Chorlton Conservative Club and that post card from Spain nu 2 ........... a new mystery

Now it is odd just how stories come about.

Yesterday a new friend in Spain sent me a post card addressed to "Miss M Calderbank, Chorlton Conser, Club, Wilbraham Road, Chorlton. C. Hardy, England."

There was no date and I doubted that I would ever know who Miss M Calderbank was, or how the postcard got back to Spain.

But within an hour of posting the story Annette, Della and Marie all replied with memories of Melody Calderbank.  Annette went to Levenshulme High School with Melody, Della remembered her parents Dick and Mona and Marie told me she would now be in her fifties which might date the postcard to around 1974.

But the best was that Melody's sister was also in touch commenting that "my sister is 66 now...... I'm 56...she married in 1972 when she left the Conservative Club...so post card could be older..."

Of course that just led to the mystery of how the picture postcard from Chris to Melody having arrived in Chorlton made its way back to Spain.

The answer is a bit more sinister and suggests that Miss M never got the card.  Emma who sent me the card wrote that, “la postcard was rescued with another hundred , more or less , of a factory that recycled papel. todas rescued postcards have ornaments with pictures of Gypsy dancing sewn , so I think someone post , many years ago stole to coleccion.hay postcards to many parts of the mundo.I try to arrive but that some difficult. Que joy arrives.”

So perhaps Melody never got to know of the holiday Chris had in Spain and in turn Chris may well have just mumbled something about the Spanish postal service.

All of which is a nice lesson i how even the most mundane events have a habit of offering up a story of how we live.

Today the message would have been sent as a text, or from anyone of a number of different social media platforms, included would have been a photograph of the beach and perhaps even a selfie.

It would have been instant unlike our postcard which even in the 1980s would probably have arrived long after the suntan had begun to fade.

And the same social media platform allowed Emma to find me and pass on the postcard which perhaps 47 years later will allow Melody to be reunited with the postcard from Chris and along the way has given me a new friend from Spain who I might add has a better command of English than I of Spanish.


Location; Chorlton & Spain

Painting; The Conservative Club  © 2012 Peter Topping

Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Picture; the postcard, date unknown, courtesy of Emma Gilarranz Gutierrez