December 4 1959
Dear Mrs Green,
I am in receipt of a letter from John Drury & Co, representing their client Mrs Violet Gamart of The Stead, to the effect that your current window display is attracting so much undesirable attention from potential and actual customers that it is providing a temporary obstruction unreasonable in quantum and duration to the use of the highway, and that his client intends to establish a particular injury to herself in that it is necessary that she, as a Justice of the Peace and Chairwoman of numerous committees (list enclosed herewith) has to carry out her shopping expeditiously. In addition, the regular users of your lending library, who, you must remember, are legally in the position of invitees, have found themselves inconvenienced and in some cases been crowded or jostled and in other instances referred to by strangers to the district as old dears, old timers, old hens, and even old boilers. The civil action, which remains independent of course of any future police action to abate the said nuisance, might result in the award of considerable damages against us.
Yours faithfully,
Thomas Thornton,
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.
December 5 1959
Dear Mr Thornton,
You have been my solicitor now for a number of years, and I understand ‘acting for me’ to mean ‘acting energetically on my behalf’. Have you been to see the window display for yourself? We are very busy indeed on the sales side at the moment, but if you could manage the 200 yards down the road you might call into the shop and tell me what you think of it.
Yours sincerely,
Florence Green.
December 5 1959
Dear Mrs Green,
In reply to your letter of 5 December, which rather surprised me by its tone, I have endeavoured on two separate occasions to approach your front window, but found it impossible. Customers appear to be coming from as far away as Flintmarket. I think that we shall have to grant that the obstruction is unreasonable, at least as regards quantum. As to your other remarks, I would advise that it would be as well for you, as well as for myself, to keep a careful record of what has passed between us.
Yours faithfully,
Thomas Thornton,
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.
December 6 1959
Dear Mr Thornton,
What do you advise, then?
Yours sincerely,
Florence Green.
December 8 1959
Dear Mrs Green,
In reply to your letter of 6 December, I think we ought to abate the obstruction, by which I mean stopping the general public from assembling in the narrowest part of the High Street, before any question of an indictment arises, and I also think we should cease to offer for sale the complained-of and unduly sensational novel by V. Nabokov. We cannot cite Herring v. Metropolitan Board of Works 1863 in this instance as the crowd has not assembled as the result of famine or of a shortage of necessary commodities.
Yours faithfully,
Thomas Thornton,
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.
Dear Mr Thornton,
A good book is the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.
Yours sincerely,
Florence Green.
December 10 1959
To: Mrs Florence Green
Dear Madam,
I can only repeat my former advice, and I may add that in my opinion, although this is a personal matter and therefore outside my terms of reference, you would do well to make a formal apology to Mrs Gamart.
Yours faithfully,
Thomas Thornton,
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.
December 11 1959
Dear Mr Thornton,
Coward!
Yours sincerely,
Florence Green.
If Florence was courageous, it was in quite a different way from, for example, General Gamart, who had behaved exactly the same when he was under fire as when he wasn’t, or from Mr Brundish, who defied the world by refusing to admit it to his earth. Her courage, after all, was only a determination to survive. The police, however, did not prosecute, or even consider doing so, and after Drury had advised Mrs Gamart that there was nothing like enough evidence to proceed on, the complaint was dropped. The crowd grew manageable, the shop made £82 10s. 6d. profit in the first week of December on Lolita alone, and the new customers came back to buy the Christmas orders and the calendars. For the first time in her life, Florence had the alarming sensation of prosperity.
She might have felt less secure if she had reviewed the state of her alliances. Jessie Welford and the watercolour artist, who by now was a permanent lodger at Rhoda’s, were hostile. Christine’s comment, that she’d as soon go to bed with a toad as with that Mr Gill, and she was surprised he didn’t give Miss Welford warts, was quite irrelevant; the fact was that the two made front together. Not one of the throng in the High Street had come into the dressmaker’s, still less bought a watercolour. Nor had they looked at the wet fish offered by Mr Deben. All the tradespeople were now either slightly or emphatically hostile to the Old House Bookshop. It was decided not to ask her to join the Inner Wheel of the Hardborough and District Rotary Club.
