The Bookbinder

by Pip Williams

‘Nothing green,’ said Maude. I’d meant to boil beans. ‘We’ll live,’ I said. ‘Not as long.’ Ma’s refrain.

It’s not in my nature to take charge, I’d heard him say to Ma. When I’d asked her later if that was why they’d never married, she shook her head. He’s asked three times, she said, but I don’t love him in the right way. She’d had the courage to say no, but she liked him enough to let him keep loving her.

‘Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, but then begins a journey in my head.’

‘It wasn’t really about hard work,’ said Old Mrs Rowntree. ‘It was about missing someone you love. About how their face comes to you in the dark and quiet of night and starts you thinking.’

Reading was such a quiet activity, and the reader in their parlour or leaning against the trunk of a tree would never imagine all the hands their book had been through, all the folding and cutting and beating it had endured. They would never guess how noisy and smelly the life of that book had been before it was put in their hands. I loved that I knew this. That they didn’t.

Might Is Right by Sir Walter Raleigh.’

It is a very dangerous doctrine when it becomes the creed of a stupid people…

A nation of men who mistake violence for strength, and c...

Dot and the Kangaroo.

How many times did I watch the movie version as a kid? I didn’t know it was a book!

People didn’t realise that pity made you feel worse.

‘It was destroyed. Burnt. All those books. It would have gone up like a bonfire.’

‘Tilda is a friend,’ I said, ‘with very little talent for folding.’ ‘A talent for life,’ said Maude. It was one of Ma’s refrains.

There is beauty in symmetry, Ma would say. We can’t help but notice it.

Working men had no claim to England, no stake in the land, and many would be refused a turn at the ballot box, just like me. But still, they lined up. They bled and died for a country they had no legal rights to, and their wives and daughters went to work making bombs. Perhaps it made the masters, landlords and law-makers uneasy.

I sometimes wish them dead, Peg. Does that shock you? I’ve been asked to deliver it, you know. And I’ve felt the hate of more than one smashed-up boy for withholding it. They turn from me and refuse to eat or drink. It takes longer, but some succeed. The doctor records that they died from their wounds or infection, but some of them have just decided.

‘Not even the Germans would drop bombs on a hospital.’

once inside the building, I hesitated. If I went right, the stairs would lead me to the library. I went left.

You can always tell when you have them, Tilda once said, about an audience.

Give them a chance to show off, Tilda had coached, and they’re more likely to do your bidding.

tongue. No need to say a word when you have the advantage, Tilda would say. Usually best not to.

I couldn’t say when the laughter stopped and the mourning started. His chest moved and tears fell, and his sobbing was deep and round and regular like a drum. No one turned his way. No one acknowledged his pain. It was how we kept our heads, I thought.

‘I suppose it’s one way to see the world?’ said Gwen. ‘I don’t think it ends up being the grand tour they’re hoping for,’ Tilda replied.

the generals don’t know what they’re doing half the time, they ignore the officers in the trenches and threaten them with court-martial if they don’t send their men over the top. Talk about a rock and a hard place – dead if they do, dead if they don’t. They’d rather a German bullet than one of ours—

‘There’s concern it shows support for Germany.’ ‘Are we at war with their poetry?’ I asked.

Maude didn’t find it easy to compose an original sentence, but she chose what to repeat. She understood, I think, that most of what people said was meaningless. That people spoke to fill the silence or pass the time; that, despite our mastery of words and our ability to put them together in infinitely varied ways, most of us struggled to say what we really meant. Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light.

‘My ambition was to engage in the debate, as you say. I worked in the library. I read the books and formed opinions. I made arguments that should have changed minds, but usually did not. It was important, I thought, to engage in the debate.’

‘It is all ashes,’ she said.

fingers. I looked up, took in the mask again. It was like the censor’s pen: it hid what the war had done, was doing. It hid him.

‘We want to raise the dead or silence them,’ he said, ‘to be free of death’s burden.’

If you shrink yourself to the smallness of your circumstances, you’ll soon disappear.

‘German people are not my enemy, Peggy. But there are some who have used their language like a weapon, to share the evil of their thoughts, the details of what they will do to humiliate you, hurt you. What they have already done.’

The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read!

Women’s Words and Their Meanings, edited by Esme Nicoll.

It might be a dangerous thing for Mr Darwin’s theories to be applied to people. When I asked why, she looked at Maude. How should we judge who is fit and who isn’t, Peg? Should it be how clever you are, or how rich? Or should it be how kind you are, the unique way you see the world, or maybe how often you make others smile?

‘Of course with you, but I can’t be a wife and mother and a scholar as well. It just isn’t possible, and I can’t deny you those things that you want.’ My voice faltered. I’d never said it aloud, never even articulated it in thought. ‘The life you offer is too much.’ ‘You think you have to choose?’ ‘Oh, Bastiaan, I know I have to choose.’

He’d offered me everything he had and I’d said no.

When we bound these books, I thought, they were identical. But I realised they couldn’t stay that way. As soon as someone cracks the spine, a book develops a character all its own. What impresses or concerns one reader is never the same as what impresses or concerns all others. So, each book, once read, will fall open at a different place. Each book, once read, I realised, will have told a slightly different story.

‘If she were more perfect, she would be less interesting.’

Just promise to look up from the books occasionally. I’ve always thought the blossoms of spring as stimulating for the intellect as any text.’

‘The words used to describe us define our value to society and determine our capacity to contribute. They also’ – and again she poked at the translations – ‘tell others how to feel about us, how to judge us.’

My heart beat harder, a reminder that it did not always agree with the choices of my head.

‘Roughly speaking: religion, love, jealousy, solitude, ill health and despair.’ ‘That seems to cover it,’ I said. Eb came closer. ‘I think he left out war.’

‘A shift in the normal order of things. It can be uncomfortable for some but an opportunity for others. It seems appalling to think there might be a silver lining.’

‘That too much learning will make me lonely, send me mad and keep me poor.’

Why did we have to wait until we were dead to have our names inscribed on something?

It was a game, like chess, and it always ended in stalemate.

Three women. I searched the local papers but there was no roll of honour. Their lives are barely recorded, Ma had said once, when I asked what happened to the women of Troy. So their deaths aren’t worth writing about. So say the poets, I thought. The men who hold the pen.

His face was a badge of honour now the war was won; nothing to fear now they’d had a skinful.

It’s over, they might think. But it wasn’t.