I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) (2 page)

After
lunch, when housewives torpidly settled down with a cup of tea after the
exhaustion of carpet-beating and mangling sheets, we children were preoccupied with
the delightful voice of Daphne Oxenford. She emitted and emoted out of our
leather-bound Roberts Radio, enquiring if one was sitting comfortably
(preferably on Mummy’s lap) while she read you a story.

Apart
from that, there was absolutely nothing else to do but read or play in the cul-de-sac
with other children. I didn’t like playing. I didn’t like games and running and
balls and hide and seek. Supposing I hid and no-one came to find me? I liked
dressing up and make-believe. But only children don’t understand how to
organise play. Lying on the bed with a book was simple, direct and took you
into a world of friends who didn’t jump out at you from behind a tree or scream,
‘YOU SMELL’. I learned my social skills from books. If they’re wrong, blame
literature. Blame Becky Sharp who got ahead and Catherine Morland whose
imagination was too big for her circumstances.

I
can’t remember learning to read. I do remember a moment in the kindergarten
classroom when the teacher wrote something on a blackboard and asked us if we
knew what the letters were. Fragments of a sentence grew out into the room, but
not all the words had meanings. Still, I think I must have forged forwards in
literacy because there was nothing else to do all day. Reading wasn’t my
religion – it was my oxygen.

Aged
around six or seven, I began to build my library. This earliest collection
consisted of two plaster-of-Paris horse-head bookends facing each other on the
window ledge, surrounded by wallpaper with repeating rose patterns. They held
in an expanding row of dust-jacketed hardbacks from W.H. Smith and Puffin
paperbacks. Enid Blyton’s
The Faraway Tree
and
The Wishing-Chair
gave
way in time to her
Malory Towers
boarding school series and
The
Secret Seven
. I have just spent 40 minutes trying to track down any
reference to a book which greatly influenced me called, I believe,
A Star in
the Hand
. Nothing. I read the
Bobbsey Twins
books from America,
first published in 1904, and written by a syndicate of writers under the
pseudonym Laura Lee Hope, reaching 72 volumes before the series was finally
canned in 1979. I re-read on many occasions the
Jill
series, starting
with
Jill’s Gymkhana
, by Ruby Ferguson, whose chief character, the
eponymous Jill, was the horse-mad child of a widowed writer who buys her a pony
out of her advance royalties. There was a slightly ominous quality to Jill’s
progression through the series, with secretarial training beginning to loom as
she approached school-leaving age.

Eventually
my parents bought me a bookcase. The challenge was to fill all three shelves.
Lines of Penguins began to advance purposefully across them, already
anticipating the handiwork of Crispin. In time, those orange spines were toned
down by the smart grey minimalism of the Penguin Modern Classic. Ambitiously, I
began to add the forbidding black editions of the Penguin Classics. Aged 13, I
bought and read
Crime and Punishment
without understanding a word, but
the evidence of the cracked black spine was there on the shelf to show that I
had waded through it.

Bookshops
were temples, places of worship. I started out in the children’s section of
W.H. Smith on Allerton Road, which was imminently to become famous for its
landmarks noted in the lyrics of the song ‘Penny Lane’. I moved on, when I was
old enough to be allowed to get the bus into town on my own, to Philip, Son and
Nephew, a warren of a place on several floors of a Georgian house, the Foyles
of the North-West. Then Lewis’s department store opened a Penguin bookshop on a
mezzanine. They gave away catalogues of the complete Penguin backlist and I
doggedly worked through every entry, ticking the ones I planned to read.
Alberto Moravia. Who is he? Tick!

A
dazzle of turquoise lit up the shelves. Defiantly intellectual and provocative
non-fiction titles exploded in the mind of a suburban Jewish teenager.
Homosexuality
by D.J. West, price three shillings and sixpence, with an ominous band of
black, rising to iron grey below a clear white space encasing the title. The
anti-psychiatry bible,
The Divided Self
, by R.D. Laing, in which I
learned that the mad were sane and the sane mad, and that schizophrenia was all
the fault of your family. Pelican’s trenchant, mission-to-educate-and-explain
series was an explosion of radicalism amongst the department store’s tea towels
and floral housecoats, an official visitation north by Portland Place and
Hampstead intellectuals through the medium of the mass-market paperback.

