How I Read It

Years ago I read a lot of fiction because I travelled long distances daily on public transport and it made the journeys bearable. Most of the books I read then are long forgotten, including their titles. Some however I have read again since, and intend to re-read. I'm afraid I'm hard to please as to fiction, having always preferred non-fiction reading. But some books have become an important part of my life: When I talk about these books, you will see that I am not engaging in literary criticism. I am simply telling you about the books I love and what they mean to me. Neither will I be recounting the stories the works embrace, because you may want to read them for yourselves, without any prior expectations.

My copy of Crime and Punishment, by Feodor Dostoevsky, is one of the Collector's Library volumes I wrote about in an earlier blog. I know tastes differ widely, but really, if you do not read this book, you are missing an experience which no other book could ever give you. If you have read it, I recommend that you do so again. Each time I read it, it seems different. It transcends its translation from Russian and also the many years since it was first published in 1866, to enter the mind and lodge there forever. Obviously I am not the only one who loves it, since it is with justification a very famous work.

In the end, however, it is what you or I make of the books we read that counts. Often I think it would be both interesting and refreshing to hear from people who dislike some famous and universally lauded books. How often have we read that a reviewer hates a book through and through.? It would not be long before such a person found him or herself looking for a job. Yet I have opened umpteen novels, read a few lines and closed them forever. Or I have read the first couple of chapters, thinking they are not too bad, and have soon discovered they have lost their charms.

“The Householder”, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, published in paperback edition by John Murray , London, is a small book, set in India, which I would recommend anyone to read. It is the story of a serious and self-conscious young man in the first months of his made marriage, his developing love for his young wife, how he comes to terms with his interfering mother, his social life, his job...it is a deceptively simple tale, worth reading again and again. It does what a good novel should, to my mind. It rings true. When I got into it, it made me think. I felt sympathy for the characters. And at the end, I felt I had read something worthwhile. It led me along, and I was always interested enough to follow.

This is another important point when reading. Too often have I read and found the train of thought or the plot so tortuous that it was a pain to follow the story, and in the end I just closed the book. When I was very young I used to feel obliged to finish a book even if I really disliked it, and then one day I just realised “I don't need this”, and afterwards I felt freer when reading. However, that has meant that there is now very little fiction that comes my way which I want to finish, and certainly a minimum which I would reread. There are novels which I quite liked when I was reading them, but still I have never felt the inclination to read them again. Two examples of this are “White Tiger”, by Aravind Adiga, and “The Help”, by Kathryn Stockett, which has just recently been made into a much acclaimed film. They are good reads but I do not want to read them again. On the other hand, I intend to buy for myself “No Longer At Ease”, by Chinua Achebe, which I gave away in a fit of generosity to a friend, and which I found unforgettable. In the first place, it is a really good story. But also it explains so much about the background to corruption in Nigeria and other African countries, which most of us only know through those incessant and by now very predictable and boring missives telling of vast sums of money awaiting us in hidden vaults in mysterious banks worldwide which somehow have found their way there after various coups, murders and whatever you're having yourself. Can there really be people who respond to these e-mails? I recall reading somewhere that if even one person does fall for it, the scam has become worthwhile. I would be amazed if even one person ever responds nowadays. The real scam, I think, is on the poor unfortunates who obviously buy copies of these letters believing that by despatching them they will shortly have their fortunes made. That is probably the only way any money is gleaned by those e-mails now. Of course this book was written well before the internet or world wide web existed, in 1960, but somehow it helps to explain the mindset of those who engage in scams of this kind.

The classic novel “Silas Marner”, by George Eliot, is a good read. Once again it has the virtue of being quite a short book, thus holding the attention well. The story has a nice twist which sadly can never totally surprise again after the first reading, and the style of writing is very old-fashiuoned to a modern reader. It was first published in 1861, and my copy is a Collector's Library one, published in 2005. From my liking for shorter books you may conclude that I could not have read any large tomes such as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, or Anna Karenin. On the contrary, many teenage days were spent reading these. “Anna Karenin” was worth reading, but I was too young to understand the feelings which motivated her life choices, and I would not have the energy to read it again now. “War and Peace “ I found wonderful, but I skipped all the war and battle scenes, and I know I would do so again. Likewise with that famous novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, 'And Quiet Flows the Don'. I've never been interested in politics, of which most history seems to be composed, and so the battle scenes in that book I also dispensed with. The one part which stuck in my mind to this day and which made the novel memorable for me was the old father at a time of near famine eating and eating all the family's hardwon stores and getting fatter and fatter through grief when his son was missing. Is it enough, I wonder, to be moved by and find unforgettable just one small part of a novel? Perhaps yes. In the same way, I recall the end of the “Beast in Man”, by Emile Zola, and the terrible and powerful picture conjured up of the troop train loaded with war-going soldiers, heading at speed and driverless towards inevitable disaster.

