Parting with books

Mark, my son, questioned why we have planned to have a family meeting in Perth over the Christmas break. We had held a group meeting the previous year when poor Kelly, the dog, needed to be put down, because she was old and ailing.

‘There’s no need for family meetings if we all agree, and anyway if you want a new pet, just pick one.’

I rang him. This time we were moving. We had decided to downsize. We would live in an an apartment, and we were moving interstate.

‘There is no pet involved. This is a change that involves you too. We’ve got to deal with the books from your youth, you know, those you left with us when you moved away from here. I’m sorry, but they’ll have to go.’

We talked for a while and he offered to arrive two days before Christmas. I hated having to repeat my words, we were meant to be on holiday, so I rang his sister suggesting the same arrival date.

Soon after he arrived, Mark walked into the tiny room we called the ‘library’ and started the discussion, pointing to the books of his youth,

‘Tolkien is Lit. Not Sci Fi and you know it’s not young adult either!’

I thought I wouldn’t rise to the challenge of this long-worn argument about shelving Tolkien. Instead I occupied myself sorting out the children’s books. At that point Sophie, his sister, sneaked in and out of the room. She glanced over her shoulder at a book I was holding.

‘I don’t know why you kept buying the Ramona books, you must’ve liked her!’

I looked up sharply. Was that a tongue-in-cheek tone or not? I couldn’t tell any more. I could only think of the number of times she had talked of the Ramona books!

John, my husband, always knew how to avoid arguments,

‘I don’t think the children want to get too involved in sorting the books out. I’ll make lunch now. We’ll have time to meet on Boxing Day.’

I decided not to comment further about procrastination, as I had done this too often lately. Our Christmas meal was animated, with some pleasantry and little disagreement. We weren’t prepared for the widespread disaster that would affect most countries in Southern Asia the next day. A violent earthquake shook our neighbours resulting in a tsunami.

The impact of the devastation that the Boxing Day Tsunami created that summer had a repercussion in Australia where many South-East Asian groups were part of the communities. In our family it had the strange effect of sharpening a sense of practical maturity. On the request of Save the Children we set about piling up mountains of toys and animals of all sizes that had shaped the children’s childhood and placed them into baskets wrapped in bed sheets, blankets and towels. Sophie, a soft toy freak all her life, volunteered to take boxes to the Scarborough Road Red Cross Shop. Mark caught the shuttle train to Fremantle carrying Lego boxes. He chose to donate them to his friend who had just had a child. I thought it was an unusual gift for a newborn but didn’t say a word.

After a couple of productive days, I started fretting again. The dread of having to go to the dentist’s is nothing compared with the threatening feeling of having to part with books. To be realistic, we might have to extract them by the box. Multiple phone calls to bookshops failed to convince them to take linguistics texts and journals off me. I could not understand why, given the lack of valid linguistics texts in town, no one wanted them. I had hoped to find a good home for all of them.

Because of my background as a French Australian whose early education had not been in English I tended to keep miscellaneous classics and biographical stories. French books that appealed to me were Piaf’s story by her sister and Henri Charrière’s Papillon which I still enjoyed reading in French. I loved tales like Saint Exupery’s Le Petit Prince. I had also followed Russian literature particularly Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment which helped me deal with my philosophical and unsettled adolescence.

Writers that I treasured because they contributed to my better understanding of the English-speaking world are Charles Dickens with Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd. For the United States I had found Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was a turning point because of its innovative style. The characters of his story became first-person narrators, one chapter after another, giving us readers a closer rapport to them. Until then, Mark Twain had been the only American author I had studied. I had loved reading The adventures of Tom Sawyer in school.

Over various stages of migration I had gradually taken a liking to worldviews that writers from various continents have portrayed in English. The types of books that I would always keep were the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in A Grain of Wheat from Kenya, Chinese American Amy Tan with The Joy Luck club, Frank McCourt in Angela’s ashes about life in and Ireland and Bill Bryson who came away from the United States to offer his impressions of Britain in Notes from a small island. After I first arrived in Western Australia I closely followed the impact of My Place by Sally Morgan and of Follow the rabbit-proof fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. Because I was a Southern European migrant, I was duly fascinated by the way Helen Garner went about to recount Joe Cinque’s consolation. Drama books are rare and I kept famed editions of Hamlet and Chekhov’s Three Sisters. The later plays I’d loved most were Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, Pinter’s The caretaker and Jack Davis’ No Sugar. These had helped me understand societal life better than Facebook or Twitter ever could. My taste in poetry was eclectic. I started with the French Middle Ages poetry of Villon, then Baudelaire; I liked Oscar Wilde, and the work of e. e. cummings. My favourite from Australia still is Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s My people.

