Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss
uniform (but this is vandalism) in blue buckram, together with many other prizes. In huge wooden cases, specially made by Mr Watts, are stored Hogarth’s engravings of London life and Piranesi’s engravings of prisons and of Rome, in various states. There are also some Rowlandsons. Such Rowlandsons! Country scenes, bawdy scenes, inns, maidens, stage coaches, the whole eighteenth-century world which Thomas Rowlandson’s calligraphic line so skilfully evoked.
I had never heard of Rowlandson until I went into Mr Sanders’ stock room, and have worshipped the man’s work ever since. He was unrivalled as a draughtsman until Beardsley drew. In Mr Sanders’ house on the Woodstock Road hung perhaps ten lilting Rowlandsons, country landscapes of the greatest delicacy of line and colour. No doubt they are now in the Paul Mellon collection. Over Sanders’ mantelpiece hung a pristine print of the painting generally regarded as Rowlandson’s masterpiece, ‘Vauxhall Gardens’.
As far as Rowlandson is known, he is valued for his scenes of bawdy, of boisterousness and drinking bouts. But with that subject matter goes a style of transparent delicacy. His creamy young Georgian maids might have stepped out of Cranford or a novel by Thomas Hardy. A travelling print-seller used to come round and sell Sanders pornographic Rowlandsons for his gentlemen clients.
Without being judgmental, Thomas Rowlandson elegantly recorded an England at once awful and enviable. I owe my introduction to him to Frank Sanders – another amusing bounder.
2
Three Pounds a Week
Two people served with me in the shop. One and a half to be precise. The half was Mrs Y, who did the accounts as well as serving, and so was generally tucked away in the downstairs office. She was always ready to emerge for a chat. If she was asked for a book by a customer, Mrs Y would fall into a mild, ladylike panic. With one finger up to her lip, she would go slowly round in circles, cooing, ‘Oh, dear, have we got that now, I wonder? What an interesting question. Where would it be, I wonder? What did you say the title was again?’, until Bill Oliver or I rescued her.
Bill Oliver had been a scholar of St John’s College, and had served with the Eighth Army in the desert. Now he wore a blue suit and a large ginger moustache, over which his grey eyes bulged in accusatory fashion. He looked ferocious, yet I never met a milder man. He worked long hours without complaint. He was married to a distinguished, smiling, foreign lady, relation, it was said, of Robert Musil, author of The Man Without Qualities – a novel I never managed to get through, despite the local connection.
In those days, following the war and paper-rationing, there was a scarcity of books, with the consequence that everybody wanted them. The shop, at least during the university term, was always full of people asking for books we did not have. We sold a small number of new books; but those were often rationed by the publishers.
The representative for Oxford University Press was a tall thin man called Mr Lathom. He had a face like a kind lemon, his expression fostered by the number of times he had to say no as gently as possible. If we ordered six copies of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for the beginning of term, we would be lucky to get one. At that time shortages were a way of life.
All the staff in Sanders got along well together, which was fortunate, since we worked long hours. I had to be there at a quarter to nine. I had an hour and a half for lunch. The shop closed at five thirty, but we were expected to work until at least six thirty, often seven. Many a time it was eight. That was the worst of Sanders, that and the pay.
At five thirty, Sanders would come down from his office, smoking his pipe, to see that everything was secure, shutters up and door locked. We would all light cigarettes and ‘get down to the real work’.
Frank Sanders was a small vigorous man with a perky face and a quiff of white hair. He resembled Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Arnold Bennett. He was a humorous man and in many ways a terrible crook; he kept us destitute and laughing.
Sanders was sincere in certain matters. His love of music, books and Rowlandson could not be faulted. He also had the gift of the gab, and this led him into areas of insincerity.
Middle-aged ladies flocked to Sanders, just as they flocked to the lectures of C. S. Lewis, who was then at Magdalen College and occasionally came into the shop. The ladies tried to charm Frank Sanders, but Frank Sanders always charmed the ladies more. Wives of heads of colleges were his natural victims. In the course of intimate conversations, when the ladies were led up to his office, books and money would change hands, valuable prints would turn into more valuable cheques. Sanders would then escort the ladies to the door with amiable courtesy.
Directly they had gone, the mask would fall. He would stamp back into the rear of the shop. ‘Oh, that Lady –! How she talks, how she wastes my time. I can’t bear the woman. She’s humbug all through …’
Frank Sanders was a self-made man. He began with no advantages in life, beyond the resources of his brain. As a youth in North Devon he sold newspapers for W. H. Smith’s on Barnstaple railway station. I too once lived in Barnstaple; this gave us something in common, and allowed him the opportunity to pay me less than I was worth.
The gift of the gab brought more than middle-aged ladies to Sanders. It brought some of the famous as well. I squinted up from street level at these leviathans of the literary scene. Hugh Macdonald, editor of Marvell’s poems and other works, always grumpy, but fun to imitate behind his back. Geoffrey Grigson, poet, producer of books, never satisfied with our service. Many celebrated dons, the most engaging of whom was probably J. I. M. Stewart. Stewart was busy installing himself in Christ Church when I arrived in my shabby suit to conquer Oxford. He was writing a series of Shakespearian or mock-Shakespearian plays for the BBC Third Programme, then at its cultural zenith. Years later, Stewart must have felt a little rueful when he found Tom Stoppard tilling the same ground more profitably in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. But by then he was well embarked on his second or third career as detective writer Michael Innes.
On a Saturday afternoon, when Oxford fell into a comfortable doze, and those who wished to curl up with a good book were already doing so, A. V. Bond entered Sanders.
He descended from somewhere called ‘The Cotswolds’. I put the term in quotation marks because I knew no more of the Cotswolds than the name; I had never been there. Mr Bond called himself ‘The Poet of the Cotswolds’.
He was roughly dressed, garbed generally in a long black coat wrapped tight round his wiry frame, as if he were about to be shipped to Patagonia, where warmth counts for more than style. To me, he was the Ancient of Days, or at least of an Afternoon, his sparse white hair tormented by the memory of Cotswold typhoons – or whatever they had up there – a straggly white beard, and piercing blue eyes.
Mr Bond was dramatic. He entered the shop like a thinned-down Wolfit, one arm raised in salute, and immediately began to talk. His chief target was Mrs Y, who eagerly devoured his every word. She would sit with legs crossed, elbows propped on desk, and hands clasped under her chin, looking up at him as if to convey visually the message that Earth, and the Cotswolds in particular, had not anything to show more fair than Mr Bond.
I too was fascinated. It was my first poet. He would declaim in the shop, and Mrs Y would clap prettily, and say afterwards, ‘Of course he’s such an amusing man and so gifted.’
His poems were printed by Mr Vincent, a local printer with a shop in King Edward Street, and sold at a penny a time. I remember none of his poems, unless he was guilty of a sonnet beginning ‘The heart in wonder like a lonely wren …’ I have retained none of his little sheets, unfortunately.
Mr Sanders once told Mr Bond a dirty joke, which profoundly shocked him. He left the shop, returned to the Cotswolds, and did not reappear for a month.
His open-air aspect convinced me that he must inhabit a mountainside, and a gorse bush he had made comfortable. I was disappointed later both by the extreme couthness of the Cotswolds – which resemble burial mounds more than mountains – and the discovery that the poet lived in Stow-on-the-Wold. I’m sure he was designed for the Pennines at