As Christmas approached, she grew reckless. She took her affairs out of Mr Thornton’s wavering hands and entrusted them to a firm of solicitors in Flintmarket. Through the new firm she contracted with Wilkins, who undertook building as well as plumbing, to pull down the damp oyster warehouse – work, it must be admitted, which went ahead rather slowly. She could decide later what to do with the site. Then, to make room for the new stock, she turned out, on an impulse, the mouldering piles of display material left by the publishers’ salesmen. A life-size cardboard Stalin and Roosevelt and an even larger Winston Churchill, an advancing Nazi tank to be assembled in three pieces and glued lightly on the dotted line, Stan Matthews and his football to be suspended from the ceiling with the string provided, six-foot cards of footsteps stained with blood, a horse with moving eyeballs jumping a fence, easily worked with a torch battery, menacing photographs of Somerset Maugham and Wilfred Pickles. All out, all to be given to Christine, who wanted them for the Christmas Fancy Dress Parade.
This was an event organized by local charities. ‘I’m obliged to you for these, Mrs Green,’ Christine said. ‘Otherwise I’d have fared to go attired as an Omo packet.’ The detergent firms were prepared to send quantities of free material, as were the Daily Herald and the Daily Mirror. But everyone in Hardborough was sick of these disguises. Florence wondered why the young girl didn’t want to go dressed as something pretty, perhaps as a Pierrette. Out of the unpromising materials, however, Christine sewed and glued together an odd but striking costume – Good-bye, 1959. One of the Lolita jackets provided a last touch, and Florence, whose feet were almost as small as her assistant’s, lent a pair of shoes. They were crocodile courts, the buckles also covered with crocodile. Christine, who had never seen them before, although she had had a good poke round upstairs, wondered if they were by Christian Dior.
‘You know that Dior met a gipsy who told him he’d have ten years of good fortune and then meet his death,’ she said. Florence felt she could hardly afford to speak lightly of the supernatural.
‘That’d be a French gipsy, of course,’ said Christine consolingly, slopping about in the crocodile courts.
The patroness of the Fancy Dress Parade was Mrs Gamart, from The Stead. The judge, in deference to his connection with the BBC, and therefore with the Arts, was Milo North, who protested amiably that he should never have been asked, as he tried to avoid definite judgments on every occasion. His remarks were greeted with roars of laughter. The Parade was held in the Coronation Hall, never quite completed as Hardborough had intended, so that the roof was still of corrugated iron. The rain pounded down, only quietening as it turned to drizzle or sleet. Christine Gipping, wheeling Melody in a pram decorated with barbed wire, which had been sent down to publicize Escape or Die, was an easy winner of the most original costume. Discussion on the point was hardly possible.
The Nativity Play, which followed a week later, was on a Saturday afternoon, when the shop was too busy with the Christmas trade for Florence to take time off. She heard about the performance, however, from Wally and Raven, who dropped in, and Mrs Traill, who had come to see about her orders for next term.
The critical reception of the play had been mixed. Too much realism, perhaps, had been attempted when Raven had brought a small flock of sheep off the marshes on to the stage. On the other hand, no one had forgotten their parts, and Christine’s dancing had been the success of the evening. As a result of her success in the Fancy Dress she had been awarded the coveted part of Salome, which meant that she was entitled to appear in her eldest sister’s bikini.
‘She had to dance, to get the head of John the Baptist,’ Wally explained.
‘What music did you have?’ asked Florence.
‘That was a Lonnie Donegan recording, Putting on the Agony, Putting on the Style. I don’t know that you cared for it very much, Mrs Traill.’
Mrs Traill replied that after many years at the Primary she had become accustomed to everything. ‘Mrs Gamart, I’m afraid, didn’t look as though she approved.’
‘If she didn’t, there was nothing she could do about it,’ Raven said. ‘She was powerless.’ He exuded a warm glow of well-being, having had one or two at the Anchor on the way over.
Florence was still anxious about Christine’s prospects in the eleven plus. ‘She is such a good little assistant, I can’t help feeling that after she’s been through grammar school she might make it her career. She has the ability to classify, and that can’t be taught.’