A
girl I was at school with went to a brand-new concrete-campus university, and
in the age of revolution became a Trotskyist. This leap into the communist era
had an immediate effect on me, not in terms of the content of my reading, but
because she taught me that it was a revolutionary act, a
moral
act, to
‘liberate books from their capitalist oppressors’.

I had
a long black hairy Moroccan cloak with a hood, purchased in the Lanes in
Brighton. The cloak was the perfect device for restoring the economic balance
from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. Or, to steal books from Philip, Son
and Nephew and take them home to my parents’ suburban detached house, whose
gardens overlooked allotments with a rockery and rose bushes at the front. I
stole books for quite a long time – three or four years. I stole them because I
wanted them. I wanted books in a junkie kind of way. I had begun to want any
books at all.

When
I left home, I bought Katherine Whitehorn’s
Cooking in a Bedsit
, and
learned how to make zabaglione on a table-top Baby Belling cooker, fed by
shillings in the meter. I progressed to Elizabeth David’s
Provençal Cooking
,
and tackled the challenges of quiche Lorraine and French onion soup. Almost
everything you needed to know or learn came from books, and the rest could be
picked up at the Rimmel counter in Woolworths, where they taught you how to
spit onto a solid block of mascara and work the mini-toothbrush over it to turn
your eyelashes into sticky black clumps.

It is
more than 50 years since I began to build my library, from its earliest
foundations in the elementary sentence construction of Enid Blyton. Now at
least half of the thousands of books I have bought are gone. It is one of the
worst things I have ever done. I hate myself. But not as much as I have come to
hate the books.

Hate
books! A thought crime at the very least. Only a philistine, a religious
zealot, a Nazi, would hate books.

It is
not the words I hate, not literature, but their physical manifestation as old,
musty, dusty, yellowing, cracked objects, heavy to lug around. When I open the
pages swarms of black ants dance on the paper. No-one told me. No-one said, ‘In
the future, you will squint and screw up your face and try to decipher these
words you once read so easily. Not because you are going blind, but because in
the middle of your life your eyes have betrayed you. They are no longer fit for
the purpose of reading.’

I
have reading glasses, multiple pairs scattered all over the house. Prescription
reading glasses as well as magnifiers for use with contact lenses. I can’t
believe my eyesight was ever good enough to read print this tiny. There are
closed books that are closed books to me until they are available on an ereader
so I can enlarge the font size. Very little literature has been digitised. As
new books come out, the main publishing houses usually bring out simultaneous
editions, but the backlist, the in-copyright classics, remain to be uploaded. I
cannot read Joseph Heller’s
Something Happened
because, according to his
son Ted Heller, that title remains stuck in contract negotiations. The
Frederica Potter novels, by A.S. Byatt, beginning with
The Virgin in the
Garden
, which I would like to re-read, have not yet been made available as
ebooks because of a transfer of agent representation.

When
I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of
Wonderland
,
when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her. I crave the small, tactile
simplicity of my new Kindle Paperwhite in its purple leather cover, which is
currently home to what would make up around three boxes of physical books, but
whose screen’s digital imprint is flattened of all memory and association. It’s
soulless and almost weightless.

On
the other hand, the smug little ereader has not broken my spirit and my knees
in the way that disposing of half my library has done, driving me to tears,
rage and paracetamol.

***

Books Do Furnish
a Room
is the title of the tenth volume of Anthony Powell’s series
A Dance to the
Music of Time
. I haven’t read it. I understand that it is set during the
period of post-war austerity, when food was still rationed, and perhaps paper
was too. Much of the grim, cold, shabby, partly-derelict country was crying out
for basic products. In 1942, the government had introduced a scheme called the
Utility Movement, state-sanctioned furniture items designed to make the most
efficient use of scarce timber supplies. Influenced by Arts and Crafts, William
Morris’ anti-industrial manifesto, the tables, chairs and beds were built with
minimal decoration, spartan in their simplicity but using factory production to
help a bombed-out wartime population.

