In Devon during the fifties the contractor was a large Exeter bookseller, and the terms of the contract allowed schools a certain freedom to buy from other sources. I say a certain freedom, but I really mean an uncertain freedom. It is obviously convenient to a teacher if, seeing exactly the book he wants in a shop, he can go in and buy it, rather than order it from the contractor, wait six months, learn that it is reprinting and finally receive it a year later at twice the price when he no longer needs it.
If the book is a net one – as it probably will be if it is seen in a bookshop – then as far as the school is concerned there is not even a discount to be lost. But the Contractor will be less happy, for he depends upon his net book sales to subsidize his non-net sales. That was the reason for leaving it all a little uncertain. Schools were not forbidden to buy their general books where they pleased, but equally they were not encouraged to. Some head teachers knew they could, others thought they couldn’t. And since practically no teacher knew the difference between ‘net’ and ‘non-net’, a rather vaguer term was used, thus increasing the uncertainty: schools were allowed to buy their ‘library books’ where they pleased. In those days only secondary schools had libraries; so this freedom didn’t really affect primary schools – not in the fifties, that is.
Then came 1960.
Thinking back those seventeen years I find myself thinking back still further, to the day in September, 1943, when I was ordered to take my bridging lorries to a certain map reference on the road to Salerno and report to an officer from 221 Field Company whom I would find there, I had had the same sort of order a few days previously and I had been away for as long as it took to get my lorries unloaded and the bridge built – a matter of hours. So away I went this time, excited and happy to be doing something, and leaving instructions with the cook to have a good hot meal waiting for us when we got back. . . . But we didn’t come back. It was not a bridge; it was the Great Advance that was to carry us through the ring of mountains and across the Plain of Naples to the banks of the Volturno. And here was I caught up in it, swept along with it; and although I did nothing very gallant or exciting or even very difficult, I could at least feel that in my Division I held a unique post. I was the Division’s one and only Bridging Officer, and bridges were going to be needed now as never before and as never again.
So when in the autumn of 1959 we were invited by the South Western Branch of the School Library Association to put on an exhibition of school library books at a Conference of Primary School teachers to be held at Dartington Hall the following May, I saw it as not more than just that. I never guessed, never realized until months afterwards what it really was: that I was lining up for another Great Advance, joining the Devonshire army of teachers, librarians, school inspectors and educationists who were to advance towards the New Education. Never mind whether my role was to be gallant, exciting or difficult: as in 1943 so in 1960 it was to be unique. I was the only bookseller in the convoy.
Why had they invited us? There were other booksellers in Devon. There was indeed the contractor. Dartington Hall was only twelve miles away, it is true: but that would have been only part of the reason, for the Conference was an important one, to be attended by teachers from all over Devon and indeed from Cornwall and Somerset. So I doubt if there had been any special feeling that the invitation ought to go to a local shop. . . . Perhaps already we had begun to make a name for ourselves outside our home town.
What sort of books did they want us to bring? I was no expert when it came to schools. At that time our children’s department occupied a single bookcase along one wall – the bookcase I had made nine years previously from the French poplar we had brought down with us from London. Mostly it contained story books about ponies, ballet dancers and adventurous children. Blyton and Biggies featured prominently. They talked about ‘information books’. Luckily I knew what they meant. These were something new and I had ventured to stock one or two. They were thin books, about ten inches high, and each dealt with a single subject: ‘travel by road’, ‘ports and harbours’, ‘coal mining’ – that sort of thing. Usually they came in a series, all looking more or less alike. I could think of three such series, but perhaps there were others. We had a letter printed and we sent it to eighty Sales Managers to find out.
The figure eighty sticks in my mind, but I cannot now recall how many replies we had or how many parcels of books were sent. We took them home in our recently acquired second-hand van (for we now lived on the edge of the town) unwrapped them and made piles all over the floor of our spare-room. Two teachers would be coming to vet them. We invited them to supper and after supper they set to work, sitting on the floor, reading, reading. . . . After the first hour each had made two little heaps, those books they liked, and those they didn’t; but the piles all round them seemed scarcely touched. During the next hour they went a little faster, not reading now, just glancing, but thousands of books still remained. And now we had to look at our watches for there was the last ferry to catch. Well, they had made a start; they had given us an idea of what they wanted. Perhaps we could carry on along those lines? Until May 28th, then. . . .
On May 29th I sat down with a piece of paper to work out our profit-and-loss. On the credit side were the books I had sold and the orders I had taken. I added them up and took 30% of the total: that was our profit. On the debit side was the cost of the wood I had bought to make the special stands I needed so that the books could be elegantly displayed, the cost of petrol, the cost of printing our eighty letters and the probable cost of returning the unwanted books to their publishers. Deduct the one from the other and I was left with a small credit balance. So financially it had paid off. Good.
