That was the first step, then: to make room for the new books, to find them and to stock them. The second step was to read them and recommend them. They were good all right; but they were most certainly not easy to sell. We enjoyed reading them immensely, but so often were left wondering what sort of child would also enjoy them. Often we felt that they were written not so much for children as about children. Another difficulty – these new writers certainly weren’t making things easy for us – was that a success was seldom followed by a sequel to the same pattern. Not only was the author’s next book often quite different, it was often addressed to a child of a different age. So each book had to be treated on its own individual merits. It was hard work and one couldn’t blame the school librarian (who had plenty of other hard work to do) if he bought only non-fiction, leaving it to the County Library to send down on loan boxes of assorted fiction. Yet this seemed to me quite fatal. For it meant that the librarian didn’t know what he was getting, didn’t read what he got, couldn’t recommend to a child what he should try, and so the child might well pick up something quite beyond him – and perhaps be put off reading for life. . . .
In short, if anyone ever thought that selling books was merely wrapping them up and handing them over and putting the money in the till, no one could ever think this of selling children’s fiction in the sixties.
So when the elderly lady doctor came in and asked me to recommend a book for a seven year old god-child, and when, after looking at the three or four books I had picked out for her (none of which, naturally, meant anything to her), she thanked me and said she would leave it for today and ask Mrs Robinson who had a seven year old child of her own what he was reading and then perhaps I could order a copy, what I said was:
‘Very well, Dr B., and when I have a pain I too will go to Mrs Robinson for advice and no doubt you will be good enough to write me a prescription for whatever it is she recommends.’
No. I lie. That is what I ought to have said.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS
In 1972 we celebrated our twenty first birthday. We did it in style, for it was not just an important landmark in our bookselling lives. In one sense it was the finishing post. The Harbour Bookshop would continue, but my life as a bookseller was coming to an end.
In our Christmas catalogue that year we looked back and gave thanks, as was proper, to all those books we had sold with such pleasure – and, yes, with such profit – over those years.
First: three books that helped us right from the start. Two of them of local interest, just out and which we continued to sell happily for a number of years, first at full price, later reduced: Ruth Manning-Sanders’ The River Dart and Percy Russell’s Dartmouth. The third, a national bestseller whose birthday virtually coincided with our own: Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea.
Then two more national bestsellers of our youth, two books that gave us immense pleasure in the reading and so a double pleasure in the selling: Laurens van der Post’s Venture To The Interior and John Hunt’s Ascent of Everest.
Next, two more books of exploration, but spiritual rather than geographical. They may seem odd partners at first sight, but we have always felt they had much in common: John Robinson’s Honest to God and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – both deeply serious, both tilting against the establishment, both (for better or for worse) opening the flood gates of pent-up feeling.
Then a miscellaneous collection of books with this in common: that their authors kindly helped us make a success of them by putting in a personal appearance and in most cases, too, a personal word, on their behalf for our benefit. Stanley Smith’s The Wind Calls the Tune, Peter Churchill’s Of Their Own Choice, Brian Fawcett’s Exploration Fawcett, Elephant Bill’s Bandoola, Gerald Durrell’s Bafut Beagles, Robin Knox Johnson’s A World of my Own and Nicolette Milnes-Walker’s When I Put Out to Sea. How many of our customers can boast signed copies of all seven?
Then The New English Bible. And would you have been wiser than we were in the months before publication and guessed that the version with the Apocrypha would outsell the version without by somewhere around ten to one?
Then W. Keble Martin’s The Concise British Flora, the book that so many publishers turned down before Michael Joseph made it the bestseller of bestsellers. Readily identifiable by us, even if described as ‘that book by the clergyman’ or ‘that book that the Duke of Edinburgh . . .’ even, on occasion, merely as ‘that book’.
Then two books that television (not always our rival) turned into winners: John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation.
Finally a book that sold well everywhere but especially here: Nevil Shute’s Most Secret. Six shillings in hardcover in 1951. Six shillings in paperback today. Of special interest, of course, not only because the story has a local setting but because we can proudly claim Nevil Shute Norway (to give him his real name) as a Dartmouth author.
Where does one stop? There are still a dozen more titles we have listed, and dozens and dozens we could well add. Most of them fairly obvious and unexciting – books about Devon, about the sea, certain children’s classics. . . . So let us end by thanking that vast army of books, tens of thousands of them, of which we have sold only one solitary copy. Add them together and it is they rather than their more popular companions, that have kept us in business selling books here in Dartmouth.
There are two sorts of bookseller (this is my theory): the male and the female. The male bookseller is concerned with the territory over which he operates, defending it, enlarging it. It is the male bookseller who wants to expand his business, the male bookseller who opens new branches. The female bookseller, on the other hand, is concerned with her shop, furnishing it, making it attractive, making it not the biggest but the best shop in the area.
