Rescued writing

Although there were plenty of books lying about our house when I was a child, relatively few were left when my mum died, a dozen or so years after dad. Mum had macular degeneration in the last few years of her life so that reading was pretty much out of the question. I do, however, have a handful of books rescued from the family home. You can see two of them above, fruit of my dad’s membership of the Companion Book Club. I think I have mentioned this before. You got a recently published hardback book every month for about six bob rather than the pound or two that a newly published book would cost at the time (this was in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s). As I recall, we had several shelves of these books, with uniform cover styles, but most of them were disposed of during my mum’s declining years.

On the front inner flap of the Helen MacInnes book, it says “5/9d to Companion Book Club members only. Originally published by Collins at 21/-.” This would translate to twenty-nine pence versus one pound and five pence. The old fellow always liked a bargain, although as I recall my brother Tbone saying, ‘He watches the pennies and the pounds fly out in all directions’.

There is nothing particularly special in literary terms about these books, but I value the link they give me to my late parents. The Double Image is a run-of-the-mill cold war thriller. As you can see, Curtain is the final novel in Agatha Christie’s Poirot series, in which Poirot dies. This completed our exhaustive collection of Agatha Christie’s crime fiction. Some of my brainy pals look down their noses at Aggie, but I defy anyone not to be affected by the deep sadness of Curtain, especially for the narrator, Captain Hastings, who survives his best friend Hercule Poirot. The TV version, in which Hastings is played magnificently by Hugh Fraser, is even more moving.

From my parents, I also inherited the 1934 William Clowes edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. This is a magnificent edition, with a number of fascinating illustrations, mainly photographs of eminent actors playing major roles. There is a fly in the ointment, however. The edition is in six volumes and I only have volumes 2 to 6. Heaven knows what happened to volume 1. Maddening, isn’t it?

Let me return to the subject of Agatha Christie for a minute. As noted above, we have her complete crime oeuvre on our shelves, most of the books bought from charity shops. One is a stand-alone novel, not a Poirot or a Marple, called They Came to Baghdad. This was not inherited from my parents, I bought it from an Oxfam shop in the 1990’s. 

One thing I should say about Mrs Christie is that those of her novels set in the context of archaeological expeditions in the near and middle east draw on a wealth of personal experience. Although I have no way of ascertaining their accuracy, the atmosphere of these books rings very true. But have a look at this sticker, inside the front cover of They Came to Baghdad. Admirer of Aggie as I am, I can’t help thinking that this novel can be at best of limited use in police training.

To come back to mum and dad, here is the most moving picture of all, from the inside back cover of The Double Image. Clearly mum or dad was using this to vie with the actual competitors as they watched Countdown on the telly. For those of you who don’t know, Countdown is a very sedate TV game show, aired in the afternoon, involving anagrammatic and arithmetic skills, compered by a gentle and avuncular chairperson. As a digression, for a while, they had Anne Robinson, former boss of The Weakest Link, chairing it, but she was unable to lose the peremptory and offensive style of her previous show. I almost expected her to urge competitors on with, ‘Come on baldy, we haven’t got all day.’ Anyway, it very quickly became clear that her abrasive style just didn’t fit with the programme, so she was deservedly dropped.

I had always regarded the show as entertainment exclusively for what Boabby on the sitcom Still Game would describe as ‘decrepit auld dafties’. However, since the pandemic, a sea change has occurred, bringing yet another connection to the generation above me. The afternoon show is repeated early the following morning, and on most weekdays at around six o’ clock in the morning, Linda and I are to be found in front of the television in our dressing gowns, watching yesterday’s Countdown. Lo are the mighty fallen.