Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ stopping every so often to play an air. From Sanders’ window, you could hear him as far away as Halliday’s Antiques.

      Despite my limited hours for personal pursuits, I was keeping company with the most beautiful girl in Oxford. Her name was Pam, and her hair was a staggering mixture of sunlight, ginger and Pre-Raphaelite red. She liked – we liked between us – the old Neapolitan tune, ‘Come Back to Sorrento’.

      The barrel-organ man (I knew his name once) would trundle his barrel-organ up the High, stopping outside Sanders to play ‘Come Back to Sorrento’. Methinks that music hath a dying ping I would climb from the window and pay him lavishly. Sixpence. A sizeable fraction of the three pounds which was my weekly wage. What sentiment! What music! What generosity!

      What happiness.

      Try parking your barrel-organ, or your van, outside Sanders now.

      In those days, children, there were no double yellow lines up the High. Indeed, there was scarcely any traffic. Old Oxford, breathing the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, expired in a death rattle of traffic wardens.

      Oh, it sounds great. If you were content to work till seven every evening for three pounds a week. Of course, if you knew you were going to be famous (a secret kept from all but Pam and Mrs Y), that made everything OK.

      So there stood Betjeman’s old van, full of trashy books. Sanders would turn them over and finally say, ‘A fiver, John?’

      ‘Well, I know it’s rubbish, Frank, but someone must read the stuff. I really have to buy a new set of tyres. Couldn’t you make it ten pounds?’

      They soon came to an agreement.

      The agreement was five pounds.

      Bill and I then carried the books into the shop. Betjeman departed.

      Sanders kept any books that were at all passable, merging them with our new stock. The rest of the books were crammed into two large suitcases. These suitcases I took up to Foyle’s bookshop in London, where the buyer in the basement would pay me perhaps twenty pounds.

      The only novel I can remember salvaging from Betjeman’s collections was Guy Endore’s Methinks the Lady, which I read avidly while immersed at the same time in Pope’s poems and Lewis Mumford’s Condition of Man. I still read several books at once.

      This rather shady dealing in review books stood me in good stead later, when I became literary editor of the Oxford Mail.

      Christmases at Bill and Gertrude Oliver’s house were different from ordinary English ones. The food shortage was noticeable. We ate Smarties at intervals. The Christmas tree was decorated in the Austrian way. Its tip reached the ceiling, and it was loaded all the way up in white candles, nothing but white candles. It resembled a dancing girl in an inflammable white dress. The heat was terrific. We had to back away. Yet the house stands till this day.

      Bill is dead. He died young, of cancer. When I went to see him in hospital, he would talk of nothing but bookselling. I tried to lure him to more personal subjects. He would not be moved. His talk was purely of books, new and old, and the problems of selling them. He was a most impersonal man; a door had been locked which even terminal illness did not open.

      During his time with the Eighth Army in North Africa, Bill had been captured by the Italians – a fate given to few, I imagine. He spoke a little Italian, and so had been made interpreter, in which role he was allowed some freedom in the camp, between prisoners and captors.

      Thus he was able to get his hands on the supplies of tea which the International Red Cross sent British prisoners. Because of a severe tea shortage among Mussolini’s heroes, the commodity was highly prized and could be exchanged for Italian cigarettes. The British POWs, despite their fondness for tea, did not drink it, preferring to trade. Bill, with access to the stores, found a solution to the dilemma.

      He would take the boxes of tea one at a time to his fellows. They would have a brew-up, dry the tea leaves afterwards and pack the used leaves back in the boxes, which Bill would then return to their proper place in the store. After which they were traded for cigarettes. Everyone was happy.

      One day, the Italians got a jump ahead. The British were forced to trade virgin tea for the cigarettes. Next day, the Italian camp commandant had his prisoners on parade and asked them sternly who had been messing about and ruining the new tea ration.

      Good work, Bill.

      Sunday tea with Mrs Y was pretty eccentric. Her name was Mrs Yashimoto. As far as I can piece together the story, she had gone out to Japan as a young missionary. There she met and fell in love with Mr Yashimoto, and married him. A rash and romantic thing to do – just before the USA and Britain declared war on Japan.

      For the crime of marrying a foreign woman, Mr Yashimoto was interned. His wife somehow managed to escape and returned to England. She led a devout Christian life, pining all the while for her husband. Many looked down on her, since the Japanese – long before they started to shower little electronic goodies upon us – were hated at the time.

      Eventually Mrs Y got her husband back. To the delight and benefit of them both.

      By then I was preparing to leave Sanders.

      I had asked Sanders several times for a rise in pay. He refused. What he dangled instead was the possibility of a partnership in the business when he retired, which, I was given to understand, might be any day.

      Then he said to me, taking me aside, ‘You come up and see me on a Friday evening, and I’ll slip you an extra pound. You’re worth it. Just don’t tell anyone else.’

      ‘No, I’m sorry, I couldn’t accept it on those terms.’

      This annoyed him. After work that evening, I took Bill to the nearby Blue Boar Inn. Over a pint, I told him my tale. Bill was completely unmoved. ‘Yes, Frank made me the same offer. I turned it down on the same grounds you did.’

      ‘What about the partnership?’

      ‘That’s complete boloney. I’ve heard that tale too. Everyone hears it. The man is a hypocrite.’

      ‘Christ, worse than that, I’d say.’

      ‘I would prefer to categorise him as a hypocrite. The man has had a hard life.’

      After that, there seemed nothing for it but to leave.

      3

       Vienna Steak, Heinz Salad Cream

      Sanders liked his pint of blood. When he finally retired, he sold the shop, as it happened, to a friend of mine, Kyril Bonfiglioli. By then I had gone.

      Those first years in Oxford were a time of intense dark living. I had to come to terms with many incompatibilities. The shop with its desperately long hours was a prison, yet it was also a magic cave, an inspiration, jostling with the personalities of dead authors.

      Outside was freedom, of a kind. I was the underprivileged poor, living in a rented room, with little spare time and the crazed impulse to write. Behind everything was the East, which I was sickening for and trying to forget, knowing I should never be able to return there.

      The СКАЧАТЬ