“Wind in the Willows “ is one of my all-time favourite works of fiction. Every time I read it I find something new, which is not bad for quite a short book. I remember so well how much I loved as a child the part where Mole finds his old house at Christmas and also the place where Otter is looking for his lost son, and how well I remember Badger's house when his friends come upon it by chance when lost in the snow of the forest. It was first published in 1908, and my copy is once again a Collector's Library one. Kenneth Grahame, the author, wrote it for his son, I believe, and I was sad to read that his son in later life committed suicide. Knowing that gives a further poignancy to the novel, somehow.

No doubt many will consider my tastes very low brow, but I tend to like simple stories. For me, Aesop's Fables cannot be improved upon, though I was never lucky enough to have learned the original Greek. In the category of short stories that never weary, The Oxford University Press collection “Modern Irish Short Stories” contains some true gems, including Frank O'Connor's very well-known “My Oedipus Complex”, and “Guests of the Nation”, two totally different types of work, and the unforgettable “Exile's Return” by Bryan MacMahon, If you can get hold of this collection, there are a few in it which will help you understand much more where the Irish 'are coming from', as they say in current parlance. .The stories are of the old Ireland, but no matter how far we have come from those days, somewhere in our souls many of the old ways linger. The devastating story “Going into Exile” by Liam O'Flaherty, describing a so-called American wake in the days before Skype or the internet, makes one appreciate the gifts of communication we have today.

James Joyce's “The Dead” is one of the stories in the collection. I can see it is a well-written piece, but I cannot warm to it. In fact, I must confess the same of anything of Joyce's I have tried to read. Ulysses is one of those books that I just didn't want to get through, which will no doubt shock many people of a 'literary' turn of mind. I appreciate that it was something quite new in its day, and it's famous for its stream-of-consciousness type of writing that changed literature for ever. However, it is not for me. As for Finnegan's Wake, I didn't even get through the first page. I recall reading the autobiography of a column writer for the Irish Independent of many years ago, who insisted that the peculiar language used in this work was actually taken from the common cant of the inhabitants of the Dublin Liberties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I cannot recall his name but if I come across it I will put it in the blog so that those interested can judge for themselves.

Books are like people, really. Some, no matter how clever or good, you will not personally like. In the end, no matter how much critics praise a work of fiction, if it doesn't find a resonance in your heart, let it go, it is not for you. For every reader, there will be some books which achieve this, and which will become more than acquaintances in your life. Count yourself lucky and enjoy them as long as you live.

Speaking Out

Frederick Bodmer's "The Loom of Language" was first published by Allen & Unwin in 1944. The copy I have is a reprint of the first paperback edition, dated 1996. When I was a young teenager I borrowed this book so often from our local library that I began to feel it was mine; then someone else borrowed it and never returned it. Luckily I found one later in a local bookshop. It has never lost its charms for me. For anyone interested in languages, it is an amazing book. It tells the story of languages from earliest times, and traces how the different ones we have today developed. It discusses language learning, the origins of script and writing systems, artificial languages, everything to do with languages. Here you will find tables translating English into all the common Germanic languages, and separate ones translating English into the more common Romance languages. It is a book to take up again and again. If such a book had been written and handed down from the times of Linear A and Linear B there would be a lot of happy scholars now.

The Dictionary of Languages by Andrew Dalby, which describes itself as "The Definitive Reference To More Than 400 Languages" is another fascinating book. I bought it from Amazon, havng come across a review of it by chance. My copy is a paperback published by A &C Black of London in 2006. It details 400 different languages, giving maps of where they are to be found, their origins and relationships with other languages living or dead, and the number of speakers using them as a first language. As you read you realise what treasures our spoken tongues are, how they enunciate emotions and feelings and ideas, how important it is not to let these go, how they are as important a part of our heritage as any artefacts in museums. The Irish Times today had a small piece on a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting which is underway in Vancouver. At the meeting it was said that the technology of the internet and the social media which use it will be the saviour of dying languages. The importance of all languages was stressed. The Times reported that 'The loss of languages spoken by only a few hundred people may not seem an issue when there are plenty more languages to replace them. Yet languages are a unique repository not just of words but also of cultural identity, linguists stressed'......"Languages become a repository of information on plant and animal species, cultural practices, traditional medicine and much more," said Prof David Harrison of Swarthmore college in Pennsylvania. "Through the digital technologies these languages can talk to the world." he said. And I have to say I think that sounds right to me. Owning and reading language books is a personal experience, but sharing this experience with a large number of other people has only been made possible since the arrival of the internet.