I never bothered to do such sums again. If I counted my profit after Dartington in pounds, by the end of the year I was counting it in hundreds and soon after that in thousands. And if occasionally I travelled a hundred miles to sell a dozen books, I told myself that I owed it to Devon and to all those schools who, unsolicited, had now started sending me their orders. How many hundred mile journeys can one set against a school that takes two or three hundred pounds of ‘net’ books off one’s shelves? For this was how it became in the end.
Thus began the Big Advance towards the New Education; and I was in it, right up at the front. For me the Dartington Conference and all that followed from it forms one of the most important episodes in my life. Through it I got to know (and do business with) the Head Teachers of over sixty schools, primary and secondary, in all parts of Devon. Visiting these schools with my books I must have met and talked to many hundreds of other teachers. Meeting them, talking to them, seeing them in the presence of my books was to be conscious of a zeal that was almost fanatical. No revolutionaries bearing aloft the banner of their newfound faith could have matched the enthusiasm, the determination, the sense of comradeship, the devotion to their cause with which these teachers greeted the Revolution in Primary School Education and marched towards the El Dorado that it appeared to offer.
For it was a revolution, almost literally. And in the end I was to become not just one of the converted, but a preacher, finding pulpits open to me in school hall after school hall. For the New Education did not come as an edict from above but rather as a forest fire that is spread by the wind and sets light only to what is combustible. Here it was welcomed, there rejected. It was revolutionary in another sense too, turning old ideas inside out, upside down. Where once children sat in silent rows all working at the same task, now they moved about each working at different tasks. Where once they learned with tears now they learned with pleasure. Where once schools were inward-looking, isolating themselves from the outside world, now they looked outwards, a part of that world; high windows with a view only of the sky were replaced by low windows with a view of the neighbourhood; walls and fences were lowered. Subject after subject fell to the conqueror. The elements of physics, chemistry and mechanics, previously taught only as specialist subjects to older children, were now introduced to
infant schools. Arithmetic became the New Mathematics. Multiplication tables were replaced by coloured rods. Foreign languages were spoken, not written. Spelling and grammar took second place to poems and stories. History was how people lived, not dates of kings and Acts of Parliament. Geography, too, was how people lived, not exports and imports and principal rivers. Even religious education, though it put up a stiff resistance, eventually submitted and put on new clothes. And the life-blood that permeated all these subjects was the New Books.
No more did children in primary schools, sitting in their rows, turn obediently to page twenty-five of the well-worn textbook. Textbooks were out. Textbooks, unique among books, published by ‘educational publishers’, distributed by ‘school suppliers’, read only in schools, had no place in a school that was a part of its community. The books the children found in school must resemble as nearly as possible the books they were to find outside school. For if home and school were to be integrated what better place to start, what better link between the two, than the book that the child could read and read with pleasure in both places. Thus the ‘school library book’ was born, and born too was the school library book publisher and the school library bookseller. A faint aura of seriousness hung over all three, but the barriers were down. The school library book and the children’s book could sit side by side on the same shelf in the same shop and each would have a beneficial influence on the other.
What did I know about it all? What does a seller of books know about education? I would have known nothing if they hadn’t taken me and converted me and welcomed me as one of themselves, a fellow revolutionary, and then trusted me and sent me out, a missionary, to convert others.
They welcomed me because their Bible was the Book and the Book was mine. They needed a Bookseller to distribute their Bibles. And I was easily converted. How could I not be when I saw what it meant to them and to the children under them? Have you ever been surrounded by a playground-full of children and seen your heavy boxes of books moving across that playground like giant spiders, their great bodies carried on eight tottering, spindly legs?
‘Miss! He’s brought us some books. Miss! When can we have them? Oh, Miss!’
What did I know? What I saw, what I learned by talking to others, what I myself found in books. There were plenty of books being written at that time, books like Sybil Marshall’s An Experiment in Education. I bought them all, read them all, urged others to read them. How many copies of David Holbrook’s English for the Rejected did I force Secondary School librarians to buy?
Then there were the teachers. I never saw a class being taught; I never saw my books being used. But I talked to the teachers who used them. Earlier in this chapter I said that the way a bookseller judges the contents of a book is by enlisting the help of an expert. And so among my teachers I sought my experts: here the expert in mathematics, here the expert in I.T.A., here the expert in religious education, and so on. From each I learned which books were best and these I stocked and recommended with confidence to others.
Finally I read reviews, two publications being particularly helpful: there was the School Library Association’s own quarterly publication, The School Librarian, which contained articles by teachers on the use of books as well as hundreds of individual book reviews; and then there was that extraordinary one-man-band of an almost-monthly, Margery Fisher’s Growing Point.
But I couldn’t have done any of this if I hadn’t had three pieces of good fortune.