The glance that flashed through Mrs Traill’s spectacles suggested that everything could be taught. Nevertheless, a sense of responsibility weighed on Florence. She felt she ought to have done more. Granted that the child didn’t like reading, with the exception of Bunty, or being read to, mightn’t there be other opportunities? She kept Wally back after the others had gone and said that she had been interested to hear about the play, but had he or his friends or Christine ever been to a real theatre? They might go over to the Maddermarket, at Norwich, if something good came on.
‘We’ve none of us ever been there,’ Wally replied doubtfully, ‘but we did go over from the school to Flintmarket last year, to see a travelling company. That was quite interesting, to see how they fixed up the amplification.’
‘What play did they put on?’ asked Florence.
‘The day we went it was Hansel and Gretel. There’s singing in it. They didn’t do it all – they did the bit where the boy and girl lie down and get fresh together, and the angels come in and cover them with leaves.’
‘You didn’t understand the play, Wally. Hansel and Gretel are brother and sister.’
‘That doesn’t make it any different, Mrs Green.’
January, as always, brought its one day when people said that it felt like spring. The sky was a patched and ragged blue, and the marsh, with its thousand weeds and grasses, breathed a faint odour of resurrection.
Florence went for her walk in a direction she usually avoided, perhaps not deliberately, but certainly she had not been that way for a long time. Turning her back on the estuary of the Laze, she walked over the headland, northwards. A notice on a wired-up gate read PRIVATE: FARM LAND. She knew that the path was a right of way, climbed over, and went on. Presently it took a sharp turn to the sea, which idled on its stony beach, forty feet below. The turf was as springy as fine green hair. Running to the cliff’s edge could be seen the ghost of an old service road, and on each side of it were ruins, ruins of bungalows and more ambitious small villas. A whole estate had been built there five years ago without any calculation of the sea’s erosion. Before anyone had come to live there the sandy cliff had given way and the houses had begun to totter and slide. Some of the FOR SALE FREEHOLD notices were still in place. One of the smaller villas was left right on the verge. Half the foundations and the front wall were gone, while the sitting-room, exposed to all the birds of the air, flapped its last shreds of wallpaper over the void.
For ten minutes or so – since it felt like spring – Florence sat on an abandoned front doorstep, laid with ornamental tiles. The North Sea emitted a brutal salt smell, at once clean and rotten. The tide was running out fast, pausing at the submerged rocks and spreading into yellowish foam, as though deliberating what to throw up next or leave behind, how many wrecks of ships and men, how many plastic bottles. It annoyed her that she could not remember exactly, although she had been told often enough, how much of the coast was eroded every year. Wally would supply the information immediately. Churches with peals of bells were under those waves, as well as the outskirts of a speculative building estate. Historians dismissed the legend, pointing out that there would have been plenty of time to save the bells, but perhaps they didn’t know Hardborough. How many years had they left the Old House, when everyone knew it was falling to pieces?
Milo and Kattie – someone young, in any case, with bright red tights, so it could hardly be anyone else – were walking down the cliff path. When they got nearer, Florence could see that Kattie looked as though she had been crying, so the outing could hardly have been a success.
‘Why are you sitting on a doorstep, Florence?’ Milo asked.
‘I don’t know why I go out for walks at all. Walks are for the retired, and I’m going to go on working.’
‘Is there room on your step for me to sit down?’ Kattie asked. She was behaving nicely, trying to please and conciliate. Either she wanted Milo to see how readily she could charm other people, or she wanted to show him how kind she could be to a dull middle-aged woman, simply because Milo seemed to know her. Whichever it was, Florence felt deeply sympathetic. She made room on the step at once and Kattie sat down neatly, pulling her short skirt down over her long red legs.
‘Kattie wouldn’t believe that there were ruins in Hardborough, so I brought her to see,’ said Milo, looking down at both of them, and then at the pitiful houses. ‘They were all ready to move into, weren’t they? I wonder if the water’s still connected.’ He stepped over a pile of masonry into the remains of a kitchenette, and tried the taps. Rusty water, the colour of blood, gushed out. ‘Kattie could live here perfectly well. She keeps saying she doesn’t like our place.’
