Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s

The gift of the gab brought more than middle-aged ladies to Sanders. It brought some of the famous as well. I squinted up from street level at these leviathans of the literary scene. Hugh Macdonald, editor of Marvell’s poems and other works, always grumpy, but fun to imitate behind his back. Geoffrey Grigson, poet, producer of books, never satisfied with our service. Many celebrated dons, the most engaging of whom was probably J. I. M. Stewart. Stewart was busy installing himself in Christ Church when I arrived in my shabby suit to conquer Oxford. He was writing a series of Shakespearian or mock-Shakespearian plays for the BBC Third Programme, then at its cultural zenith. Years later, Stewart must have felt a little rueful when he found Tom Stoppard tilling the same ground more profitably in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. But by then he was well embarked on his second or third career as detective writer Michael Innes.

On a Saturday afternoon, when Oxford fell into a comfortable doze, and those who wished to curl up with a good book were already doing so, A. V. Bond entered Sanders.

He descended from somewhere called ‘The Cotswolds’. I put the term in quotation marks because I knew no more of the Cotswolds than the name; I had never been there. Mr Bond called himself ‘The Poet of the Cotswolds’.

He was roughly dressed, garbed generally in a long black coat wrapped tight round his wiry frame, as if he were about to be shipped to Patagonia, where warmth counts for more than style. To me, he was the Ancient of Days, or at least of an Afternoon, his sparse white hair tormented by the memory of Cotswold typhoons – or whatever they had up there – a straggly white beard, and piercing blue eyes.

Mr Bond was dramatic. He entered the shop like a thinned-down Wolfit, one arm raised in salute, and immediately began to talk. His chief target was Mrs Y, who eagerly devoured his every word. She would sit with legs crossed, elbows propped on desk, and hands clasped under her chin, looking up at him as if to convey visually the message that Earth, and the Cotswolds in particular, had not anything to show more fair than Mr Bond.

I too was fascinated. It was my first poet. He would declaim in the shop, and Mrs Y would clap prettily, and say afterwards, ‘Of course he’s such an amusing man and so gifted.’

His poems were printed by Mr Vincent, a local printer with a shop in King Edward Street, and sold at a penny a time. I remember none of his poems, unless he was guilty of a sonnet beginning ‘The heart in wonder like a lonely wren …’ I have retained none of his little sheets, unfortunately.

Mr Sanders once told Mr Bond a dirty joke, which profoundly shocked him. He left the shop, returned to the Cotswolds, and did not reappear for a month.

His open-air aspect convinced me that he must inhabit a mountainside, and a gorse bush he had made comfortable. I was disappointed later both by the extreme couthness of the Cotswolds – which resemble burial mounds more than mountains – and the discovery that the poet lived in Stow-on-the-Wold. I’m sure he was designed for the Pennines at least or, failing that, the Quantocks.

The visitor I liked least was Evelyn Waugh.

Waugh I observed with a particular interest. At school, we had been taught English by a fine product of Trinity College Dublin, H. C. Fay. Fay, known as Crasher after the sound of his hobnailed boots which he wore at all times, modelled himself on George Bernard Shaw, and had something of Shaw’s wit. His wit was sharp. It was truthful. It often transfixed us. But there was no malice behind it. We liked it. And we admired Fay – less because of his learning than because he had once, in class, told us that his cat was too fat to climb through her door hole into the house because she was pregnant again.

Sensation! The word ‘pregnant’ had never been spoken by an adult in our presence before. Fay was treating us like human beings. We were grateful. From then on, we were on Fay’s side, and content to be transfixed regularly by his wit.

His virtues consisted in more than the possession of a pregnant cat. He was sympathetic to my wish to become a writer. In his class, I was granted a privilege. Instead of a weekly essay, Crasher Fay allowed me to write a weekly story. While the rest of them were turning out their constipated page and a half on ‘My Visit to the Dentist’, or ‘Why I Love Rugger’, or ‘How to Treat a Hotwater Bottle’, I could plunge into the real thing. Imagination.

