The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner Read online

  Off-colour health news

  White doctors better treated

  NHS disease.

  William Rees

  Paddington Hatfield

  There’s blood on the Railtrack STOP

  All Change to Corbett

  William Rees

  Now summer is here

  Noisy kids sweltering nights

  Solstice? Bag o’shite!

  John Cleary

  Euston Train Station, 4 October 2009

  We are rushing to catch the 15.05 Chester train when I catch a glimpse of the Mayor of London. The stooped stance and shock of blond hair. It is undoubtedly Boris Johnson. He is looking a little lost. In taking our seats, we see him walking alone on the platform adjacent to our train. I surmise that he is awaiting the Manchester train in order to attend the Tory Party Conference and make mischief.

  On the 6th of October, I send the following e-mail:

  Dear Boris Johnson,

  I intended to speak to you at Euston Station on Sunday afternoon but I was unable to do so. I was rushing, with my son, to get the Chester train. I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed your recent nomination and subsequent contribution to Radio 4’s ‘Great Lives’. It occurred to me that you might be interested in purchasing a painstaking facsimile of the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary that I have for sale. Price £600. Below is a description of the item.

  The Folio Society, 2006. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Johnson’s Dictionary is an absolute triumph. Even the process used to tan the calf hides for the superb, three-quarter binding is the same as that which was used in Dr. Johnson’s time. The boards and page edges are marbled by Ann Muir, reproducing a feature also found on the original. The colours used in my copy are shades of very dark green, red, several of ochre, and white. This palette perfectly complements the colours in the leather, the spine labels, and the paper. The same colour of paper is used, but it is of a much better quality, to ensure use by successive generations. The size is also faithful to the original and is, in a word, huge. The two, massive volumes weigh in at twenty-six pounds and require some effort to lift or carry about. All the hand work is of the highest degree of craftsmanship: the paper (Favini), the printing (St. Edmundsbury Press), the leather (Graham Wright Leather dappled calf), the binding (Smith Settle), the blocking and label work on the spine, the gloriously beautiful marbled covers and book edges (Ann Muir), and the scalloped case with its volume divider.

  Should this e-mail spark any interest, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

  Yours faithfully

  William Rees

  On the 14th of October, I receive the following reply:

  Dear Mr Rees,

  The Mayor thanks you for your email. He has no plans to buy the volumes at the moment, but he has asked me to thank you for tipping him off.

  Very best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Ann Sindall

  Executive Assistant to the Mayor

  By strange coincidence, a London customer purchases the dictionary the very same day.

  Collis School fête, Teddington, 2001

  I head to the tables that have books piled upon them. Friendly volunteers man the stall.

  I tend to smile benignly without entering into conversation. I can’t allow myself to be distracted from what is essentially my work. ‘You’re a big reader,’ I am told. I nod. Sometimes I come clean and declare my hand but not on this occasion. I put down a pile of James Bond paperbacks (Pan) so as to inspect a neat collection of early (but not Firsts) Dr Dolittles, each with a pristine dust wrapper. Nearby is a C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, that looks like an early edition. It’s seemingly in very good condition with its wrapper intact. My mind, upon turning the cover, prepares itself for disappointment, expecting to see any of the following: a torn page, a missing page, a library stamp, a reprint edition, a pen mark, an inscription, a previous owner’s signature, spotting, a water stain, a price clipped d/j, a remainder mark, mould, bug damage.

  None of them. Which is why I can describe it as a ‘good collector’s copy’: cover slightly faded, no chips, no tears, book with illustrations in text, without inscriptions. Illustrator Pauline Baynes, published by The Bodley Head, 1956. The Last Battle concludes the Chronicles of Narnia. It deals with the end of time in the old Narnia and sums up the series by linking the experience of the human children in Narnia with their lives in their original world. This copy is on sale for £480.

