FullReads

Flipperty–flipperty–flipperty

flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty

flipperty–flipperty–FLOP.

Right down to the letter-box in the hall. Two flipperties a floor. (A simple calculation shows that we are perched on the fifth floor. I am glad now that we live so high. It must be very dull to be on the fourth floor with only eight flipperties, unbearable to be on the first with only two.)

“O-oh! How fas-cinating!” said Celia.

“Now don’t you think you ought to write to your mother?”

“Oh, I must.”

She wrote. We posted it. It went.

Flipperty–flipperty –However, you know all about that now.

Since this great discovery of mine, life has been a more pleasurable business. We feel now that there are romantic possibilities about Letters setting forth on their journey from our floor. To start life with so many flipperties might lead to anything. Each time that we send a letter off we listen in a tremble of excitement for the final FLOP, and when it comes I think we both feel vaguely that we are still waiting for something. We are waiting to hear some magic letter go flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty… and behold! there is no FLOP … and still it goes on–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–growing fainter in the distance … until it arrives at some wonderland of its own. One day it must happen so. For we cannot listen always for that FLOP, and hear it always; nothing in this world is as inevitable as that. One day we shall look at each other with awe in our faces and say, “But it’s still flipperting!” and from that time forward the Hill of Campden will be a place holy and enchanted. Perhaps on Midsummer Eve–

At any rate I am sure that it is the only way in which to post a letter to Father Christmas.

Well, what I want to say is this: if I have been a bad correspondent in the past I am a good one now; and Celia, who was always a good one, is a better one. It takes at least ten letters a day to satisfy us, and we prefer to catch ten different posts. With the ten in your hand together there is always a temptation to waste them in one wild rush of flipperties, all catching each other up. It would be a great moment, but I do not think we can afford it yet; we must wait until we get more practised at letter-writing. And even then I am doubtful; for it might be that, lost in the confusion of that one wild rush, the magic letter would start on its way–flipperty–flipperty–to the never-land, and we should forever have missed it.

So, friends, acquaintances, yes, and even strangers, I beg you now to give me another chance. I will answer your letters, how gladly. I still think that Napoleon (or Canute or the younger Pliny–one of the pre-Raphaelites) took a perfectly correct view of his correspondence … but then he never had a letter-box which went

Flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty

flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty–flipperty

flipperty–FLOP.