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Comfort and Consolation

Faced with the prospect of moving into a new eco-house at the bottom of our garden I have begun to realize that I must downsize my library – which is what I like to call it: a collection of many books would be more accurate. But the name doesn’t matter: the sheer number of books is the problem. I can’t resist adding to them, even though, as I am now in my late 70s, I shall never have the time to read them all; yet the thought of having to live without them is unbearable.

I grew up in a Dorset country rectory, the eldest child in a family of six. My father was hopeless at organizing himself and was always at odds with authority. At times I felt that his ideal might have been a character in one of Jane Austen’s novels – a gentle scholarly country parson with adequate private means to maintain his chosen way of life. But the tragedy was that this was completely at odds with reality: constantly short of money and doomed by his own upbringing and lack of formal education, he sought refuge in books.

He had been brought up in a Derbyshire coal-mining village; his father William, after whom I was named, was a strong, self-made man, left fatherless at an early age by an explosion in the local coal mine and thus forced to leave school at the age of 11 and make his own way in the world. So when my own father showed little sign of wanting to follow him in the family building firm, preferring instead to bury himself in a book or help out at the local parish church, he met with violent opposition.

I well remember a poignant incident he once described to me. As a young man, sitting as usual in a corner with his nose buried in a book when no doubt there were urgent household chores to be done, his father stormed up to him and tore the book from his hands, exclaiming, ‘Throw that bloody book away!’ Not that it made much difference. Forced to leave school at the usual age, for those times, of 14, he recognized early on a calling to the priesthood. Natura

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Faced with the prospect of moving into a new eco-house at the bottom of our garden I have begun to realize that I must downsize my library – which is what I like to call it: a collection of many books would be more accurate. But the name doesn’t matter: the sheer number of books is the problem. I can’t resist adding to them, even though, as I am now in my late 70s, I shall never have the time to read them all; yet the thought of having to live without them is unbearable.

I grew up in a Dorset country rectory, the eldest child in a family of six. My father was hopeless at organizing himself and was always at odds with authority. At times I felt that his ideal might have been a character in one of Jane Austen’s novels – a gentle scholarly country parson with adequate private means to maintain his chosen way of life. But the tragedy was that this was completely at odds with reality: constantly short of money and doomed by his own upbringing and lack of formal education, he sought refuge in books. He had been brought up in a Derbyshire coal-mining village; his father William, after whom I was named, was a strong, self-made man, left fatherless at an early age by an explosion in the local coal mine and thus forced to leave school at the age of 11 and make his own way in the world. So when my own father showed little sign of wanting to follow him in the family building firm, preferring instead to bury himself in a book or help out at the local parish church, he met with violent opposition. I well remember a poignant incident he once described to me. As a young man, sitting as usual in a corner with his nose buried in a book when no doubt there were urgent household chores to be done, his father stormed up to him and tore the book from his hands, exclaiming, ‘Throw that bloody book away!’ Not that it made much difference. Forced to leave school at the usual age, for those times, of 14, he recognized early on a calling to the priesthood. Naturally there was no prospect of going to university, so eventually in desperation he took himself off at the end of the 1920s to the remote central provinces of Canada where, after minimal academic training, he was ordained and got married and where in 1933 I was born. To keep him going during the long and bitterly cold winter months his mother, who had always sympathized with her elder son’s ideals, sent him boxes of books. Because of the imminent house move, I’ve recently had to get rid of some of them – precious books of poetry and copies of the great classics of English literature – Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair and the like. My own childhood was very different. Through the intervention of a family friend, the means were found to send me to boarding-school. So from the ages of 8 to 18 I was away from home during the anxious years of the war and the times of austerity that followed. In my loneliness and sense of utter abandonment I, like my father, sought refuge in books. Perhaps the most precious book in my own library is the first volume in the Penguin Classics series – Homer’s Odyssey in the translation by E. V. Rieu. It cost me 1 shilling and I bought it just before my fourteenth birthday. I shall never get rid of it. There are other books from my childhood that are infinitely precious: a complete 14-volume set of Captain Marryat, half-bound in leather, 6 inches by 4, octodecimo size, price 3 guineas, the print so small as to be almost illegible. But it was one of these, Mr Midshipman Easy, which undoubtedly drew me to the Royal Navy when the time came for me to do my National Service. During my early weeks of intensive training, first as an Ordinary Seaman RNVR (the lowest form of life in the Navy) and then as an Upper Yardman, slinging my hammock on a mess-deck, before I myself became a Midshipman, it was that precious Penguin Classic, and other volumes, that kept me going. Some years later, during a memorable interval in my own time at Cambridge before I went to theological college, I found myself back in Canada, trying to discover my roots by working at one of the uranium mines in northern Ontario. In my haste to return to Canada I had failed to pack many books. Miles from the nearest bookshop and desperate to escape into literature from the hardships of life at the mine, I sent a plea to my father: ‘Send me the two volumes of the Penguin edition of War and Peace as soon as possible.’ Typically, and recognizing in me his own experience, he got the books to me within days. When I was a curate in Portsmouth in the early 1960s, it was a consolation on my one day off a week to search out the latest Penguin – in January 1960 it was Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason; a year later it was André Malraux’s Man’s Estate. Towards the end of my career as a naval chaplain I found myself at the Rosyth Naval Base, not far from the second-hand bookshops of Edinburgh and a long way from home. When I read about the formation of a Penguin Collectors’ Society I began to add to my own collection. Now I have several hundred, including an almost complete run of the first Pelican editions. I shall never be able to realize my dream of possessing the first 1,000 of the initial Penguins, but I’m on my way, even though they are now quite expensive. A tip-off from my wife recently enabled me to purchase from a charity shop in Cambridge an immaculate copy of No. 21, still with its dust-cover – Our Mr Wren by Sinclair Lewis – for only £1. It is a real bargain. But what about all the other books – that set of Captain Marryat and those fine editions of Scott, Dickens and George Eliot I inherited from my father, which gave me an addiction to collecting sets? To complicate matters further, my prep-school reading left me with a love of historical fiction and tales of adventure that I’ve never tried too hard to grow out of, though I have managed to move on from Percy F. Westerman, Henty and the tales of Harrison Ainsworth. I shall surely have to find room for my sets of Hornblower, my complete run of Patrick O’Brian’s magnificent tales of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and the ten volumes in Allan Mallinson’s series on the military campaigns of Matthew Hervey, the fictitious son of a Wiltshire clergyman. Then too, to my great joy, I have recently acquired a complete set of the 25 volumes of the Macmillan edition of Rudyard Kipling, bound in deep maroon leather with gold lettering that lights up a corner of the library. But it is my Penguin books that are particularly precious. Just by looking at them I can recollect moments in my own life: the thinner volumes that came out during the war when paper was rationed, the Pelicans that recall my intellectual journeys, the different colours of the Penguins denoting their subject: orange for fiction, green for thrillers, maroon for travel, blue for biography and so on. They were first published in 1935, two years after I was born; now my possession of them is a reflection of my own life and a reassuring sign that, even in this age of computers and digital libraries, books will never lose their precious significance and I shall never be without the comfort and consolation of something to read.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Bill Taylor 2011


About the contributor

After a lifetime devoted to those two great institutions, the Church of England and the Royal Navy, Bill Taylor has retired to the open landscape of East Anglia, near enough to Cambridge to be able to haunt its bookshops. A relentless urge to travel, intellectually, spiritually and physically, keeps him busy.

The roundels that appear in this article are taken from the covers of the original editions of Penguin Classics.

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