The Pen Friend by Ciaran Carson

can be made in the home with milk and vinegar. Bring a cup of milk to a simmer and slowly dribble in twelve tablespoons of vinegar, stirring all the time as if you were making mayonnaise. When lumps begin to form and coagulate, drain off the excess liquid. When these curds have cooled, form them into whatever shape or shapes you please – milk buttons, perhaps – and leave overnight, by which time they will have set rock solid. Casein can be made into sheets, rods and tubes. It has been used for imitation jade, tortoiseshell, and lapis lazuli, and in the manufacture of various articles besides pens, such as buttons, buckles, knitting needles, combs, hair-slides, pocket mirrors, door handles, knife handles, walking-stick handles, cigarette cases, radio cabinets, and electrical plugs, sockets and jacks. And that, until some hours ago, was the extent of my knowledge of casein, so I decided to research it on the Internet. This is what I found.
    Casein was first developed and patented by two Germans, Spitteler and Kirsch, in 1899. It was then taken up by firms in Germany and France and used for industrial purposes under the name Galalith. Subsequently other countries produced their own casein under a range of names: Aralac, Aladdanite, Ameroid and Pearlolith in the USA , Akalit in Germany, Ambloid and Ambroid in Japan, Beroleit and Casolith in the Netherlands, and Estolit in Estonia, to name a few. In Britain, casein was produced under the name Syrolit by Syrolit Limited, in their factory at Enfield, North London, the home of the Lee-Enfield rifle. In 1911, the firm moved to Lightpill in the town of Stroud, Gloucestershire, where it set up in a derelict cloth mill once used for making ‘scarlet’ for British Army uniforms. In 1913 the firm renamed itself Erinoid because the raw milk solids used in the process were imported from Ireland through the nearby port of Bristol, and I thought of boats crossing the heaving green Irish Sea with their holds full of a pale green cheese that would end up as buttons, fountain pens, and electrical plugs. With the onset of the Great War, supplies of Galalith from Europe ceased, and Erinoid found a ready home market. Soldiers’ uniform buttons were made from Erinoid.
    And then I remembered your third card had been posted in Stroud, and wondered how I could have forgotten the Stroud connection. But then we were more than a little drunk by then, that night in New York when you told me of your mother’s suicide, and the next morning I had forgotten some of the salient details. After the war, you said, your father emigrated from the Netherlands to take up a position in the London branch of Philips, and it was in London that he met your mother. In 1958 or so – you were seven or eight – your father was assigned to the Lightpill factory in Stroud to oversee the production of a new design of light-switch; he worked there for two years, sometimes staying all week, sometimes commuting home in the evenings, for London was only two and half hours from Bristol on the Great Western Railway, and as I try to piece together your story from my fragmentary recollection, more lines from Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ come into my head:

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations …

    and I think of the train bearing its long plume of smoke through the darkness.
    Where’s Daddy? you used to ask, when you woke from one of your nightmares. You slept badly for those two years. Daddy’s in Lightpill, your mother would reply, and you would envisage him standing in a pool of light, near yet far away, bent over a workbench, and he would turn his head as if he heard something, and look into the distance with a puzzled look, and then he would smile as if he had seen you, and he would wave his hand. And sometimes you thought Lightpill was a