Eddy makes a resplendent entrance into the classroom, flouting school dress convention. The form teacher, Mrs Bremner, affectedly holds her mouth wide open as Eddy shuffles self-consciously past her, a striking blue figure amidst a room filling with its daily complement of grey jumpers. Eddy drops behind an ink-scrawled desk and into a chair also given the full graffiti treatment. But his swift movements fail to conceal the football kit. Aside from white socks and white stripes running down the sides of his shorts, Eddy is clad in cotton dyed blue in sporting allegiance. Mrs Bremner makes certain that her expression of shock has been universally perceived before she speaks.
What I find distracting is the eerie inertness of Eddy’s head and his thick messy hair. From my angle his head is barely eclipsed by the silver strands on the head of his inquisitor. For a moment I have a ridiculous impression they are kissing. The threat of banishment is stridently issued in tones that belie Mrs Bremner’s short and rather peculiar stature. A huge pair of breasts induces a stoop in her posture, and her pupils, keen to pay testimony to their cruel wit, brand her as the ‘milk float’, a nickname that proves durable.
Eddy looks unruffled. Maybe it’s shock. But from this moment I know that I’m a Chelsea boy too.
Bangor, January 2010
In one of the Sillitoe boxes, I might have discovered a story about a man with confused ambitions who must resist a tendency to fixate on limited editions (even his washing machine is a first edition Hotpoint). Amid tales of travel, written in the present tense because that is how he lives them, are chance meetings with verse and prose. He puzzles over the reliability of memory. Is it a present representation of the past? Or the actual past, laid down in neural pathways, resurfacing in the present? It would seem difficult to filter out all the fiction from the fact. Whatever memories are, writing about them is an attempt to impose if not an order then at least some sort of theme to a life lacking in clear direction. Amid a stream of consciousness, he recollects: The births of his children. The polished syntax of a Penguin rep. A knife point mugging in Barcelona. Finding B. S. Johnson’s Trawl in a box of Mills and Boon. Diarrhoea on a Corfu beach. Samuel Beckett’s miniature signature. The pallor on the face of a young waitress behind a fish and chips counter. Led Zep taking to the Knebworth stage. Hell’s Angels on a Devon beach. MacGowan mud pelting at Glastonbury. Watching Match of the Day in a post-operation painkiller high. Drinking tea with an Israeli soldier beside Bala lake. Finding reminder notes in a hymnbook that belonged to a church organist, recently deceased. A hashish bean soup in Corsica. Impromptu kick abouts.
Life, at times, has an overwhelming intensity. The exhilaration may cause dizziness, and he self-prescribes autonomy to loaf about in imagined worlds, to deal in books and to dream. A buzz of expectation to banish the banal. Groping among the dirt and dust at the bottom of boxes, fingers eager to uncover rare, limited editions, he can lose himself ‘so that time and place and circumstances are annihilated in this sweet game, as in no other sport’. There is always the chance of a bargain, whether it be found in the shelves at Any Amount of Books in Charing Cross Road or from Pwllheli public library offloading old stock. He must learn, however, to abstain from snapping up books that were once bargains. The internet plays merry havoc with prices. The perennial fear of dealers, that the rare books will die out, is perhaps a more justified one these days. Charity shops have got savvy. Auctions generally are a better bet. Delving into a box bought at a recent sale, with the beetles and spiders scuttling away, he discovers two books that, being hidden beneath old newspapers, had escaped everybody’s attention. One book, with colour plates that illustrate beautifully the varieties of pheasants, will pay for a flight to Mumbai.
And the other is a book with a passage in it that made a strong impression on him several decades ago, A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert. In it somewhere is an acceptance by Frederic Moreau, the novel’s protagonist, of life’s vicissitudes, a useful if rather bland philosophy. He rereads the novel but fails to locate the passage. Is it another figment of his imagination? Maybe it’s to be found in Madame Bovary, a more famous work of literature, perhaps, with memorable imagery.
‘Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.’
He continues to hunt with delusions of grandeur; to stumble upon an ‘Et Tu Healy’, a broadsheet poem by James Joyce said to have been published when Joyce was nine years old. Or better still; a ‘Love’s Labors Won,’ a Shakespeare lost play achieving mythical status since 1953, when Solomon Pottesman discovered it in the 1603 booklist of the stationer Christopher Hunt, listed as printed in quarto: ‘Marchant Of Vennis, Taming Of A Shrew, Loves Labour Lost, Loves Labour Won.’
The story ends before an aborted enquiry into the ethics of selling them, for as Percy Fitzgerald in the Book Fancier says: ‘the loyal heart would feel a twinge or scruple, as he carries off from the humble and ignorant dealer, for a shilling or two, a volume that may be worth ten or twelve pounds. No sophistry, he concludes, will veil the sharpness of transaction, in which profit is made of poverty and ignorance.’ This applies to capitalism itself but the realisation of it does not deter the story’s protagonist, now middle aged, from planning more journeys, exploratory missions to the East whereby en route he may even seek some Vedantic wisdom. Beside his bed is a well-thumbed copy of the Let’s Go Guide to India with the addresses of Delhi’s bookshops underlined. He continues to chase after it, still searching.
About the Author
Bill Rees lives between Bangor and Montpellier, and makes his self-proclaimed ‘precarious’ living by translating French football matches into English for a Dutch bookmaker, as well as selling the occasional book. As a graduate of Bangor University, Rees worked as a reporter for a local newspaper in London, before the lure of travel and bookselling led him to take a less conventional road.