The Lost Room
posted by Barter Books @ 1:51pm, Wednesday 9 July 2008.
This isn’t the way I planned to start off my blog.
What I was going to do was tell you about something perhaps mildly amusing that had happened in the bookshop that day.
Or maybe about some old book (we’re secondhand/antiquarian) someone had introduced me to.
Or maybe even about some famous person that’s come into the shop, word spreading among the staff like wildfire. (Kate Winslet - now that would have been good. The boy at the till still hasn’t recovered. We go visit him now and then in the Sanctuary.)
But I’m not going to do any of that. Anyway, not today.
Why?
Because today, I’m too taken up with this little café we’re opening next week. We hope next week. And as our bookshop is in an old Victorian train station, I’m already on the look-out for Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.
Not that, I have to say, the café doesn’t already have its own little romantic story, all by itself.
That story starts with the fact that I’ve wanted a café for so long, even before Caffè Nero was born. But there was no room for it anywhere in our bookshop. None. Zilch.
And then one day Phileas (Phil’s one of the managers; he hates his real name, so that’s the last time you’ll hear it) came up to me, “Mary,” he said, “I’ve found a room.”
“Found a room?”
Phil explained.
He had been looking at a plan of the whole Station building, hoping to find somewhere on our side to squeeze in a second office and then suddenly noticed these black lines enclosing unknown territory, “What’s that?” And got the site manager to track down the key.
Then he walked me down the long Main Hall where row after row after row of bookshelves now filled the space which had once been taken by the steam trains on the old Alnmouth-Alnwick branchline.
And then he stopped and pointed at the wall behind two of the bookshelves whose backs were flattened against it.
“That’s it. That lost room’s behind there.”
Behind there?
I stared at the wall, as if staring would turn it transparent.
Phil elaborated: the only access to the room had only ever been on the other side of the building, the mirror image of ours, the side belonging to the other branchline, the old Coldstream line. And once that line was cut, no matter how many businesses had let the space afterwards, the room had remained locked up, forgotten.
We exchanged looks. And without another word made for the lost room, there behind that large old sliding door, paint peeling off.
Phil took out the key (old-fashioned, big), turned it after a few goes in the padlock, and began sliding the door back - with me standing there, Carter at the sealed entrance to the tomb of Tutankhamen.
What I expected: a small pitch black room, creepy crawlies, the odd skeleton.
What I got: a real shock. Light. As the sliding door began to move, light revealed at first as a briliant thread down its entire length, and then in an ever widening band, brilliant, flooding out of the room and spilling over first Phil, then me. Until the door was fully opened, when it revealed the lost room.
Derelict, wonderful.
At first glance it looked rather like a small Victorian conservatory, untouched for years – a clerestory ceiling, a skylight, rusty tools (a spade, a hoe, a wheelbarrow), as well as (over there) a yoke and harness (there had once been stables on the station yard, used them for work horses), old barrels stencilled BUTTER, a broken mug, pots of dried paint, a scattering of nails across the floor (a foiled theft?).
But most striking of all, clinging onto the old brick wall opposite, a magnificent fern, its brilliant long green tendrils trailing down almost to the floor, able to survive for who knows how long on the sun from the skylight above and the water which came dripping off an adjacent drainpipe and down from broken panes.
For a moment, Phil and I just stood there bathed in the light of the mid-day sun and looked.
And as we looked, we became aware of something else as striking as the light: the silence. There was no sound. No movement. We had intruded into a world which, in the midst of chaos, had found its still small centre.
Could we turn our back on it and leave it be?
We could not.
“All we have to do is create another door on our side”, Phil said, “and I’ll have my staff room.”
I turned to him, tried (tried and failed) to look apologetic.
“No, Phil”, I said, “it’s my café."
Comments
That's great [: I wish i could come visit your store, it sounds amazing!
Alex - 10:32am, Sunday 13 July 2008.
Fantastic, aren't you lucky!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What a joy, I've always wanted to run a cafe, the very best of luck to you.
Polly - 5:49pm, Wednesday 16 July 2008.
I didn't realise this had all happened so recently - I visited recently and it all looked as if it had been there for a while. It was all lovely. I particularly liked the bacon sarnie. Yum!
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xing - 4:09am, Saturday 31 July 2010.
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