  It’s started to drizzle so I carefully place the book inside my jacket. The weather isn’t dampening anyone’s zeal. People are tucking into fairy cakes. Jam is for sale. The bouncy castle is in operation and other children participate in the egg and spoon races. I think of my son back in France. His school too has fêtes, with tombolas and face painting. But there’s something quintessentially English about egg and spoon and three-legged challenges. Mathieu attends l’Ecole Rudyard Kipling; the French naming many educational establishments after famous artists and writers.

  I take him to the school gates where we loiter until a friend calls out. The shout from the other side of the playground exerts its pull. Matty pauses, for just a second or so, before charging off in zig zag fashion. He reminds me of a fish returned to the river, a moment to reacquaint itself with the water before that dart to freedom.

  Scourie, Scotland, March 1990

  A friend from university works on a salmon farm off the northwest coast of Scotland. His boss is prepared to buy a library of academic books on fisheries, and a more general selection concerning the physiology of fish. I neglect to mention that the books have come out of a skip, jettisoned by the college’s accountants. It happens more frequently than you’d think.

  I arrive late but there is just enough light to take in the barren hills bounding the loch. Sombre green waters are patched with wood and wire. Mark lives in a house within fifty yards of the loch. Ravaged by the elements, it is fast advancing towards dilapidation. Over a fish supper, Simon explains that I have an invitation from his boss to join in tomorrow’s cull. There’s a knock at the door. ‘That’ll be Jake,’ says Mark. Jake lives with his sister in a white cottage nearby.

  After a cold night it’s good to be up and moving. There is time only for the briefest of introductions to Alex who says he’ll check out the books after work. I have left them in the boot of the Princess, which has defied expectations in getting me here, a journey of some 700 miles from London.

  We walk to the water’s edge. Jake fights to light a cigarette. The lines of age curve chaotically all over his narrow reddened face. Swathed in dirty yellow oilskins, he crouches to get down low in the boat. By resting his good arm against the gunwale, Jake smokes, free of the wind’s interference. He is shocked out of his reverie when the boat rocks with the sudden presence of Alex. Mark and I hurry to board the boat as its engine is jolted to life. I keep my eyes fixed to the metal gangway. Slip, and the sea will numb every nerve in the body. Death is unlikely – providing you’re fished out within five minutes.

  His fingers glow red with defiance. Paralysed with arthritis and yellowed with nicotine, Jake’s hand is little more than a cigarette holder. The good arm attains an equilibrium of sorts, but his body still shakes, needs more than a dram to control its mutinous movements.

  ‘You all right lads?’ he asks with vigour.

  ‘Not too bad,’ I lie. Jake had called round with a bottle of malt, which didn’t see out the night.

  ‘You’ll not be inquiring after my welfare lads?’ says Jake, who I now know has the capacity to drink a loch full of Glenfiddich.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ we say in chorus to which Jake replies ‘Fucking awful. Spring time in Scotland. Hah!’ he adds, looking around. Clouds scud across the sky, darkening the day. The sun can only shed a cold light upon the perennially soggy Highlands.

  Salmon swim sluggishly. Jake sees too many salmon in his life; his clear blue eyes stare into the nets, rigidly secured and weighted down. In total there are twelve nets, align
ed in two rows either side of an aluminium gangway wrapped in meshing. At one end, looking as if it had been tapped on as an afterthought, floats a shed where refuge is sought when storms stir.

  In the boat we laboriously scoop and scatter foul smelling yellow pellets, using short handled shovels to extract them from big plastic bags. Adorning the bags is a picture of a salmon arched athletically above BP’s insignia.

  We saturate the salmon congested waters with mackerel, processed at great expense, Alex has told me, and then compressed into tablet form. Each bag contains seventy pounds of mackerel. Wrist muscles throb. We diligently scatter the pellets in an even spread, whereas Jake isn’t above surreptitiously tipping out, in one cumulative plop, all the contents of the bag.

