Leatherhead Hospice, 9 June 2005
‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes”.’
From Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr
Dad is a happy with his new room, especially its large window through which he can see out onto the lawn outside. It makes for a pleasant contrast to the environs of Kingston Hospital from where he has been brought by ambulance today.
Diagnosed with motor neurone disease in February (following a misdiagnosis of a stroke the previous month), he has rapidly deteriorated; the pace of the disease catching doctors, friends and family by surprise. His mind is unaffected though and he wants to engage in conversation in spite of an increasing inability to make intelligible sounds. We ‘talk’ intermittently for hours on end until his breathing becomes particularly laboured. After re-applying his oxygen mask, I go off for a tour of the town.
Within ten minutes, I am ensconced in Dandy Lion Editions Bookshop. Scanning the books for likely titles, I briefly forget the reason for me being in Leatherhead. ‘Action gives us consolation for our inexistence,’ opines John Gray in Straw Dogs.
I turn up a first edition copy of The Selfish Gene, a hugely influential book on evolution by Richard Dawkins published in 1976. Dawkins coined the term ‘selfish gene’ as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes.
I return to the hospice to show Dad my find. Always having praised Dawkins, he is pleased by both the book’s subject matter and its potential financial return.
Dad has taken a keen and abiding interest in my efforts to make a living out of books. After his retirement, we sometimes worked in tandem during my bulk buying trips. Dashing across West London it felt like we were bank robbers; he waiting in the ‘get away’ car while I charged in and out of venues of potential pickings, dodging between the clothes hangers in charity shops.
He didn’t object to his once plush flat resembling a grocer’s stockroom; fruit and veg boxes, filled to the brim with books, piled up high in every corner.
A nurse enters the room to bring us tea. I hold the cup to his lips. ‘Lovely,’ I hear him rasp. We talk some more before I leave. He gives me, with difficulty, a thumbs up, and I tell him that I’ll see him tomorrow. I do, but not as we both imagine. At dawn I receive a phone call from the hospice; a nurse gently informs me that he died in his sleep in the early hours.
I learn later that the Motor Neurone Disease Association uses a Thumbs Up symbol as its logo, representing David Niven’s last defiant gesture.
La Comédie du Livres, Montpellier, May 1994
Dad has raced down with his car full of books. He excitedly relates his journey along the motorway across the Massif Central, much of it running at an altitude in excess of 2600 feet, with 30 miles in excess of 3250 feet. Concentrating on my stand and rearranging the display of books upon it, I can’t properly follow what he’s saying. My focus is on replenishing the stand with Calvin and Hobbes (the comic strip, that is, not the philosophers) and English language Tintins.
This is the first year that I’ve participated in La Comédie du Livres, the largest book fair in southern France. I don’t want to blow it. Tents and marquees cover the vast Place de la Comédie. Hundreds of writers, comic strip artists (big in France) and publishers, along with the local bookshops, have assembled to attract an enthusiastic public. The crowds swarm around the tents, seemingly immune to the day’s stifling heat. We have protection from the sun’s fierce rays; the awnings draped generously over the tent’s metal framework.
Business is brisk for everybody. People are delighted to meet favourite writers and the atmosphere is conducive to book selling. Along with the books hauled in a panic late last night from my shop, the books from London mean that my stand boasts an impressive variety of titles. I’m selling to tourists and locals alike.
As booksellers, we have only to pay a nominal fee in order to participate in the fair, which is mostly subsidised by the council. The French certainly plough money into culture and they are protective of their book industry, having retained even the net book agreement. Dad is amazed to hear of the council’s generosity and a journalist encourages him to air such views. Next week, a paragraph of his praise is printed in the local paper alongside his picture. ‘Sur son stand de la Comédie du livre, le patron de “Bills Book Company” ressemble a un major… anglais of course! Plein d’humour, sourant, quand on lui demande “ca march?” Il repond immanquablement, “very positive,” et ajoute ‘jamais en Angleterre on imaginerait qu’on subventionne les gens pour ce type d’operation”.’
Other English people we meet at the event are similarly impressed, including athlete Roger Black, who has been training in the vicinity.
Towards the end of the day, I meet an American lady called Sophie Herr who has a weakness for Ellis Peters’ novels. She becomes a regular at the shop. I learn that she has famous parents. Her mother, Caroline, was chiefly responsible for bringing the dancer Josephine Baker to Paris. She then met and married Joseph Delteil, a local author and poet held in high esteem. He thus became Sophie’s stepfather. Sophie, it turns out, is a friend of George Whitman.
Disillusionment, Kingston Nightclub, 1986
Eddy wants to us to start in The Fox even though we usually drink here only on quiet nights. We find no offence in the slapdash paintings of boats stranded on mud-flats, the gaudily framed portrait of Winston Churchill at his most stoical. We drink, to build up Dutch courage, with dogged determination. A couple of women huddle around a cigarette machine. I feel a sudden attraction to one of them. I follow the play of light as her dark hair, cut in a page-boy style, swings out of synch. Her friend also seems mesmerised.