After a few feverish days of action, and before the New Year activities began, the family at last gathered over what to do with our book collections, so we went into the overcrowded ‘library’ room. Against the walls of this tiny rectangular spare bedroom stood four wooden ill-matched adjustable bookshelves we had picked up at a market and which were no longer in the best condition. Varied sets of early Golden, Puffin and Penguin books accompanied by masses of assorted paperbacks were squeezed out by series of fiction, and science fiction volumes that always took too much space. School annuals, magazines and journals accumulated over the years sat gaping and slipping sideways alongside sturdy old textbooks.

On the lower shelves there were Mark’s well-loved Mad Magazines I had forced into box files that were bursting open at the base. On the very bottom shelves heavy duty dictionaries and a twelve volume encyclopaedia, which had come in handy in terms of value for money for the children’s primary school homework, sat askance staring up at me, as if asking for relief.

The shelves by then heavy in the middle started to sag while the back panel, a rickety piece of hardboard, gaped, whining it seemed, under stress against the wall. This room could be a hazard to venture into. Not that I worried about occupational health and safety. My main concern was that if I took anything out, there was no way to put it back and certainly not in the right place. I always used to organise our books by topics on my shelves at home, and classified them in categories akin to library collections.

I would miss the familiar bright odd-shaped books, with thick covers that had large printed words and children illustrations. Many of those were badly suffused with old yellowing sticky tape reinforcing their spines.

Starting with the children’s books I unearthed a tiny Disney cartoon book you could thumb through so fast you could see the animated Donald Duck character in action. Books that shaped my own childhood were myths and legends, the tales of Andersen and the cloak and dagger novels of Alexandre Dumas. My hero was D’Artagnan who like me, as I argued, was a garrulous person from Gascony in Southern France. With our own children, the longest lasting popular books at bedtime were Dr Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham with the rhythmic refrain ‘I do not like them, Sam-I-am’ and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

Other characters like Babar the elephant and Barbapapa still reminded me of the good times we had reading these to the children. I remembered from Astérix chez les Bretons the famous quote ‘Ils sont fous ces Anglais'. [The English, they are mad]. That was a great in-joke in a home where half of the family was born in England. We would read any Astérix we could get hold of -and sometimes had to do so in the language of the country we happened to visit.

During that strange heady daydreaming I spotted a book entitled Where is the green parrot? only to discover that the book was actually written in English. We had re-named it ‘Mais, où est le perroquet vert?’ Probably because I had started to read it to the children in French, it had become a French story book for them and for us all. The sight of this book made me speak up.

‘Surely we cannot part with this one!’

‘Of course not,’ Mark said, ‘but most of the others have to go!’

Well, I had been so wrong thinking I was on my own in this book-culling saga. In the end, as people do in a crisis, we rallied together. John had already found cardboard boxes. I chose to pack up a box of the bilingual books to keep as a reminder of the days when we all had such fun sharing bedtime stories together.

Mark and Sophie rang around and found a couple of bookshops that might take in a few boxes of the more famous authors. After one of the booksellers asked him if we had any copies of Mad Magazines, Mark seemed to want to draw a line,

‘Anyone else asks for Mad Magazines, be sure to say we don’t have any,’ he yelled, after slamming the phone down.

I remember how Sophie and I sidled into one of the second-hand book marts with more boxes than agreed. As we left the owner must have been troubled to accept such a large quantity of books, because he called out as I left:

‘I guess I could put some on eBay.’

This is how I came to walk out of a shop feeling lighter and happy at the idea that our still-loved books were wanted and valued in cyber space.

About a year after we had moved to Adelaide, came the countershock of these madly hyperactive days. The realistic consequences of those events had caught up with me. With a peaceful, I thought, click of the mouse and a stare at a computer screen, I wandered into an online book mart. There, a vibrant picture caught my eye. I was on eBay and there was a familiar title. It was a children’s compendium of folk tales. On closer inspection that book was available from a bookseller in Western Australia. There was an entry about its good condition, and a reference to a handwritten inscription. I immediately logged out. I could not look at ‘More details…’ about that book or any other on eBay. I could not bear to witness my children’s personalised birthday inscriptions floating in limbo on the net. I have not dared go back on eBay for books since.