  The waves are rising, but haven’t yet reached a menacing height. The boat chugs contentedly enough towards a more sheltered part of the loch where the company holds the bigger salmon captive. Today there is to be a harvest. Lorries descend on the company’s station, two inlets down the jagged coastline.

  Some landlocked lakes teem with tiny salmon, tricked into accepting the freshwater environment as the river stage of their life cycle. Simon says that hired helicopters haul these fish out to be conveyed rapidly to salt loch waters. Chemicals in the tablets will turn the farm reared salmon the pink colour that wild salmon acquire naturally.

  ‘How many?’ asks Jake.

  ‘A biggy. One thousand six hundred,’ Alex answers, probably thinking of his bonus. Mark sighs, appreciating the magnitude of the toil involved. The wind strengthens. Tethered to the platform, the boat begins to pitch and roll. We watch the approach of a barge carrying crates half filled with ice. The barge is being pulled along by a squat craft powered by a noisy engine. The crew is a youthful bunch of burly locals. They assemble two waist-high benches near the crates before untying the ropes. One net is heaved upwards, so as not to disturb an outer net, which is interwoven with wire to deprive the seals of an easy meal.

  The salmon splash madly, as if sensing their fate. Self-torpedoing, the salmon are easily ensnared in landing nets. The fish are tipped out, wriggling and gasping, onto the first bench, soon slippery with the slime of blood, scales and water. Clasped by their tails, the fish are dealt blows by Alex’s club-wielding gang. Only the heads are battered, the odd eye is dislodged.

  When they are flung onto the second bench, it is then our job to propel the dead and dying fish into the ice packed crates while keeping count. It is tiring work. Once begun, the cull always needs to be completed.

  The barge is set loose on the sea, bound for the old barn that reeks of creosote. Beside the barn is a slipway, marking the culmination of a sharply undulating road that runs behind Jake’s cottage. It tests the nerve of the lorry drivers charged with transporting the fish to supermarket.

  We sit in the floor of the shed, which inside is lined with posters that show the various stages of sea lice infestation. Mark makes the tea while Jake and Alex eat Mars Bars. Farming the seas burns calories. Alex is pleased with the haul.

  ‘How much do you want for the books?’ His question takes me by surprise. I hope he’ll appreciate the effort I’m putting in. I try my luck.

  ‘Three hundred pounds?’

  Okay. Deal done. Simon thinks Alex wants the books more for show, to give a sheen of intellect to a job that is essentially labour intensive.

  I find it difficult to envisage Jake trudging back out for the afternoon feed.

  But he does. The rain stings our faces as we go our separate ways, dragging bags to our assigned nets. On we work. Black smoke is coiling into the sky. The company is burning the discarded plastic bags.

  A Book and a Memory, Chirk Castle Bookshop, 2004

  Madeleines, dipped in tea, are famous for sparking involuntary memories in Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past in the first translation, more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time).

  ‘She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place… at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…’

  Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann’s Way.

  Books possess that madeleine-like power. The second book that I truly read of my own volition (the first being Shark Attack: Terrifying True Accounts of Shark Attacks) was Muhammad Ali’s 1975 autobiography, The Greatest. In it, Ali recounts his life, both in and out of the ring. The beauty of a great athlete whose family roots in Louisville fascinated me as much as his sporting endeavours. And Ali’s victory over Foreman was, for me, an early experience of pure vicarious exhilaration. The book reminds me instantly of that night in 1974. Still decades after its publication, a mere glimpse of it – the yellow background and The Greatest: My Own Story in bold black type – transports me back to when Ali is taking a pummelling. Convinced that Ali’s demise is imminent, my family and their friends have left the room. Round Eight. A punch is landed. They come rushing back into the room to sample the magic of the moment; the commotion in Zaïre able to emanate from a TV set in a Devon cottage. It’s contagious; causing a ten-year old with no real interest in boxing to jump around and chant ‘Ali! Ali! Ali!’

  A Heinous Suggestion, Bangor, November 2009

  Transhumance is the seasonal movement of people with their livestock, typically to higher pastures in summer and to lower valleys in winter.

