Yes, I have piles, I have piles of piles and lots of them. Putting cream on them will not help. Sucking my stomach in and thinking of higher things is no help at all and eating prunes doesn’t make a hap’orth of difference.
What I have is book piles.
I can remember a time when I did not have book piles. It was in the nineteen fifties. I had a bookcase in my bedroom which had a longer lower section then a shorter mid section and one box on top, so the form was of steps with a stepped section for displaying other things in case you had a bookcase but didn’t really like books. The whole effort was covered in a toffee coloured varnish on the outside but the inside was painted yellow. There was a lot of pale lemon yellow around generally in the fifties. All my aunties had lemon yellow twinsets. My older cousins had lemon twinsets and sticking out skirts. My mother had a cream, verging on yellow, kitchen with red handles on the cupboards. It was the latest thing. One aunt had a black and white kitchen which had been the latest thing before the war and another aunt, the one with the money, had a bathroom that was black and white tiles in patterns like an art deco cinema. I was always amazed when I used the facilities that there was not a flapper with a swansdown boa and a cigarette in a foot long amber holder reclining in the bath.
The aunt with the money was married to the uncle who had earned it and had a drawing room with big book cases nicely filled, which I envied. Other aunts did not notably have books to envy, they were much more likely to be readers of women’s magazines and did swap opinions of recipes from magazines at coffee mornings.
My mother realised I was a reader quite early and brought me back books from the library when she went shopping in town every Friday. When I think about it this was not only a kindness, it was also an effort. We had a family car, but my mother was unable to drive and did not learn until the Sixties. In the fifties driving was for men, among the aspiring classes. All those women in the war driving tanks and vans and delivering aeroplanes might as well have not happened in the family I got adopted into. The demarcation lines between the sexes were iron clad. Men did not pick up tea towels, women did not drive cars. So my mother went in to town on a Friday on the bus and returned the same way with a woven wicker shopping basket on wheels, full of books.
Usually by the time she had unpacked the shopping and put everything away I had read at least one book. She couldn’t keep up with me and never complained but I developed the habit of stacking the books and reading them as many times as I could before they disappeared the following Friday.
We moved house in ’64 to the house my father had designed and built, being a builder. He built me bookcases too. I filled them but they never overflowed because I was a teenager and didn’t earn money. When I left home and was a young teacher with a flat he made me a collapsible bookshelf which I took down to Nottingham flat in my car and erected and filled. I have it still, it lives in the loft filled with the books of my youth and the Sixties.
In the flat I still didn’t have book piles. I didn’t have much spare money, running the car seemed to take up a lot of money and, of course, being in my twenties, going out was a necessity.
I believe I may have developed book piles after the S&H was born. I certainly recall piles of books on my bedside table being helpful during the wakeful nights. You can rock a baby with one hand and hold a book with the other easily, in this way never resenting the baby but being delighted there is extra reading time. I have always been delighted that there is extra reading time.
As we were only in the next house for a couple of years not only did book piles not develop, we had no money for books at all, as we were living in an area within reach of London for people commuting for work, so everything was priced accordingly.
Finally moving here we could afford to live and buy books. I was tutoring and had a bit of spare money but we were intending to stay here just a short time because the OH quickly got a job elsewhere and we prepared to move house. We had bought one tall bookcase when we moved here and one short one and, once we knew we would be moving, there didn’t seem any point in investing in more furniture until we knew what sort of house to fit the furniture into.
We never moved, I never stopped acquiring books but we never bought any more bookcases. In another year and a half we’ll have been here for forty years, with thirty eight years’ worth of book piles.
This of course is the thing about the new year. You can make all the resolutions you like but the unforeseen will still creep out of the shadows of the future and bite you on the ankles. I firmly intended for nigh on forty years to buy more bookcases when I moved house. Great. I just never moved house.
And now I have piles. I have them in the loft, near the bookcase, in boxes. I have them towering conveniently near to my bed (these are the really dangerous ones, I’m not sure you can wake in the night and Learn Perspective Drawing in Two Weeks, though I have frequently given it a go.) And, as you know the garage is not only filled with them but lovely neighbours add to them on a regular basis. Putting them out on a trolley fools no one, after a slow start, I effortlessly assemble more than I can bestow.
Only a non reader (which isn’t you) would offer the solution of having once read them, you can scrap them. What sort of person would read Wind in the Willows once? I have three shelves of Terry Pratchett. One is a signed one which the S&H queued for hours in the cold in Dundee to get for me when he was a student. In the top ten of my possessions, ever.
So I have book piles. There is a skill to piling books which takes into consideration not only the size of the book (biggest on the bottom, smallest on the top) but frequency of use. I have phases of reading the same book three times just to check, so that needs to be near the top of the pile even if the surface area considerably exceeds a pile of five below it.
This method of filing naturally leads to book avalanches, which I don’t resent at all. If they happen in the night I take it as a sign that the book which has ejected itself from the pile has something to offer, so I read it again. In this way the stratification of individual piles is constantly evolving.
E reader, I hear you mutter. Kindle? Yes got one of those and regret not buying all the Alan Partridge books in paper, I think they would look good in a pile. I have bought the latest in paper, it is arriving tomorrow and I know just which book pile it will perch on top of in a couple of days.
I do recycle the newspapers. I’ve seen the television programmes about people who have to be rescued from newspaper piles. In fact, I’ve got a book about it, it’s here somewhere, in one of these piles.
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