Friday, August 16

We're waiting for the cleaning lady to arrive and Jamie's just driven up  to take me out for coffee while Marilyn stays home to supervise.  I'm posting a story I wrote about my visit to Cambridge in 2013.  Yesterday, we were watching a Youtube video about Cambridge. and I mentioned to Marilyn that I had good memories of a shop called the Haunted Bookshop ... and there it was on the screen, painted red as I remembered.  So, here is the story:

THE BOOKSHOP

I was feeling footsore and weary after a day exploring the backstreets and alleyways of Cambridge, guided by a friend who had made this beautiful city his adopted home.  I looked forward to a comfortable chair and a cup of good coffee but Brian insisted on one more stop before we headed for home. 

We turned off one narrow laneway into an even narrower St Edmunds Passage and there was our destination: The Haunted Bookshop.  This gem of a bookshop specialises in children’s books and the window is cluttered with ancient leather-bound and cracked volumes with faded gold lettering.  Inside, in the cramped, musty space, books are both on shelves and stacked in teetering piles on the floor.  A friendly lady sits quietly behind a till.  It is very quiet.

There seems to be no order to the chaos but, on investigation, I see that an attempt has been made to alphabetise those on the shelves, and the piles of clutter appear to be organised in some sort of thematic way: fairy stories together, boys’ own adventures in another pile.  My eye is drawn to a vintage copy of Enid Blyton’s Rubbalong Tales, a favourite from my childhood and I wonder whether I am enchanted enough to part with the 60 pounds asking price.  There is so much more to see and I drag my eyes away to editions of Biggles books by the yard.  I remember parting with the last of my Biggles books just a few years ago.  Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies seems to be in mint condition, certainly not like the copy I pored over as a child.

I hear a man and his young child enter when the floorboards behind me creak.  They are directed upstairs, via a tiny staircase in the corner I hadn’t even noticed.  Following them, we make our way up the narrow stairs, with more piles of books on every step, and where more delights await.  My friend and I play the game of throwing out a remembered name and seeking it out among the cluttered shelves: Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll: they are all there in various editions and of varying qualities.

I would have liked to have found an illustrated Oliver Twist like the one I received for my 7^th birthday and which disappeared in one of my moves, but it never occurred to me at the time.  Perhaps I was so enthralled with the variety that I couldn’t think of what I might take as a reminder of my visit.

I did remember my childhood comic books: the Dandy and the Beano, and The Eagle, each new edition awaited eagerly and read avidly from cover to cover.  There they were, some tattered editions going back to the 1940s and 50s.  Of course, comics such as these were strictly rationed when I was young and If I had had more access to such treasures would they have been so appreciated?

My friend introduced me to the lady behind the till who was the proprietor.  I congratulated her on her initiative in providing such a business and asked why she had chosen the name The Haunted Bookshop.  She said that, in her mind, all bookshops were haunted: by the voices of the living and the dead, voices that are trapped until we release them.  These voices can be smiling, laughing, whispering and screaming.  They live in the dry remains of dead trees, and only we can animate them.  And each spirit, when it is released into our mind becomes inseparable from our own – no two persons can be haunted in precisely the same way.

I wondered what it would be like to live in a town where such treasures were there for me to delve into whenever the itch came upon me.  Picking up one comic from the year I turned 8, I found that I was disappointed with the clumsiness of the prose and the banality of the story. I put the volume back on the shelf, unwilling to spoil the warm memories of childhood by a dose of reality.

I left the Haunted Bookshop empty-handed.  I suppose I imagined I would return there another day and could buy a book then, but I don’t need a tangible reminder of my visit.  The memories of the unruly piles of books, the faint, musty aroma and the olde-world ambience stay with me always.