The first lay in the terms of the Devon contract which (as I have already said) allowed schools to buy their library books where they pleased. In the past this freedom was more in the nature of a door left unlocked than one thrown open and signposted, and not many-schools had bothered to use it, or even knew of its existence. However, it was a freedom most strongly championed and defended by the School Library Association; and now that Primary Schools were being urged to set up their own libraries, it had become one that mattered. For the question head teachers were asking was: ‘Where do we find these books?’ They could go to the contractor, of course. They could look through catalogues and send him an order. Or perhaps they could even visit Exeter to see what he had in stock. But if there was a better, easier way. . . . There was. ‘Get in touch with the Harbour Bookshop’ they were told.
They did, and they came to us in such numbers that the door was now left wide open, and even the County’s advisers and inspectors were directing teachers towards it. Indeed the pressure soon became so great that yet another door had to be opened. This allowed Secondary Schools freedom to buy all their books where they pleased. An immense volume of school business came our way and coping with it would have been quite impossible but for our second piece of good fortune.
At the back of our shop, part of the building but not belonging to us, were two dark, damp, dilapidated flats. Even thus qualified, the word ‘flats’ seems too good for them conjuring up the wrong sort of picture altogether. To begin with they weren’t flat: they were each on two floors. They were like two bits of a jigsaw puzzle: try and work out the shape of each one separately and you were at once lost in an incomprehensible jumble of rooms, passages and staircases. But fitted together and added to the bookshop they made a neat rectangular whole. The flat nearer to us seemed at times exceedingly near. From outside you could see a window the bottom half of which was occupied by books, the top half by a baby, and publisher’s representatives could be excused for thinking that both belonged to us and for asking after the health of the latter. While from inside such alarming sounds would penetrate from the other side of the thin partition wall that Lesley and I found ourselves asking even more anxiously after the baby’s health. Our second piece of good fortune, then, (and the baby’s too) came when this flat was officially condemned and the two of them were offered to us for £1000. This happened in the summer of 1960, a perfect bit of timing.
The uncondemned flat remained occupied and was frankly a liability. But the condemned one gave us, when a hole had been knocked through to it, a large room at the back of the shop where books could be stored, and, on the first floor and when another hole had been made, an office, a small room in which the last of our picture framing was done, and – most important of all – a large, fairly pleasant, not too dark room which we at once fitted out with shelves and which became our ‘schoolroom’. It was here that we housed our new school-library-type books. Here that we sorted out our school orders. Here that (piloted by someone who knew the way or they would have got hopelessly lost) teachers came to look and to choose. And it was here that Joyce was queen.
Joyce was our third piece of good fortune. Too good for a mere paragraph she must have her own chapter. All I will say now is that she blended the very best of amateurism with the very best of professionalism and gave schools a service that I’ll bet they had never seen before and will probably never see again. With Joyce firmly in charge in the shop it was possible for Lesley and me to spend part of our time away. For if schools didn’t always find it easy to come to us we would have to go to them.
And this is what we did.
All through term the calls came in, and – depending on the size of the school, the subjects wanted and how much money I guessed they were likely to spend – suitable books were assembled, listed, packed and delivered on approval. They kept what they liked and I called back for the remainder the following week. Or perhaps a head teacher might prefer a different arrangement, and we might put on a one-day exhibition, loading dozens of boxes onto the van, Lesley coming too, and then we could enjoy together a happy day in a distant part of Devon. Many of these trips became annual events: Tavistock in May, Hatherleigh in May, Bampton in July: these were our favourites.
But whatever arrangement a school preferred, the important thing was that the teachers were seeing the actual books, not just a catalogue description of them; they were choosing from an already carefully chosen assortment; and finally there was no ordering to be done, no months of waiting. Having made their choi
ce, they kept them.
At first we let the books speak for themselves: we were no more than their escorts. But later I was often invited to say something about them. Shoved into the drawer where I keep my socks are the notes I typed for the many talks I gave. They still survive, folded and a little crumpled. I was never told what to say, and since I never liked to say exactly the same thing twice, they were always a little different. In any case they varied with the audience I was addressing, varied, too, as the years went by and there were new things to be said. To a group of French teachers visiting Devon the subject was the history of children’s books in England. To a weekend course for playgroup teachers it was story-telling. At a course for teachers of backward readers I ventured my own theories on the subject. At a conference of school librarians I talked about book selection. To parents I talked about books in school and books at home.
Mostly my talks were to parents at ‘parent-teacher’ meetings held in a classroom after school was over. We spread out our books on desks and tables. I talked about them, and then the parents would look and ask and buy. Often these visits were to tiny, two-teacher village schools in remote parts of Devon, and these we enjoyed most of all. The smaller and more distant, the better; for there we would find the warmest welcome and the largest audience, and there we would sell the most books. And often, not wanting a long, dark journey home after it was over, we would stay the night, making a leisurely return the following morning.
The Path Through the Trees Page 20