I am a female bookseller. Once, for about a week, I did contemplate the idea of a branch in Torquay, then wisely abandoned it. My work with schools took me to far away places, it is true. But it didn’t matter too much when it began to come to an end. I was not altogether unhappy to be back home again. There was plenty to do. The condemned flat had given us the space we needed, but it still had to be used in the best possible way. With the money that was coming in and with the realization that the sun would not shine for ever, came both the opportunity and the necessity for getting our schoolroom moved downstairs and united with our children’s department. It was a fearful task. A wall had to be removed, another had to be taken down and rebuilt and a third had to have a large opening cut in it. A rotting wooden floor had to be replaced by a concrete one and eventually carpeted. A crumbling ceiling had to be pulled down and replastered. Finally came shelves and fittings, some bought, but many of them designed and made by myself. That gave us our children’s room, and we were very proud of it. Then came new shelves, new lighting, new heating and new flooring in the rest of the shop. There was no end to it, no end to the improvements one could make. . . . And finally, of course, there was all that lost business to be replaced. Oh, yes, there was plenty to do. . . .
The Harbour Bookshop is very much our home – not just a machine for making money. It is old and rambling, awkward in many ways, especially when heavy parcels have to be carried. But it has a friendly feel, a personality of its own. I like it, I wouldn’t want it different. I wouldn’t want a modern shop with modern fittings and an electronic till. I like just being in it, especially in the evening when we are closed and it is empty. I like making things for it. All this is part of the pleasure of being a bookseller. Other shops may have grown bigger, but I don’t envy them. I don’t feel jealous. I would only feel jealous if I were told they were also better.
To be a good bookseller you need three things: you need a goal (or a succession of goals) to aim for; you need the spur of necessity; and you need all your working hours. After twenty one years I was about to lose all three.
It seemed that I had done as a bookseller all the things I had aimed to do, all the things I could find to do. There wa
s no other goal in sight.
For twenty-one years the Harbour Bookshop had been our sole source of income. We had proved to ourselves that we could do it: that we could survive as booksellers here in Dartmouth. In 1971 my mother died. From now on a part of my father’s royalties would be coming to me. So the spur had gone.
For seventeen years Clare had been at school. They had taught her a lot of things in that time, though not as much as some children learn. But they had not taught her how to walk. School was now finished. Clare would be living at home, and I would be helping to look after her. So I could no longer be a full-time bookseller.
So it was time to leave my grassy plain. I had found what I had wanted to find. I had done what I had wanted to do. The cloud hung its curtain across the mountains. It was time to go.
ONE MAN’S DREAM
In 1966 a half page advertisement had appeared in The Daily Telegraph (and doubtless in other papers). It was headed ‘The Olearchs’ and underneath was a large photograph of Roy Edwin McCoskery of the Shell-Mex and BP Group. Below that we were told that Mr McCoskery was Area Manager (Consumer Markets Division) with a territory covering Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Northamptonshire embracing Birmingham and the Black Country and that he watched over the supply of petroleum in its various forms to a wide variety of consumers including farmers, ironmongers, workshops, offices and homes. We learned something of his early life and of his career with Shell-Mex. We learned that now, at the age of 44, after 11 years with the firm and four promotions, he was beginning to think about retirement and
dreams (as his wife would wish) of a bookshop on the quay at Dartmouth. Men of action always dream of sloth. Ah, well, dreams (like boyhood ambitions) don’t affect a man at work.
Very far be it from me to discourage Mr McCoskery from coming to live in Dartmouth when he leaves Shell-Mex. Many people come here to retire and are very happy here. But I wouldn’t like him – or indeed anyone – to think that running a bookshop, even in a sleepy little place like this, is a suitable retirement job for the slothful.
In any case he would be having the Harbour Bookshop to compete with.
8. Friends and Helpers
We are sometimes asked: ‘How do you manage about holidays? Can you ever get away?’ To which we reply: ‘Oh, but we have staff.’
Even in our very early days, when we had no staff, the problem was not so much leaving the books as leaving the cat; and this problem remains – though ‘cat’ has now become ‘cats’.
In our first year the answer lay in a conveniently cat-loving aunt.
We had the idea that we might find a ‘locum’ for the bookshop through the Booksellers Association – a married couple like us, perhaps, who were contemplating opening their own shop and wanted a little preliminary experience and advice. We would put them up in our spare bedroom, spend a fortnight with them explaining how everything worked, then leave them on their own. We suggested this to the Association and they recommended John Martin. We exchanged letters and he seemed ideal, but as he was unmarried he solved only half our problem. So, a little fearfully, we mentioned the cat; and to our great relief he said that was quite all right. He would bring his Aunt Audrey with him.
As we had only one spare bedroom Aunt Audrey’s arrival had to be delayed until we were on the point of leaving, and this meant that John had to have lessons on cats as well as on books. We had to take him out at night, just before bedtime, and teach him the particular squeak to which Hodge, who usually spent the evening with friends, would respond. We had to show him the yards, building sites and so on where the friends would meet, and instruct him in the various lures that could be used if Hodge was in no hurry to return. Happily he enjoyed this side of his work as much as the other. Perhaps today one might hesitate to ask a young man to go squeaking through the streets at 11 o’clock at night. But in those days the town was quieter. Indeed if one heard anything at all at that late hour it was probably the miscellaneous warblings and croonings of other cat owners engaged on the same business.
