The Emotive Power of Children's Books
posted by Barter Books @ 3:35pm, Sunday 21 December 2008.
Do you believe this? This big burly man, Ant and Bee.
I opened the book.
And now I’ve got it back, don't think I'll ever let go of it again.
Christmas at Barter Books
posted by Barter Books @ 3:56pm, Tuesday 9 December 2008.
You go along thinking some places on this earth were just made for Christmas and others weren’t.
Australia, for example, wasn’t. (We were there once during the holidays and can only say that having to listen to Frosty the Snowman in broiling hot weather just didn’t do it for me.)
England, on the other hand, was.
Just a few miles from us, for example, is Alnwick Moor. On one side of the moor is a deep valley. Down in the valley you can just see what’s left of a castle, a little Anglo-Saxon church, a viaduct, a tiny village, farmhouses scattered about, and sheep safely grazing. Now, imagine all this surrounded by hills and covered in snow. Honestly, all it lacks is a sleigh circling overhead led by eight tiny reindeer.
By this yardstick, I think it's fair to say that our bookshop, too, was made for Christmas. It’s located in an old Victorian railway station which was sited on a bit of high ground just outside the town centre.
To get to it, you walk through a high wrought-iron arch and then on up this curly path which is bordered by tall trees. Then once you pass under the exterior lacy canopy, the first thing you see when you walk into the bookshop is an open fireplace with dogs (and people) usually sitting around. (Here's a photograph and, all right, I'm not much of a photographer, I never know which button to press, it's a minefield):
Anyway, we have not let the side down. Today is December 9th and the shop has been well and truly decorated at last. (I hold off letting Christmas decorations go up until December 1st . Putting them up before then feels like cheating.)
But for now it's all green swags with red ribbons, mantelpieces covered in holly and ivy, a big wreath over the old Waiting Room fireplace, and two, yes two, Christmas trees. Not to mention that come the 24th, we'll be handing out to one and all little thumbles of hot mulled wine and bite-sized mince pies. (Too bad I don’t like mince pies). And I look at it and think, you’d have to be a real Scrooge not to like this, poor old Australia.
Mind you, that tree in the children's room - I don't know about it. It's 7’ tall. It looks real but it isn't. What else it isn't is straight up. It's been turned upside down, less Dickens you might say than Narnia. Customer - and staff - opinion has been divided. The opinion that hasn't been divided is the children's. They look at it and giggle, then lie under it looking up and up, at just what who knows, but whatever it is, they start in giggling all the more.
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The second tree, however, now that's real, all right - a 14’ fir tree in the very middle of the huge Main Hall. This one is the stunner - hundreds of tiny white lights glancing off hundreds more silver and gold baubles hanging down from the branches. (I'd show you a photo of this, too, but can't, too big for my camera). And, yes, don't worry - it's right-side-up.
Anyway, the local Hospice asked if they could have a little service by that tree, one in memory of friends and relations who had not made it to this Christmas.
Of course they could. The Hospice deserves all the support it can get.
Still, I'll be honest, I was a bit concerned - wondered if the inevitable sadness of the service would be contagious during this determinedly cheerful season. Nevermind, the organizer said the whole service shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes or so, what's twenty minutes?
Anyway, the day of the service I decided I’d better go to it myself. As most people would no doubt be going to the bigger candlelight services elsewhere, the least I could do would be to help make up the numbers.
By the start of the service, there were about thirty of us there, mostly older people. They were of an age when losing people (a husband, a sister, an old friend) was becoming all too familiar. Not that there weren’t younger people there, too – there were. These were the ones who had lost, say, a father, a mother. And a few of them, in turn, were holding the hands of someone still younger, even much younger - children whose necks kept swivelling around still half looking for Granda or Gran, where were they?
Most of the people were standing in the comparatively large space around the temporarily darkened tree, while the rest of us found room in the nearby aisles.
I took my place just off the central aisle leading up to the tree. Then I had a quick look at my watch. It was 4pm now, it would be all over by 4.20, or so I hoped. I had a lot to do.
On a prearranged cue, the Christmas music filling the shop (Diana Ross and the Supremes singing Joy to the World; it's the Yank in me) was turned off.
We were then joined by a tall thin man with dark hair, a nice, clean-shaven face, wearing a dark suit, dark tie – clearly the vicar who would be taking the service.
He nodded to everyone, thanked everyone for coming, and introduced himself. He was The Reverend David Archer, minister of the local Baptist Church. He explained that Katy Drummond at the Hospice had asked him if he could come along and say a few words, and he was glad to do just that.
He then asked us to join him in a short prayer, one of the psalms.
We bowed our heads.
And then, when he finished, he asked if someone could please turn on the lights of the tree?
A pause. A longer pause. (If I had not prayed as seriously as i night have done before, I did so now, Lights, puh-leez come on.)
Then there it was - the tree suddenly turning tree of lights, lights which, altogether, lit up the faces - sad faces, drained - of those standing around it, the exception being the children's faces, their faces as shiny bright as the ornaments on the tree, their eyes all wide.
A woman dabbed at her eyes.
