As a first blog entry on my new website, I'm cheating - the following is from a piece that I penned back in 2019. It's about my fascination and obsession with books, which remains a habit that is still currently out of hand and evidenced this morning by the arrival of a collaboration of summer ghost stories The Dead of Summer, edited by Johnny Mains.
Hurrah! No more waiting for the turning of the season and the shortening days until I can sit and enjoy a dark tale of the macabre, I can now do Winter in May... brrrrr...
Tuesday 26th November 2019
I wonder if you have a favourite book?
I love books – above everything they are my go-to habit that I have a perpetual weakness for. I have more than I can possibly read in my lifetime, but that doesn’t stop me wanting to own just one more.
I’ve recently realised that I have summer books and winter books, in that there are books that I am compelled to re-visit and read over and over again, but only as long as the meteorological conditions are suitable. Right now, I’m spending my winter evenings with The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. It’s a wonderfully dark collection of a re-imagining of fairy tales.
In each story, the female protagonist, always wise beyond her years and not in need of a prince or dashing pirate to rescue her, confidently and competently rescues herself instead. Among the collection is the short tale, The Company of Wolves – possibly one of Carter’s most well know stories which was made into a movie in the 1980’s and is a candid observation of the challenges faced by young girls as they journey towards woman-hood.
My latest find is a 1942 publication of short stories by Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth. Through the joy that is the internet, one click and it was parcelled up and flown across oceans from America to its new custodian.
Me.
I say custodian, because I have a philosophy that there are very few things that we ever truly, absolutely own – nothing really other than maybe the teeth in our heads. So, most things we possess are more-so looked after by ourselves; and then eventually handed on to the next caretaker. Such was, and is, the book.
Opening the brown paper wrapping, I held my face close to the yellow edged paper and inhaled, breathing in over seventy years of its absorbed history, I tried to imagine the life of the book, its own journey beyond the story. There are multiple coffee-mug stains on the cover, so it’s fair to assume that if it hasn’t been read in recent years, it has at least been given a purpose – if only to serve as a glorified table-mat.
Inside the book is an inscription in looped, copper-plate handwriting with the message: “To George with love from Ma, London 1942” – I wondered who the boy or man George was, or maybe George was short for Georgina? Son or daughter, it was given as a gift from a mother to her child during uncertain times in the middle of WW2, maybe it was given as a talisman to a soldier son, and served as a reminder of home?
At some point it had magicked its way across the Atlantic, only for in old age to be summoned back home again. So, I get a sense of something coming ‘full circle’ and feel content that it will spend its dotage sleeping quietly on my bookcase..
Someone asked me once if I had a favourite book. I still have frown-lines on my forehead from the effort required to answer that particular question; I think I managed to narrow it down to my favourite twelve, or thirteen, give or take half a dozen… maybe? – which wasn’t really the point of the question.
Recently however it has quietly occurred to me that I do have a favourite book after all. It’s a very old, very well-read book of Norwegian fairie tales given to me by my Grandmother for my seventh birthday, East of the Sun, West of the Moon by Kay Nielsen.
I’m always bewitched by the brilliance and lantern-bright glow of the images hidden within the pages. This has always felt like an enchanted book, Nielsen’s illustrations shimmer with a radiance as if illuminated by sunlight. The written words on the opposite page become almost unimportant, because staying close to the Nordic oral tradition of storytelling, these tales were never really meant to be written down, but instead passed through the generations by the spoken word.
Not for the feint hearted child, these are frightening tales, of trolls who stalk the forests at night and witches who steal sleeping baebes from their cribs, of forbidden rooms with locked doors and gods of the North Wind that can be summoned with a whistle.
It also served as a springboard for my fascination with classic ghost stories and the uncanny, thus my love of M R James and Edgar Allen Poe may never have been ignited had it not been for this one book.
Of all my books, it is the book that I would rescue, Desert-Island-Disc-Style, if I had to choose but one. It’s not lost on me that it is in essence a classic transitional object and represents far more than the sum of its parts. It conjures memories of sitting next to my grandmother whilst she sewed lace poppets for my sister and I, and retold us stories of her own childhood. It represents home and safety, closeness and warmth, but most of all it symbolises love.
There are moments when I wonder if George took comfort from the book that was given to them all those years before, that beyond the pages there was the memory of home, and a reminder of their place amongst things.
I truly hope so.