Hodge, Aunt Audrey, John, the books and our customers all got on excellently together. Did we feel that his canvas shoes and flowery open-necked shirt were perhaps a trifle too informal? But it was a failing in the right direction; better far than to have someone arriving with a business suit packed in his luggage, expecting to find a cash register rather than a biscuit tin for putting the money in, and calling everyone ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’ in a solemn and respectful manner. For ours has never been that sort of shop. And John in 1952, the first of our many helpers (and the first of sixteen whose names began with a ‘J’) set a standard which others almost without exception have been happy to follow.
Goolie joined us in 1956, as fond of cats as she was of books and so delighted to look after both. By then we had moved to a house with a garden at the top of the town. The kitchen window was left permanently open, and Hodge’s comings and goings were no longer a problem. All he needed, apart from food, was a bit of company in the evenings, and this she was happy to provide.
Her real name was Eleanor Guglielmo, but hardly anyone knew her as Eleanor and few ventured on a surname that looked as if it might sound like the last of the bath water running out. So she called herself Miss Goole and most of her friends knew her as Goolie. This left the rest of the world even more baffled, and to them she was variously ‘Miss Goolie’, ‘Miss Gold’, ‘Miss Gooleemo’ or ‘Miss Jilliamo’. She had spent her working life as private secretary to Sir Ian Fraser, meeting, getting to know, helping and for ever after keeping in touch with the many hundreds of blinded ex-service men who passed through St Dunstan’s. On her retirement she bought a cottage on the beach at Torcross, arriving in Devon shortly after us.
Many people, after an active, urban, sociable, working life, and remembering carefree holidays, look for their dream cottage in South Devon. But day after rainy day for month after wintry month with nothing to do and no one to do it with is very different from summer fortnights when all one wanted was to relax. So not everyone who seeks it finds contentment here; still fewer can live happily in an isolated cottage; and very few indeed after forty years of strenuous work enjoy being both isolated and alone. Goolie was a rare exception. She was immensely sociable; she loved people; there was hardly a town in England that didn’t contain a St Dunstaner with whom she continued to correspond; she was an immense letter writer and an immense talker. Yet even after her retirement her ideal of a holiday was still a wild and lonely sea coast – Sark, it might be, or the Orkneys. No matter, then, if the winter gales sent the waves beating against her walls, flinging stones at her windows and over her roof, dumping great loads of shingle on her flower beds until they were indistinguishable from the rest of the beach; warm and snug inside, she was perfectly happy and loved it there.
But content though she was to spend most of her time in her own company, now and again she needed the company of others. So she caught the bus to Dartmouth and spent an hour or two doing duty at the Borough Museum. Then, before returning to Torcross, she might perhaps look in at the Harbour Bookshop. She was a great reader. She had been a delicate child and the games she couldn’t play and the adventures she couldn’t enjoy she had found instead in books. Later, working with people who were unable even to read about what they couldn’t do, she had spent a lot of her time reading aloud. So, as she looked along our shelves, she must have thought that, pleasant though it was to work odd hours at the Museum, it might be even pleasanter to work odd hours in a bookshop.
To us however she was at that time no more than a friendly anonymous face, one of the many elderly female faces that we found it so hard to attach a name to.
Then in 1956 Clare was born, Lesley withdrew temporarily to become a full-time mother and our Gift Gallery was opened. There was no doubt that we would need an assistant, and Tessa joined us. But with our very much larger shop, on two floors, Tessa alone, at the height of the holiday season, was not enough. We needed a part
-timer as well. ‘I believe there’s someone who lives at Torcross,’ said Lesley . . .
The arrangement we made suited us admirably. There were two rooms and a bathroom on the second floor above the shop, now no longer wanted by us. There were dozens of Goolie’s friends who would love to spend a fortnight in a cottage by the sea. So, during the summer months, Goolie moved to Dartmouth and a succession of friends moved in and out of Torcross. And since these friends paid her rent it was agreed that no further financial arrangements need be made.
Thus in 1956 Goolie made her debut at the Harbour Bookshop, and since in that same year my father died, many people immediately assumed that she must be my mother – which added yet another complication to her identity.
She stayed with us off and on for fifteen years, so much a part of the shop that it seemed to some she was the shop; for she was a large person and when she was in residence even Lesley and I sometimes found it a little hard to squeeze round her. In a more formally organized shop where areas of responsibility and orders of seniority are more exactly determined, Goolie’s status might have been a little difficult to define. I never attempted to define it and luckily I never needed to. She was devotedly loyal and immensely hard working but she never wanted more than to be allowed to meet customers and sell books. She was warm-hearted and kind and easy to get on with, yet at times she could be very fierce; and customers who misbehaved were told off like naughty children. But I need not have been alarmed: they didn’t mind; they came back; they all adored her.
The Path Through the Trees Page 22