Florence, wishing to change the subject, asked Kattie about her work at the BBC. It was rather disappointing to find that she had nothing to do with television but checked the expenses sheets for the Recorded Programmes Department, which she referred to as RPD. Surely that couldn’t be rewarding work for this intelligent-looking girl.
‘We’ve been to lunch with Violet Gamart,’ said Milo, balancing easily on the short grass at the very edge of the cliff. ‘It was a chance for her not to disapprove of us.’
‘Why can’t you ever say anything agreeable about anybody?’ Florence asked. ‘Does she still want you to run, or look as though you’re running, an Arts Centre in Hardborough?’
‘That’s a seasonal matter with her. It reaches a serious crisis every summer, when Glyndebourne and the Aldeburgh Festival get into the news. Now it’s January. The pulse is low.’
‘Mrs Gamart was very kind,’ said Kattie, hugging herself rather as Christine sometimes did.
‘I don’t like kind people, except for Florence.’
‘That doesn’t impress me,’ said Florence. ‘You appear to me to work less and less. You must remember that the BBC is a Corporation, and that your salary is ultimately met out of public funds.’
‘That’s Kattie’s business,’ Milo replied. ‘She does my expense sheets. We’ll walk back with you.’
‘Thank you, I’ll stay here for a little longer.’
‘Please come with us,’ said Kattie. She appeared to be racking her brains. ‘Won’t you tell me about how you manage to wrap up the books? I’m always so hopeless with paper and string.’
Florence always used paper bags, and never remembered to have seen Kattie in the shop at all, but she agreed to accompany them back to Hardborough. Kattie kept picking little bits of plants and asking her deferentially what they were. Florence had to tell her that she wasn’t sure of any of them, except thyme and plantains, until the flowers began to show, and that wouldn’t be for a couple of months.
One day, when the top class of the Primary School were having their free activity, which in cold weather largely meant sitting at their desks and amiably exchanging whatever dirty words they had learned lately, a stranger appeared at the door.
‘You needn’t rise from your seats, children. I’m the Inspector.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said the head boy.
Mrs Traill, who had been checking the attendance register, came back to the classroom. ‘I don’t think I know you,’ she said.
‘Mrs Traill? My name is Sheppard. Perhaps you’d care to glance at my certificate of appointment from the Education Authority, which entitles me, under the Shops Act of 1950, to enter any school in which I have reasonable cause to believe that children employed in any capacity in a shop are at present being educated.’
‘Employed!’ cried Mrs Traill. ‘I daresay they’d like to be employed, but outside of family business and newspaper rounds, I’d like you to tell me what there is for them. You might like to try again at potato-lifting time. I don’t remember your ever coming here before, by the way.’
‘Due to staff shortages, our visits have not been as regular as we should like.’
‘Who suggested that you should come here this time?’ the headmistress asked. Receiving no answer, she added. ‘There’s only Christine Gipping who works regularly after school.’
‘At what address?’
‘The Old House Bookshop. Stand up, Christine.’
The Inspector checked his notebook. ‘As I expect you’re aware, I have the right to examine this girl as I think fit in respect to matters under the Shops Act.’
A storm of whistling broke out from the class.
‘I’ve brought a lady colleague with me,’ said the Inspector grimly. ‘She’s just outside, checking the car’s properly locked.’
‘There won’t be criminal interference, then,’ the head boy said placidly.
Christine was unperturbed. She followed the female inspector, who hurried in, with explanatory gestures, from the yard, into the small room behind the piano where the dinner money was counted.
To: Mrs Florence Green, The Old House Bookshop
The Education Authority’s Inspectors have examined Christine Gipping and have required her to sign a declaration of truth of the matters respecting which she was examined. Although there is no suggestion of irregularity in her school attendance, it appears that consequent to the arrival of a best-selling book she worked more than 44 hours in your establishment during one week of her holidays. Furthermore her health safety and welfare are at risk in your premises which are haunted in an objectionable manner. I quote from a deposition by Christine Gipping to the effect that ‘the rapper doesn’t come on so loud now, but we can’t get rid of him altogether’. I am advised that under the provisions of the Act the supernatural would be classed with bacon-slicers and other machinery through which young persons must not be exposed to the risk of injury.
