When Craig died, Claire asked me what I might want of his. The one thing I asked for was an ornament from a windowsill. It is of a Chinese scribe, sat at a low table with ink and brush. She gave me that and other things. That scribe speaks so much to who I am, he has his place upon my altar. I will write about him another time, or perhaps I already have. The other thing I said was, “Let me know about any books before you give them away, especially hardbacks…”
It was unspoken between us that I would trust all of her decisions, including those about the books. I don’t know what books there were that might have gone elsewhere and it does not matter. Much of what came to me, came with the permission to keep it or let it go and the truth is quite a few I let go, without a second thought. A few I kept, to read through first – and some of those too, I decided that really, I probably wouldn’t. Much I let go, unrecorded.
Some I will keep, and will re-read, for childhood’s sake if nothing else.
This is not about those books. This is about one specific book that I have not yet read.
It is a weighty book, a mighty tome, and for a while I kept hold of it thinking I would like to read it before I let it go. I knew from the first that it would not find its way to my keeping shelves. Then I kept thinking I probably wouldn’t even bother to open it. It is not my kind of thing at all.
It is a massive, family-Bible-sized edifice, entitled The Sunday at Home (illustrated).
A frontispiece declares it to be a 1905-1906 edition, published by the Religious Tract Society (incorporated) of 4 Bouverie Street, London, EC. I know nothing about them.
It runs to over a thousand small-print, double-columned pages.
There is nothing to tell me how it came into the family. There are no names or dates that would imply a gift. Did it come from my grandmother to Jim? Or from Marj’s mother to her? Or did one or other of them pick it up in a second-hand store somewhere along the line? I have no way of ever knowing.
I was about to decide, once again, that I would not ever get around to reading it. I’m no more religious than my forebears, probably much less so in their sense of that word. Less Christian, certainly…as in, not at all. But, well, here’s a question: where is the line between religious and romantic? Where do we decide to distinguish between romance and myth and legend and religious ‘truth’? Because I do not know.
Where do we draw the line between religious (which I never was) and spiritual (which, who knows, maybe more so as I get older)?
There are things that I choose to believe, and things that I choose not to believe, and the only thing they have in common is that I do not know.
I was on the point of thinking there is nothing in here that I need to read – as if I ever know in advance what there might be in a story that I need to know.
I picked the book up intending not even to put it in the charity bag, thinking that nor would anyone else want this ancient tome, thinking to put it straight into the blue bin…
…but then I noticed that pages had been marked.
The book did not close entirely close upon itself.
I was not too much intrigued by which pages had been marked…more so by the book-marks.
So much so, that I did not even record which pages these markers had been left within.
One of them was a card, probably intended as a Christmas card, that had been designed to hold a photograph. It did not do so. It was a picture of a deer. No words. Just a simple picture. A scrap of card pushed in to mark a page.
The others, though, were flowers. Again, I paid no attention to the pages marked. Whatever import they had would mean nothing to me. Whether they were significant, or just where the reader had got to when they decided to press the flowers, is lost to time. Perhaps the readings would recall the dates and thereby what those flowers meant. Perhaps not.
As an avid reader, I forget what I have read. I do not hold much of the detail of stories. I live them with the characters, and then I escape back into myself. The ones that affect me most strongly, even those, I let go of the details, what I hold is who I was, and when, and where I was when I read them.
Perhaps others hold onto the who and when and where, by marking the pages.
That these were flowers, tells me it must have been Aunty Marj's book. I will never know if it was her mother's before her. I will never know what her religious beliefs were and how strongly she held this particularl book in her hands. There is a sadness in that.
I found, in different places, two single red roses. Love tokens, presumably. A single red rose. Kept, and pressed between pages. Twice over. Who gave these, and who so inexpertly kept them pressed between pages?
1905-1906: the flowers do not date to so long ago.
I know my grandparents married in 1910, and both were of poor backgrounds. Too poor to have had such a book. If my grandmother had been of a mind to press flowers, it would have been to extract their healing juices. I do not know of Marj’s parents.
Alongside the two red roses, placed at different places, so given at different times, there are two other posies, button-hole pieces from weddings, their stems wrapped in silver-foil (as we would have called it; aluminium to be precise) – they probably date from the 1970s.
I am deducing all the way along the line. I think the book was Marjorie’s. Whether inherited or acquired, I cannot say. The flowers, I suspect, were also hers…red roses for birthdays or valentines, the wedding button-holes, maybe from Craig’s wedding, or those of our other cousins – Carole or Lynda – or maybe even my brother?
Their spread throughout the book, suggests that she read the book, along the way…and maybe I should do so too before I give it away.
I have photographed the flowers, knowing I will not keep their drying forms, with no provenance to keep them to life…but I am glad that I found them.
I hope that whoever put them between those pages would be happy enough, that at least they were found again, and that they made someone wonder at what love it was put them there, and maybe that hope in itself keeps a little seed of such love alive in the world.
And maybe that matters…at least, a little.
If nothing else, it means that I will read that book before I send it on its way. Who knows? Maybe I will learn something from it.
