From Chatwin to Furst

I am pleased to have more or less completed the reorganisation of my books – essentially spacing them out so there is room for additions. When I put White Eagles Over Serbia in its appointed place in Fiction I saw I have The Alexandria Quartet. You may remember I ordered Justine, the first in the tetralogy a few days ago. I haven’t read the AQ and had forgotten I possessed it, for an excellent reason.

In the late 1970s I bought a small flat on Southampton Row, WC1, and indeed it had two bedrooms and one WC. The street was noisy and grimy. At night vans rattled up and down from Fleet Street to Kings Cross with newspapers for distribution. The windows were virtually opaque, dirtied by the filth hanging in the air. As, through a laughable misunderstanding, I had been deprived of my UK driving licence for a year while patriotically celebrating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, it was within easy walking distance of central London – its theatres, restaurants, brothels, bars, galleries, etc. It also had a branch of Hertz. This was useful as I could hire their cars at weekends using my Irish driving licence. I hope there is a statute of limitations regarding this minor infringement of the law.

A friend shared the flat with me – useful as the interest on my mortgage shot up from 8 to 15%. Most of the furniture – there wasn’t room for much – came from Barmeath, inherited from my mother and paternal grandmother. The latter had bought rather attractive small pieces from antique shops in the Depression, in the Cotswolds when my grandparents lived near Morton-in-Marsh between the wars. A round pedestal table with three claw feet served as our dining table in the small kitchen. Do you remember Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, published in 1907?

“Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.”

My friend, also titled, was not struck dead when he changed the one dangling light bulb in the kitchen but he did stand on the pedestal table and one of the claw feet snapped off. I never quite got round to having it mended and the table came with me to Margravine Gardens and the Orangery with the chunky hardback, The Alexandria Quartet, serving as a prosthetic leg. Finally, the table remained at the Orangery and the book came back to Barons Court with me. And that’s why I never read the AQ.

Almost every book tells a story, whether about where it was bought or sometimes who gave it to me. I treasure first editions of Alan Clark’s Diaries and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The former signed by AC, a present from the light bulb changer, and both given to me as birthday presents almost twenty years ago.