[John Whitworth]

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition

In Competition No. 2686 you were invited to submit a love letter from one fictional character to another. An entertaining postbag included this endearingly cack-handed overture from Bridget Jones to Rochester: ‘the word is you are sex on legs, and I’ve been rather short in that department lately. Well, for a bloody long time. Ever get depressed and want to do tons of smoking, drinking and comfort eating?’ (Basil Ransome-Davies). And this touching attempt by Long John Silver to woo Miss Havisham: ‘Though ’tis true there be as many women as fish in the sea, there’s none matchin’ you, nor another as stirs up such great expectations in me.’ (Alan Millard). Noel Petty, Adrian Fry and Margaret Howell were also on fine form. It’s £25 to the winners, printed below, and £30 to W.J. Webster.

Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby to Mrs Malaprop
As you know, dear lady, I am but a simple military man. Of military things — of sieges and ambuscades, of bastions and ravelins — I can speak with some confidence. But in softer matters my tongue ofttimes seems tied. How I admire your eloquence! When you dubbed me your ‘faithful Roman centenarian’ I blushed with pleasure at the compliment and with shame at my ignorance of the term. By joining such rare knowledge with yet rarer goodness of heart in such a comely frame you might capture any man’s deepest redoubt. My own heart is a poor, patched thing. It has seen service in the field. I will say no more. But I make bold to claim it is an honest heart and true. And it is yours, wholly, now and for so long as it may beat.
Your faithful centenarian, T. Shandy, Capt.
W.J. Webster

Humbert Humbert to Miss Havisham
Havisham! Queen of my mind, ravisher of my imaginings! How steadfast your purpose, how firm your refusal to have truck with the mere mindless forward trickle of time that means so much to the ill-educated. Yet — forgive my impertinence in saying this, but say it I must — I dream that I might tempt you from your shadows, poetic as they are. We are neither of us young; all the more reason to taste the pleasures of life’s afternoon, to enjoy contentment and life’s sultry flowers. May we not explore the waning day together as it fades sublimely into moth-rich evening? Let us seek vivid and beautiful experience together, Miss Havisham, shamelessly, and with no sham having? I understand, by the way, that you have adopted a 12-year-old ward. How charming! I keenly anticipate making her acquaintance.
Your own and constant Humbert Humbert
George Simmers

The governess in The Turn of the Screw to Heathcliff
I press again, for the moment, for your word. It may be imagined how, moreover — for what I imagine, I imagine! — I have, simply, as you have gone about your business, which is indeed an attestation of your extraordinary and instantaneous being, unnatural and precipitate — in which you fix me – found the absolute strength to succumb to your will. I can’t begin to describe — oh how I wish, were the diligence in my words sufficient — how blighted I might be, were it not that, and you may suppose that I am capable of being candid, I am unafraid of your remonstrance. I am, should you ask, magnificent. I rise above your terrors. I am, I am sure, for the road beyond Gimmerton is inconsolably rough, assured of your welcome, mutely expressed, for all welcomes are as silent as the newly-hewn grave, and, I fancy, as wild as they are inarticulate.
Bill Greenwell

Mrs Malaprop to Robinson Crusoe
My dearest Robbie: first and foremast, I earnestly hope this bottled massage bleaches you; one simply cannot trust the tidal system nowadays. I await an expedient replay with lustrous articulation. The last sea-borne massive was delicious to pursue; daily I pander your well-being on that topical Ireland but worry lest your dietary regiment be inefficient. Not every proffering of the ocean is wealthy or credible. I once shellfishly scoffed an entire platter of muscles and abstained that torrid eye infraction, subjunctivitis. I dearly wish you could escarp, build a kazoo or rift and piddle home to me; or that a passing brigand might fescue you; the oggin is parlous with allegories and other maritime minsters. Knightly I carve your gentile afflictions. Loaf and fishes, Mistress M.
S.P. this fellow you call Friday: is he your Slav or something Moor?
Mike Morrison

Leopold Bloom to Emma Bovary
Chere Emma
For I can do the French courtly, le mot juste, romancing like the steaming novels bringing you some tasty litery chewer. Woman of bookery with the neat feety tripping and a sleek silksome fashion for the cities, would you consider a walking through the proud rumpetty boulevards tonight? We could talk each senseless and sensory till the feckless circling cab brought us snug into fusty dark, curtayned like a privy closet. I’m a manner of your kidney, fullsome and restless, with the musk of you wheedling me je ne say croy, like a couple of fine eggs in a pan as Mrs Riordan does when the day’s before and not down the deadlike night of the sole proprietor. Let the city slap us together, meat in the sand witchery of your inwards, lipsome as spaniels after the tripes and livery. Would you fancy some bookish? L.
D.A. Prince

Humbert Humbert to Dorothy
Dorothy, my witchcraft, my windstorm. Gale in my heart. My cyclone-swept journey of love, and my enchanted destination. Do-ro-thee: how I treasure the tap and trill of tongue tip on palate as I utter the first two syllables of your beloved name, and the luxurious loll between the front teeth as the final syllable gusts forth. Do. Ro. Thee. Let those who lack brain and heart and courage stand against our love, those who know only the arid quotidian Kansas of this life, who lack imagination to comprehend the emerald-green realm of magic and passion to which you whirl me away. My gingham-garbed gamine. My prettily plaited princess. My Dorothy. Your Humbert.
Chris O’Carroll