We would sing four carols in all, Mr Archer said, and in between each carol he would say a few words.
And so we did sing, tentatively at first, a little group of people overwhelmed by the very space of that huge Main Hall - a Hall that was for almost a century the old Platform 1. (It has seen so much over the years, that Hall - the arrival of Queen Victoria, Tommies leaving for WWI, city children brought to be housed with families during WWII, and then, in 1968, the last train to depart after the Beeching cuts, old newspaper photographs showing the locomotive front decorated in flowers. And now, now a small group of people singing where the old well had been.)
Still our voices did grow at least a little stronger with each succeeding verse, helped by (I stopped momentarily just to listen) someone’s lovely soprano beginning to thread its way through the spaces between the notes that the rest of us were doing our best with. (I looked around to find the owner of that voice; couldn't.)
But here was the surprising thing: Mr Archer. Can I just say how good he was? I found myself listening to him intently. It wasn't so much what he said (though that, too) but how he said it. No pear-shaped vowels softened by the odd sherry informed that voice, no theatre.
We had all known grief, he said, we had all experienced it in different ways, coped with it in different ways, had done and were doing the very best we could. We mustn’t be too hard on ourselves; they would not want that. They had loved us, just as we loved them. Hold on to that love and to our faith in life everlasting.
Listening to Mr Archer, I found myself taking comfort from his words, why was that? I was not there to be comforted.
Old griefs, it seems, are closer to the surface that we suppose.
We sang the last carol, O Come All Ye Faithful.
I found it difficult to sing.
Then Mr Archer ended the service by telling everyone that, if they wanted to, they could take one of the silver ornaments from the bowl that was being passed around and add it to the tree in memory of.
A fair few did.
I did.
I who had just come to help make up the numbers.
Has Anybody Seen Fizzy?
posted by Barter Books @ 3:06pm, Sunday 23 November 2008.
In a nation of animal lovers, it can hardly be surprising that one of the bookshop’s most popular features is that we allow dogs - the only stipulation being that their owners must be attached to them by a leash.
Not only do we allow dogs but, from the day we first opened, we have actively encouraged their custom - this by putting a cute dog photograph on our front door (terriers, sheep dogs, Yorkies, mostly – the rottweiller didn’t work) with a little tag underneath ‘Dogs Welcome’. If we could only figure out how to turn them into paying customers, we’d really be going places. So far, however, they can’t seem to get past the fire which they curl up in front of and go to sleep. (Not unlike a fair few of their owners, I might add.)
In view of all this, you’re probably thinking I must be a dog lover. And you’d be right. (If I thought you had an hour to spare, I’d tell you about the little fox terrier I grew up with, AC. He was the best!)
But the truth is, thanks to my becoming the stepmother of two cats upon our marriage, I have slowly turned into so ardent a cat lover that I now consider their deep acquaintance one of the best gifts Stuart ever gave me. This is something that other cat lovers will immediately understand without further explanation, just as dog lovers won’t, and we won’t even mention bird lovers, what can I say?
But what both dog and cat-lovers will understand is how much both mean to us, these children who never grow up. Don’t judge us. Don’t care what we look like or how old we are. Just treat them decently, take them (dogs) for a walk by the sea or, even better, to the bookshop (well, I would say this, wouldn’t I?) or let them (cats) roam about at will under the moon and the stars and then come home at dawn to a cosy nest and they’re with you through thick and thin.
In short, in their way, they love us, and we, in ours, them.
One of the cats we have loved best was Fizzy.
Here is a photograph of Fizzy taken just last June, when she was about two months old.
We agreed to take her (love at first sight actually) as a furry friend for our marmalade cat, Custard. Who hated her. (Just for starters, she had no respect. She would jump on him when he was asleep, stuff like that.)
In typical proud-mother fashion (brace yourself), I think Fizzy was beautiful. She was a tortoise-shell cat, her top fur a gorgeous spectrum of colours ranging from black to brown to gold to yellow, while underneath she was white as snow. In my imagination, I could just see her in some Disney film sporting silver loop earrings and pink lipstick and knocking all the boys’ socks off.
In temperament she was (I have to say it) quite feisty. If you were holding her (as I often did, irresistible) and she wanted down, she wanted down now, this second, (I still have a faint patchwork of tiny scars on my forearms to prove that two seconds was too long.) On the other hand, she would sit with you and purr for hours, come up to you, rub your nose with hers. She did that with me when I was reading. Or with Stuart when he was watching football. I could go on about all her myriad cute tricks, but I’ll spare you. I’ll just say that Fizzy was an endearing little companion.
Which is exactly what both Stuart and I thought she was doing last October, October 18th to be exact. Stuart thought she was upstairs curled up by me, reading, and I thought she was downstairs curled up by him, watching football. So that it was a surprise to me when Stuart came up, took one look at our bed, and asked: “Isn’t Fizzy with you?”
On the face of it, such a small no-count question, “Isn’t Fizzy with you?” But instead of floating out the window, weightless, it hung in the air and grew big until it filled the room.
She was only five months old. Who knows how restless a cat she might have grown into, but while she had proudly learned how to manuever the cat flap (a big incentive was going after poor Custard), she had always stayed very close to home. Not only that, she had never stayed out long - ten minutes, tops.
