Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss
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Название: Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s
Автор: Brian Aldiss
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Научная фантастика
isbn: 9780007482139
isbn:
This is the highest part of the ancient building, highest and untidiest. Its one dusty window looks out across the broken rooftops of Oxford.
In imitation of the real thing, Heaven is damp and leaky. Here, Dickensian charm and creative vandalism go hand-in-hand.
Many are the old books which find their way into Sanders’ clutches. Some are fashion or natural history books. Some are of a topographical nature, illustrated by steel engravings or etchings: views of English countryside, foreign views, views of Oxford colleges. Sometimes the bindings of such volumes may be torn. Sometimes the text may be considered dull. Then the book can be broken up and the illustrations or maps sold separately. And sold especially well when coloured and mounted. This applies with particular force to that beautiful octavo book in three volumes, Ingram’s Memorials of Oxford, many sets of which, entering the premises of Salutation House, find themselves broken up for the sake of the engravings of colleges within. Good complete sets must by now be extremely scarce.
The breaking, the mounting, the colouring, is done in Heaven. Here, at benches under a dusty window, sit Sheila and Miss Worms, working away with their watercolours. Mr Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts, which produced many fine illustrated books last century, must have been just such a place as Heaven, housing folk who had fled from the Terror in France after the Revolution. We find an echo of that here in Heaven: the cheerful and teasing Miss Worms is in fact a refugee from Hitler’s Reich. As for Sheila, she is young and pert and pretty, and I once fancied myself in love with her.
So to the stock room behind Sanders’ office. Here are the scarcest books, the most precious, the most cherished. The stock room is subdivided. In a small locked room called Pickle rest those books deemed most scarce, most precious, most cherished, by the miserly Sanders. These regal favourites are drawn up in ranks, gaining in value … We mentioned Mr Ackermann; here stand no fewer than seventeen sets of Ackermann’s History of Oxford, in two volumes, full of lovely coloured plates of colleges. There are even a few sets of Ackermann’s Cambridge. Together with many other books, some mildly pornographic, which Sanders could not bear to sell.
In the stock room you may come across a set of Peacock’s novels in tree-calf, or a complete set of Thomas Hardy’s first editions, all bound uniform (but this is vandalism) in blue buckram, together with many other prizes. In huge wooden cases, specially made by Mr Watts, are stored Hogarth’s engravings of London life and Piranesi’s engravings of prisons and of Rome, in various states. There are also some Rowlandsons. Such Rowlandsons! Country scenes, bawdy scenes, inns, maidens, stage coaches, the whole eighteenth-century world which Thomas Rowlandson’s calligraphic line so skilfully evoked.
I had never heard of Rowlandson until I went into Mr Sanders’ stock room, and have worshipped the man’s work ever since. He was unrivalled as a draughtsman until Beardsley drew. In Mr Sanders’ house on the Woodstock Road hung perhaps ten lilting Rowlandsons, country landscapes of the greatest delicacy of line and colour. No doubt they are now in the Paul Mellon collection. Over Sanders’ mantelpiece hung a pristine print of the painting generally regarded as Rowlandson’s masterpiece, ‘Vauxhall Gardens’.
As far as Rowlandson is known, he is valued for his scenes of bawdy, of boisterousness and drinking bouts. But with that subject matter goes a style of transparent delicacy. His creamy young Georgian maids might have stepped out of Cranford or a novel by Thomas Hardy. A travelling print-seller used to come round and sell Sanders pornographic Rowlandsons for his gentlemen clients.
Without being judgmental, Thomas Rowlandson elegantly recorded an England at once awful and enviable. I owe my introduction to him to Frank Sanders – another amusing bounder.
2
Three Pounds a Week
Two people served with me in the shop. One and a half to be precise. The half was Mrs Y, who did the accounts as well as serving, and so was generally tucked away in the downstairs office. She was always ready to emerge for a chat. If she was asked for a book by a customer, Mrs Y would fall into a mild, ladylike panic. With one finger up to her lip, she would go slowly round in circles, cooing, ‘Oh, dear, have we got that now, I wonder? What an interesting question. Where would it be, I wonder? What did you say the title was again?’, until Bill Oliver or I rescued her.
Bill Oliver had been a scholar of St John’s College, and had served with the Eighth Army in the desert. Now he wore a blue suit and a large ginger moustache, over which his grey eyes bulged in accusatory fashion. He looked ferocious, yet I never met a milder man. He worked long hours without complaint. He was married to a distinguished, smiling, foreign lady, relation, it was said, of Robert Musil, author of The Man Without Qualities – a novel I never managed to get through, despite the local connection.
In those days, following the war and paper-rationing, there was a scarcity of books, with the consequence that everybody wanted them. The shop, at least during the university term, was always full of people asking for books we did not have. We sold a small number of new books; but those were often rationed by the publishers.
The representative for Oxford University Press was a tall thin man called Mr Lathom. He had a face like a kind lemon, his expression fostered by the number of times he had to say no as gently as possible. If we ordered six copies of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for the beginning of term, we would be lucky to get one. At that time shortages were a way of life.
All the staff in Sanders got along well together, which was fortunate, since we worked long hours. I had to be there at a quarter to nine. I had an hour and a half for lunch. The shop closed at five thirty, but we were expected to work until at least six thirty, often seven. Many a time it was eight. That was the worst of Sanders, that and the pay.
At five thirty, Sanders would come down from his office, smoking his pipe, to see that everything was secure, shutters up and door locked. We would all light cigarettes and ‘get down to the real work’.
Frank Sanders was a small vigorous man with a perky face and a quiff of white hair. He resembled Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Arnold Bennett. He was a humorous man and in many ways a terrible crook; he kept us destitute and laughing.
Sanders was sincere in certain matters. His love of music, books and Rowlandson could not be faulted. He also had the gift of the gab, and this led him into areas of insincerity.
Middle-aged ladies flocked to Sanders, just as they flocked to the lectures of C. S. Lewis, who was then at Magdalen College and occasionally came into the shop. The ladies tried to charm Frank Sanders, but Frank Sanders always charmed the ladies more. Wives of heads of colleges were his natural victims. In the course of intimate conversations, when the ladies were led up to his office, books and money would change hands, valuable prints would turn into more valuable cheques. Sanders would then escort the ladies to the door with amiable courtesy.
Directly they had gone, the mask would fall. He would stamp back into the rear of the shop. ‘Oh, that Lady –! How she talks, how she wastes my time. I can’t bear the woman. She’s humbug all through …’
Frank Sanders was a self-made man. He began with no advantages in life, beyond the resources of his brain. As a youth in North Devon he sold newspapers for W. H. Smith’s on Barnstaple railway station. I too once lived in Barnstaple; this gave us something in common, and allowed him the opportunity to pay me less than I was worth.
The gift of the gab brought more than middle-aged ladies to Sanders. It brought some СКАЧАТЬ