Quality
varied amongst the different manufacturers, but the constant was the lack of
embellishment. As the fashion went at the time, everything was varnished brown.
England was a brown place, without sun or central heating. Toad in the hole and
suet pudding were substitutes for radiators. The first time I saw a picture of a
stripped-pine kitchen floor in a Sunday colour supplement, I got a shock. I did
not know that wood could be so pale. I thought it grew out of the ground a
sticky, shiny, toffee colour.

When
I was a student in the seventies, private landlords’ housing – a territory of
damp, draughts, moth-nibbled carpets, mould and mouse-droppings – was a
warehouse of unwanted Utility furniture. This era overlapped with the Habitat
chain opening stores outside London, selling coloured cotton beanbags on which
you lounged promiscuously instead of sitting bolt upright with an antimacassar
behind your head, Scandinavian blond-wood coffee tables, and cutlery with no
metal flourishes on the handles. We
hated
Utility furniture. What we
hated most of all was its brownness. Its stubborn usefulness and scorn for
ornamentation should have fitted in with the new aesthetic, but it didn’t. It
was all ‘before I was born’ stuff. Those monochrome years of cold weather and
tinned fish and powdered eggs.

I had
a Union Jack wastepaper bin, primary-coloured and irreverent.

Sometimes
Utility bookcases were provided. We asked for them to be removed. We kept our
books in modern style, on shelves of planks raised on stacks of bricks. They
were easily dismantled and taken from one unheated, mildew-ridden slum to
another. The walls were decorated with posters attached by blobs of Blu-Tack,
an adhesive substance that came in sheets of blue goo. The important fittings
were the coffee mugs and the ashtrays, but books were the true furnishings.
They were the soul of a room. They defined the identity of the person who lived
there in a series of announcements: Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha
. Charles
Reich’s
The Greening of America
. Richard Neville’s
Playpower
.
Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
. Carlos Castañeda’s
The Teachings
of Don Juan
.

All
of these were required titles on the bookshelves of the counterculture, as
defining as the shoulder-length hair, the tie-dyed t-shirt smelling of incense
ash, and the bell-bottom jeans stained with drops of rank brown patchouli oil.

When
I went house-hunting in the autumn of 2013, I looked through or up at the
windows of the neighbours. I wanted to see if they were the kind of people
whose rooms housed books. When I detected built-in shelves on either side of an
Edwardian marble fireplace, when I saw hardbacks and Penguins and a green wodge
of Virago modern classics, I felt a sense of comfort and reassurance. I peered
through the window of a house whose downstairs rooms had been knocked through
to reveal a grand piano in front of French windows leading to a garden
ornamented with Italianesque statuary. The entire left-hand flank of the
sitting room was
all books
. And I thought,
This is it
, this is
the
only
civilised way to live, in a high-ceilinged, well-proportioned
room twinkily lit by a chandelier, a room which wears its books with ease and
grace and space. I wanted the inhabitants of the house to be my friends. I
trusted them without ever seeing their presence. The books wore the room and
the room wore the books. (I wonder if they were the authors of the anonymous
note signed ‘some concerned residents’ pushed through the door a week after I
moved in. It complained about anti-social behaviour. The refuse wasn’t
organised properly for collection. I was falsely accused of not understanding
the principles of recycling.)

But
that was a house that seemed to have been inhabited by the same people for many
years. The home of a retired publisher or a professor of Anglo-Saxon or a
Jungian psychoanalyst. When I went to look at flats whose current owners were
of younger age, judging by the cot or little bed in the second bedroom, inside
I rarely saw any evidence of books. Sometimes there was an item of asymmetrical
Conran shelving designed to display a vase, a knick-knack, a framed photo, five
or six TV tie-in recipe books and a few Waterstones three-for-the-price-of-two
paperback bestsellers, the stickers still on them.