From: Mrs Florence Green
The Shop Acts which you quote only apply to young persons between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Christine Gipping is just eleven, or what would she be doing in the Primary?
To: Mrs Florence Gipping, The Old House Bookshop
If Christine Gipping is, as you say, 11 years of age she is not permitted by law to serve in any retail business except a stall or moveable structure consisting of a board supported by trestles which is dismantled at the end of the day.
From: Mrs Florence Green
There is no room on the pavement of Hardborough High Street for boards supported by trestles to be dismantled at the end of the day. Christine, like a large proportion of the Primary School population of Suffolk, is, as you very well know, ‘helping out’. She will be taking her 11+ in July and I expect her to proceed to Flintmarket Grammar School, when she will have no time for odd jobs after school.
No more was heard from the Authority’s inspectors, and this complaint, wherever it had originated, died away like the earlier ones into silence. A brief note of congratulation came round from Mr Brundish. How could he have heard about it? He recalled that in his grandfather’s day the Inspector had always come round the schools with a ferret in his pocket, ready to be of use in getting rid of the rats.
But the Old House Bookshop, like a patient whose crisis is over, but who cannot regain strength, showed less encouraging returns. This was to be expected in the months after Christmas. There would be more capital in hand after the warehouse was demolished and she could sell the site. Wilkins was being very slow, however. He had never been a speedy man, and of course the cold weather was against him. These old places looked as though they’d come down at a touch, but they could be stubborn. Florence was obliged to repeat this to the bank manager, who had asked her to step in for a chat, and had then asked her if she had noted how very little working capital she had at present.
‘You are converting the oyster warehouse from a fixed into a current asset?’
‘It isn’t either at the moment,’ Florence replied. ‘Wilkins says the mortar’s harder than the flint.’
Mr Keble observed that it was not a very favourable moment, perhaps, for selling a small building site which had always been known to be waterlogged. Florence didn’t recall his having mentioned this when her loan had first been discussed.
‘Rather less activity, I think, in your business at the moment? Perhaps it’s just as well. At one point it seemed as though you were going to jolt us out of our old ways altogether. But all small businesses have their ups and downs. That’s another thing you find easier to grasp in a position like mine, where you can take the broader view.’
Later that spring, Mrs Gamart’s nephew, the member for the Longwash Division, a brilliant, successful, and stupid young man, got his Private Bill through its first and second reading. It was an admirable bill from the point of view of his career. The provisions were acceptable to all parties – humanitarian, democratic, a contribution to the growing problem of leisure, and unlikely ever to be put into practice. Referred to as the Access to Places of Educational Value and Interest Bill, it empowered local councils to purchase compulsorily, and subject to agreed compensation, any buildings wholly or partly erected before 1549 and not used for residential purposes, provided there was no building of similar date on public show in the area. The buildings acquired were to be used for the cultural recreation of the public. Florence noticed a small paragraph about this in The Times, but knew that it could not affect her. Neither Hardborough nor Flintmarket councils had money for projects of any kind, and in any case, the Old House was in use for ‘residential purposes’ – she was still living there, although the words deflected her thoughts to the problems of upkeep. The winter had taken a large number of pegged tiles off the roof of the Old House, and a patch of damp was spreading across the bedroom ceiling, inch by inch, just as the sea was eating away the coast. There was more damp in the stock cupboard underneath the staircase. But it was the home of her books and herself, and they would remain there together.
The subject of the Bill had not been suggested to her nephew by Mrs Gamart, although she was gratified when he told her, over lunch at the House, that the idea had come to him at that party of hers last spring. As a source of energy in a place like Hardborough which needed so little, an energy, too, which was often expended in complaints, she was bound to create a widening circle of after-effects which went far beyond the original impulse. Whenever she realized this she was pleased, both for herself and for the sake of others, because she always acted in the way she felt to be right. She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.
She smiled at her nephew over the lunch table, and said that she would not have the fish. ‘I’m afraid living in Hardborough spoils you for fish anywhere else,’ she said. ‘You get it so fresh down there.’ She was a very charming woman, well-preserved too, and had come up to London that day to press for some charitable scheme, nothing at all to do with the Old House Bookshop. Her nephew could not quite call to mind what it was, but he would be reminded.