  It’s getting cold at home in the attic rooms that have no central heating. We bring the computer down to the first floor, where the room temperature is more clement.

  There is still a fireplace in the attic though. An acquaintance suggests we ‘could always burn some books’.

  Madrid, 1991

  Murphy’s English Grammar in Use is something of a bible for the community of teachers of English as a foreign language. As there seems to be large mark up on books sold in the shops here, I make inquiries into how to procure discounted copies for the boss of a small language school. A phone call to Cambridge University Press establishes that any money saved will not justify the hassle involved in setting up an account. My boss is appreciative of my efforts. As recompense, she gives me an old collection of teaching manuals which I now need to return to the flat and dump before going out this evening with a flatmate to watch Atletico Madrid.

  I walk through a district that isn’t renowned for any ‘red light’ activities. From out of nowhere appear two blondes who strongly resemble each other. Their approach to business is incredibly brazen. Politeness isn’t a good strategy, and I have to wrench myself away from clasping hands. The bag of books impedes my escape. I pull myself angrily clear while feeling nevertheless a guilty sense of titillation.

  They remind me of the Smith sisters at school, blonde-haired, blue-eyed twins – but not identical on account of Tracey’s fuller figure.

  When Tracey wasn’t kissing boys, she blew bubbles of gum. Her mouth tasted of it and there were complaints, so I kept it to myself that I liked kissing Tracey. I wasn’t bothered by the synthetic fruit flavours or a sweet stained tongue. I found her prettier than Jenny, but received wisdom had it that one progressed from Tracey to her skinnier sister, a progression for which I felt no inclination.

  They were in the same class as me for RE lessons that were held in a Portakabin. It comprised two spaces; the largest being where we received instruction in the affairs of the divine and a much smaller area that gave off a distinctive damp smell from the peg hung coats. The teacher would carry the textbooks into the cabin with an air of weary resignation. A deal had been struck early. Our behav
iour was conspicuously unrowdy for an RE class and guaranteed to remain so in return for a minimal line of inquiry and only nominal homework assignments.

  It was among the coats that we learned to kiss during the three minutes of unsupervised time that separated RE and Maths; Miss Jenkins swiftly leaving the classroom as we reached out to our partners.

  The Morgan Evans Auction Centre, Gaerwen, April 2004

  This is my first visit to Morgan Evans and I’m a little disconcerted to see the cattle, trucks and pens. They may hold livestock auctions but it isn’t my intention to leave with an actual lamb. A Charles Lamb maybe….

  The salesroom, resembling a large warehouse, is where the ‘Household’ auction starts in twenty minutes. Fortunately there aren’t many book lots to assess. A single box grabs my attention for it contains hundreds of Ladybird titles, their trademark logo and book format instantly recognisable.

  Wills & Hepworth produced the first Ladybird book during the First World War, but it was in 1940 that the familiar pocket-sized Ladybird saw the light of day. I haven’t time to examine all the books but I catch sight of a few titles that look promising – old enough to be originals in the animal series – like Downy Duckling. Some have dust jackets, which means they predate 1964.

  My eight-pound bid, a modest enough sum, allows me to take home the box, which turns into a font of reminiscence. There is a complete key word series of Peter and Jane titles, which helped me, along with thousands of children, to read. And I derive in an inordinate amount of pleasure from seeing a good number of their history titles: Sir Walter Raleigh, Oliver Cromwell, Robert the Bruce, David Livingstone, Captain Scott and my favourite, William the Conqueror. The cover has William on horseback, his arm raised to acknowledge the soldiers who surround him. My six-year-old ego associates itself with a conqueror. I envisage myself kneeling on the beach: ‘In landing, he/I tripped and fell. For his/my followers this was a bad sign, but he/I stood up with both hands full of sand and earth.’ Look,’ he/I said. ‘I have seized England with my two hands.’ Pronouns merge as history melts into fantasy.