Fay was indulgent about the stories he received, though they were more fantastic and would-be humorous than he liked. One Monday morning in class, his patience stretched to breaking point. He seized up the story I had submitted and waved it furiously in the air.

‘Aldiss,’ he said, ‘if you do not mend your ways, you are going to end up as a second Evelyn Waugh.’

I blushed the colour of ambition.

Waugh’s early novels were pure delight. Meeting Waugh in the flesh was a different matter, at least if one was victim material, a bookseller’s assistant. As I remember him, Waugh was always in a bad mood. Perhaps it was because he was writing Brideshead Revisited, which is where he went off the gold standard. Later, Waugh redeemed himself a hundredfold with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, a brave, funny and perceptive book. Largely autobiographical, I understand.

He entered Sanders like some minor devil, small, bounderish, rosy on the wrong bits of cheek, with a smell not of brimstone but an equally noxious mixture of cigars and lavender water. He wished to see Mr Sanders – so imperiously wished to see Mr Sanders that anyone less than Mr Sanders was hardly worth a glance. A flick of the cigar was all we could hope for.

Sanders would appear in his usual genial way and sweep Waugh upstairs. They would emerge later, Waugh clutching some luxuriously bound volume of landscape engravings, both laughing. I believe he once had a very nice Boydell’s Thames from Sanders. They would part at the door, glowing false bonhomie on both sides. Waugh was a bad payer. And inaccurate with his cigar ash.

John Betjeman was much more pleasant. He would arrive giggling and steaming in an old coat with a fur collar which might once have done duty for Bud Flanagan. His hair was curly and somewhat enveloped in an old felt hat. He filled the shop with formidable goodwill, made himself pleasant to all, and signed a copy of his poems for me.

‘Such an interesting man,’ cooed Mrs Y, after one of his appearances. ‘And so fond of Oxford. He’s like me, he loves beauty.’

Betjeman came not to buy but to sell. He was then living near Wantage. He reviewed for the now defunct Daily Herald, where he was bombarded with the very sweepings of publishers’ lists. Why they sent him such rubbish I do not know, unless Bloomsbury had an exceptionally poor view of the Daily Herald. The gaudier the cover, the more likely it was to be despatched to Wantage and a labouring Betjeman.

But Frank Sanders would be all smiles, and would go out into the High Street with Betjeman, to look in his van.

Reader, this is not mere anecdotage, please. You are being treated to social history. (Besides, what if Summoned by Bells should, in another century, rank with Moore’s Lalla Rookh? In his day, some good judges placed Betjeman among our best English poets, with his touching mixture of dread, humour and inspired pedestrianism). Stop and consider the implications behind that last paragraph.

Betjeman drove up the High in his old van and stopped outside Sanders. He then came into the shop for a half-hour’s chat, after which he strolled out again with Sanders. We are talking about 1950.

A little amplification of the point. I was a success at Sanders. After less than a year there, Sanders allowed me to dress the window every Monday. We mixed antiquarian, second-hand and new books, perhaps on a theme. Natural History, say. Bill Oliver wrote the tickets in his neat hand.

Dressing the window was enjoyable; from there we could watch the academic world go by. Every Monday morning, a tubby old man with white hair and a carnation in his button-hole would come up the High from Magdalen College. He pushed a barrel-organ, stopping every so often to play an air. From Sanders’ window, you could hear him as far away as Halliday’s Antiques.

Despite my limited hours for personal pursuits, I was keeping company with the most beautiful girl in Oxford. Her name was Pam, and her hair was a staggering mixture of sunlight, ginger and Pre-Raphaelite red. She liked – we liked between us – the old Neapolitan tune, ‘Come Back to Sorrento’.

