On Bumps and Books
Jenny Kingsley shares a lifetime in battered paperbacks
When I was pregnant with my sons, we would read children’s poetry aloud to my ripening bulges while in bed. A battered copy of Iona and Peter Opie’s The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse lived on my bedside table. I found the rhythm of the poetry relaxing; the simplicity of settings and thoughts eased convoluted fears about the future. I had this quirky notion that the words would encourage my babies to love reading as much as I do. That’s what they say.
Long walks, Chopin, Nyman and oily fish were more sources of comfort and stimulus for bumps and babies. But books were the major investment. Story tapes took up the car cassette space. There was a time when my husband used to drive the boys to school, and the entire Lord of the Rings and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy entertained them all en route. The Beatles played during intermission.
Television was never part of the family furniture. Of course, over the years we’ve received menacing letters from the TV licensing bureau. They presume we have a television and are avoiding the fee. They plan to inspect the premises. So when we used to go away at weekends ‘to the country’ – Cotswolds for a while and then the Wiltshire/Dorset borders – after the lunch performance, apart from ye olde heritage properties and Yellow Book gardens, we would visit bookshops, mostly second-hand ones.
We could never have enough of the cramped, rickety shelves, the must, dust, the crumbling covers, some leather-bound or protected with cellophane, the yellowed, brittle and browned edge pages. No sojourns were fleeting. It was hard to entice the boys away. They would find a priceless gem on the bookshelf, settle cross-legged on the floor, and forget about us. We never refused a purchase request. (We rarely visited ‘rare’ bookshops so prices never threatened their enthusiasm.)
One of our favourites remains Chapter House Books near Sherborne Abbey. The woman who owns the shop bubbles over with chat. She used to be a stockbroker in London, wondering if Dow Jones should dominate her life evermore. Her parents’ move to Dorset fired dreams for another life. She determined to realise her fantasy of owning a bookshop; the healthy bank balance was good security. Even nowadays, she tells me, when her father helps in the shop, some people assume he’s the owner.
Another dusty haven – alas no longer – was The Blue Rider in Mere. The owner, Christopher Richards, is a landscape painter. The shop was named after a German early twentieth-century progressive arts movement, in the spirit of
expressionism. Paul Klee and Kandinsky were two of its leaders. In the damp winter months, a log fire warmed the shop, and there was a rather gentle ageing black Labrador-cross stretched out by the fireplace. I remember another one in Tetbury’s market square, owned by a bearded man with a very large tummy who seemed gruff and sour, a bit fee-faw-fummish; but when we ‘made’ conversation and established acquaintance, he warmed up.
In the warmer months we went to fêtes and came away with jams, tombola prizes (the boys inevitably won wine and soup) and books. Back home in London, we frequented a second-hand haven literally around the corner, The Gloucester Road Bookshop. Many of our English and French dictionaries and grammar books come from there as well as lots of worn paperback children’s books by contemporary authors. The visits were recompense for trailing me around the shops. Nick Dennis, a nephew of Graham Greene, established this haven of convenience nearly twenty-five years ago after a stint selling books from a stall in Camden Town.
I’d venture a guess that these afternoons resulted in nearly eight, perhaps nine hundred acquisitions. I am looking at a sample on the bookcase near the kitchen and spot Ruth Manning Saunders’s A Book of Dwarfs. It was awarded to S P St J Bowthorpe in 1972 by Wellesley House School, for achievement in English. Next to it rests The Hamish Hamilton Book of Princes, with stories by such masters as Nesbit, MacDonald, Thurber and Milne. The anthology is a ‘plea for Princes’ according to the editor, who laments ‘the niggardly treatment meted out to Princes’ by writers of modern fairy tales
There is a thick blue book, True Stories of Modern Explorers, by B Webster Smith. It is dedicated to ‘every boy and girl who has any desire to roam ever the wilder parts of the world’. Its detailed, rich description of the ‘savages’, the hazards of the terrain, the endurance of the explorers and their experiences are fascinating and lack any sense of the Hollywood sensational. Some of the text could be rudimentary anthropological fieldwork. The explorers are not celebrated figures, save for Sir Ernest Shackleton.
At fourteen, my eldest was quite taken by another specimen, Jerome K Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. There are chapters devoted to all life’s essentials ...
- ‘On getting on in the world’: ‘And fighting the battle of life is fighting against fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons in every age, and the golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in the story books.’
- ‘On dress and deportment’: ‘Women at all events, ought to dress prettily. It is their duty. They are the flowers of the earth, and were meant to show it up.’
- ‘On eating and drinking’: ‘Hunger is a luxury to us, a piquant, flavour-giving sauce. It is well worth while to get hungry and thirsty, merely to discover how much gratification can be obtained from eating and drinking.’
In two tiny second-hand book and antique shops tucked away in Shaftesbury, we used to find books about the landscape of the Blackmore Vale, wild flowers and the memories of local country folk. My youngest discovered a first edition of fourteen wood engravings of places in the town of Shaftesbury in Shaftesbury – The ‘Shaston’ of Thomas Hardy. The original edition of the book appeared seventy years ago and was produced by its author, designer and printer James Masters. Christopher Driver and John R Biggs produced this version as a tribute to the author, and the very small High House Press. You would recognise the cobbled Gold Hill of Hovis advertisement fame, and share the view enjoyed by Hardy’s tragic Jude.
The children’s books, in particular, are relics of social and cultural history. Indeed, not only is the content illustrative of yesteryears, so are the materials used in their making – the paper, the covers and jackets – and the mini publishers’ catalogues at the back of some, which provide an unintentional snapshot of a moment in publishing history. Some of the text, especially of the many Enid Blyton books, is definitely politically incorrect, chronicling worlds devoid of conversation about multiculturalism and integration, when both the pace of the everyday and technological advancement were slow in comparison with today’s fast beat. The social order was rarely questioned; let alone the subject of vociferous or violent remonstration. Each generation settled just as easily as custard.
Grown-up equivalents? I think of my husband’s collections of Dornford Yates and PG Wodehouse, and, indeed his many non-fiction tomes about the Second World War and the intelligence services. I succumbed to the charms of many a British female novelist, including Elizabeth Bowen (well, she’s Irish by birth, but …), Elizabeth Jane Howard, Antonia White, Nancy Mitford, Rosamund Lehman, Pamela Hansford Johnson (though the diet was broken with weeks of her husband, CP Snow’s work), all of whom captured slices of ‘English’ life which I never experienced vicariously through books, friendship or kindred while growing up in America.
I realise that these few, very personal, recollections are unlikely to be future ones – slices of English life gone past forever? Nonetheless, I highly recommend reading to the bulge, if only because fewer second-hand bookshops might close.