We considered this stay-at-home nature particularly fortunate, as our house is next to a very busy road.
For two weeks we looked for her. That first night, we each took flashlights, we would go in different directions. But which one? With the house as the central hub, she could have gone in any one of a hundred, a thousand, possible directions, including up (roofs, trees).
There was nothing for it but to just strike out - Stuart going off in one direction, and I in another, hit or miss.
Looking back, I keep thinking what must we have looked like, both of us, two spectral forms stumbling around late at night peering down alley ways and over stone walls, training pale beams of light wherever we thought Fizzy might be, calling out her name, then stopping, listening, the loudest sound of all that night being the silence broken only by our own voices.
Nevermind, we said to ourselves, it’s early days. Maybe she’s already come home, is right now at home eating Custard’s food, wondering where we are, that would be a laugh! Or perhaps that very night, we’d hear her come back in (the cat flap makes an almighty noise in the middle of the night!). Or perhaps the next morning, there she’d be, where you been?
But that didn’t happen.
Over the next few days, we became pray to the usual fears of everyone who has ever had a pet go missing, We could bear the fact that she might be dead. What was harder was that she might be trapped. Injured. Stolen. Worse, taken. (And what kind of person would do that? I tried hard not to go there.)
And, yes, we put up posters. We called the RSPCA. We put an ad in the local paper. We called the local authorities (don’t deal with cats, sorry, only dogs). We even asked the local radio station to make an appeal. (Yes, I’m afraid we went that far, goes to show.)
And everywhere we went, people were so kind, really. They would all tell us how they had had a cat go missing, for a whole week, a month, a year, and then one day, Smudge or Felix or Tarmac had just suddenly shown up, the little bugger!
We had two responses. One, a phone call from the local post office who said a customer had seen our poster and reported that they had actually seen a tortoiseshell cat running around at the north end of our road, the only thing was, it had on a green collar, did Fizzy have on a green collar? (No, Fizzy didn’t have on a collar at all; by some horrible fluke, I had taken her collar off the day she went missing, something about it was making her claw at it so badly it was shredding. Better get her another one, I thought, tomorrow. Because, of course, there would be a tomorrow.) Still, I made a dash up the road. You never know. Maybe somebody thought Fizzy was just a stray, was as beguiled with her as we were, took her in, got her a green collar. (I found that cat, green collar, and just where I was told she’d be, at the North end of the road; it wasn’t Fizzy.)
The second response was from someone at a warehouse. A stray tortoiseshell cat had come in on one of the trucks, had obviously got locked in somehow. This time, Stuart went up, didn’t wait a minute either to go. (OK, Englishmen, stiff upper lips and all that. But I can only say that Stuart was at that warehouse practically before the caller had even put the phone down.) But that cat wasn’t Fizzy, either.
The hardest thing, of course, was the not knowing what had happened to her. What I pinned my hopes on, was that someone would find Fizzy, dead or alive, and take her to someone else (a vet, the RSPCA) who would scan her, find her identification chip, call us.
This didn’t happen.
Still, unlike many pet owners in our situation, we actually found out what happened to Fizzy. This, through a neighbour who had seen our poster two weeks after we put it up, had put two and two together and came over to tell us.
All the time we had been looking for Fizzy that very same night she had first gone missing, she had been lying almost within sight of our house. We had missed her because she was lying in the dark behind a neighbour's bin. She had been hit by a car on the road, and she had gone there to die. Our neighbour had seen her when he went off to work. He reckoned she probably had belonged to the woman of the house, he didn't know. She was later discovered and put into the bin. Where she would have been taken off and dumped, along with the rest of the rubbish, in the town tip.
Why am I telling you all this?
Not to place any blame, not at all. (Ask yourself: what would you do with a dead animal without a collar? Would you have thought it might be chipped? Picked it up? Taken it to a vet? What?)
So, back to why am I telling you all this?
First, because if you're an animal lover, something like this may have happened to you, and misery loves company, that's why.
Second, because try as I might, I don't see any realistic way forward to change this classic scenario, local authorities taking responsibility to handle dead animals, cats as well as dogs, collect them, have them scanned. (As it happens, their is a movement by an MP to have just such a bill passed making local authorities responsible, but nobody believes it will pass, not enough time, money to implement it.) For dogs maybe (the Dog Warden) but not for cats (ever heard of a Cat Warden?)
Third, because maybe you know an answer, something plausible. Maybe you'll be the one to set it in motion. (One answer I just can't do, be warned! Not let cats out, no cat flaps. Can't do that, sorry. Better not to have any more cats, our own solution.)
Still, let me put it into perspective: the whole time something like this happens, you wonder, if the loss of a pet hurts this much how infinitely worse it must be - unbearable is the word that comes to mind - when it involves not a cat or a dog but someone's child?
But, look, before I turn to jelly, can I just tell you there is at least one creature in this otherwise sad little story who is thrilled to bits by it all: Custard. He doesn't have a clue what happened to his late tormentor. But judging from the sound of his snoring, he's not all that bothered.