The barrel-organ man (I knew his name once) would trundle his barrel-organ up the High, stopping outside Sanders to play ‘Come Back to Sorrento’. Methinks that music hath a dying ping I would climb from the window and pay him lavishly. Sixpence. A sizeable fraction of the three pounds which was my weekly wage. What sentiment! What music! What generosity!

What happiness.

Try parking your barrel-organ, or your van, outside Sanders now.

In those days, children, there were no double yellow lines up the High. Indeed, there was scarcely any traffic. Old Oxford, breathing the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, expired in a death rattle of traffic wardens.

Oh, it sounds great. If you were content to work till seven every evening for three pounds a week. Of course, if you knew you were going to be famous (a secret kept from all but Pam and Mrs Y), that made everything OK.

So there stood Betjeman’s old van, full of trashy books. Sanders would turn them over and finally say, ‘A fiver, John?’

‘Well, I know it’s rubbish, Frank, but someone must read the stuff. I really have to buy a new set of tyres. Couldn’t you make it ten pounds?’

They soon came to an agreement.

The agreement was five pounds.

Bill and I then carried the books into the shop. Betjeman departed.

Sanders kept any books that were at all passable, merging them with our new stock. The rest of the books were crammed into two large suitcases. These suitcases I took up to Foyle’s bookshop in London, where the buyer in the basement would pay me perhaps twenty pounds.

The only novel I can remember salvaging from Betjeman’s collections was Guy Endore’s Methinks the Lady, which I read avidly while immersed at the same time in Pope’s poems and Lewis Mumford’s Condition of Man. I still read several books at once.

This rather shady dealing in review books stood me in good stead later, when I became literary editor of the Oxford Mail.

Christmases at Bill and Gertrude Oliver’s house were different from ordinary English ones. The food shortage was noticeable. We ate Smarties at intervals. The Christmas tree was decorated in the Austrian way. Its tip reached the ceiling, and it was loaded all the way up in white candles, nothing but white candles. It resembled a dancing girl in an inflammable white dress. The heat was terrific. We had to back away. Yet the house stands till this day.

Bill is dead. He died young, of cancer. When I went to see him in hospital, he would talk of nothing but bookselling. I tried to lure him to more personal subjects. He would not be moved. His talk was purely of books, new and old, and the problems of selling them. He was a most impersonal man; a door had been locked which even terminal illness did not open.

During his time with the Eighth Army in North Africa, Bill had been captured by the Italians – a fate given to few, I imagine. He spoke a little Italian, and so had been made interpreter, in which role he was allowed some freedom in the camp, between prisoners and captors.

Thus he was able to get his hands on the supplies of tea which the International Red Cross sent British prisoners. Because of a severe tea shortage among Mussolini’s heroes, the commodity was highly prized and could be exchanged for Italian cigarettes. The British POWs, despite their fondness for tea, did not drink it, preferring to trade. Bill, with access to the stores, found a solution to the dilemma.

He would take the boxes of tea one at a time to his fellows. They would have a brew-up, dry the tea leaves afterwards and pack the used leaves back in the boxes, which Bill would then return to their proper place in the store. After which they were traded for cigarettes. Everyone was happy.

One day, the Italians got a jump ahead. The British were forced to trade virgin tea for the cigarettes. Next day, the Italian camp commandant had his prisoners on parade and asked them sternly who had been messing about and ruining the new tea ration.

Good work, Bill.

Sunday tea with Mrs Y was pretty eccentric. Her name was Mrs Yashimoto. As far as I can piece together the story, she had gone out to Japan as a young missionary. There she met and fell in love with Mr Yashimoto, and married him. A rash and romantic thing to do – just before the USA and Britain declared war on Japan.

For the crime of marrying a foreign woman, Mr Yashimoto was interned. His wife somehow managed to escape and returned to England. She led a devout Christian life, pining all the while for her husband. Many looked down on her, since the Japanese – long before they started to shower little electronic goodies upon us – were hated at the time.