"Contemporary Linguistics – An Introduction" by William O'Grady, Michael Dobrovolsky and Francis Katamba, published by Longman, London & New York in 1996, was a college book from about fourteen years ago. It is one of those hefty books I discussed in an earlier instalment of my blog, having been revised and upgraded a number of times, so that shelves and shelves of the earlier volumes teeter in corners of student bookshops. I read recently that a university bookshop in Dublin had thrown out mountains of this type of textlbook because they couldn't sell them. A terrible waste, and definitely a pointer that the looseleaf type of textbook or some other similar system should be produced, where pages with revisions could be easily inserted, and also, the portions of the book required for certain classes could easily be carried in to college as needed and later returned to their place in the book. In this way a textbook would remain relevant for the duration of a particular course, the purchase of the revised pages being easily and cheaply accomplished when necessary, and the whole could be of value as a secondhand book when an individual student has finished with it. No doubt this would affect greatly the sales of college textbook publishers, who are not in the business for purely altruistic reasons, but when the sheer waste involved in producing these updated textbooks year after year is considered, these days there should be no contest, in my opinion. We just cannot live any longer with the squandering of resources which took place in the so-called boom years. They were really the bust years in the true sense, though we were pitifully unaware of it.

In a sale I found a volume entitled "Webster's Third New International Dictionary and Seven Language Dictionary" which appears to be part of a set published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, in 1981.. The section on languages, entitled "The Britannica World Language Dictionary" gives the grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and useful phrases for French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Yiddish. English, the source language, is apparently counted in the seven. The grammar section for each language is short but comprehensive. The best thing about this book is that it includes Yiddish, which I have never come across before in any language book. According to the text "..this is the first time Yiddish words have appeared in dictionary form in Roman characters so that they are understandable to all who read English." There are probably quite a few of these old dictionary parts to be found in sales if you're lucky.

For anybody interested in languages I would like to mention www.freerice.com, which is a website run by the United Nations World Food Program. . When you go on you will find yourself on a page giving English words and asking you to give the correct meaning. Questions to which wrong answers are given are given again, until a right answer is obtained. Every time you get an answer right some rice is donated to poor countries. The donors are the advertisers on the site, it is all explained under 'Rice' on the top menu. On the top right of the box where you find the questions, you can click and find a menu of subjects, including mathematics, art history, from tomorrow Anatomy and most importantly from my point of view, there are vocabulary tests for German, French, Italian and Spanish. I would have been more pleased if there were a section for Russian and Chinese vocabulary, the latter in Pinyin for those of us who have not got around to mastering Chinese characters. It is easy to spend hours on this website, but you won't feel you are wasting time because you are testing your knowledge of languages and at the same time donating rice.

Another website is How To Learn Any Language:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/mezzofanti/biography/index.html and on the page to which this link leads on that site, you will find the fascinating story of one Cardinal Joseph Caspar Mezzofanti, born 17^th September, 1774 at Bologna, who was renowned for his vast knowledge of languages. One thing he and I have in common is that apparently he was not a great traveller, which often puzzles people who seem to think that if you are interested in languages you are of necessity interested in visiting foreign lands. As far as I am concerned this is definitely not the case. Of course in his day they didn't have aeroplanes, however, from my point of view air travel is just one more reason to remain at home.

An Irish site which has a very good section for those interested in learning languages is www.boards.ie, The page link is http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=217 .

There is no shortage of websites for language lovers, but those are my particular favourites. Perhaps if you have a personal favourite, you would be kind enough to put a link to it in the comment box on this blog so we can all try it out.

I have been collecting language books for many years. Some have more merits than others, for instance, there are books which are better at explaining grammar, or at providing the learner with colloquial phrases, and some systems are more suitable for certain types of learner than others, but they all have something of value to offer, and are worth holding on to and passing on to posterity.

Great Big Books

 I think very large books that are not dictionaries or cookery books are often thought of nowadays as coffee table books. Are all coffee table books very large? I tend to think of books so described as being shiny and new, usually unread, but toning in with the décor of their surroundings in such a way as to make them more ornamental than anything else. Who would want to be the first to put a mark on them? Certainly you can put them out on your coffee table without fear that they will be 'borrowed', because they are much too heavy. I would never have enough coffee tables for all my large books. However, I prefer smaller books, for reasons of portability, ease of reading and holding. I googled the term 'coffee table book' and found that they have certain characteristics in common: they are large, illustrations are of prime importance, text is usually sparse; the paper is high-quality, and finally, they are usually much more expensive than normal books.

The large books I am discussing today don't fulfil all those criteria. Although they are lavishly illustrated, there is a lot of text also. They are definitely for reading as well as for looking at. The first three are in the same series. They are “Vanishing Ireland”, published by Hodder Headline, Dublin, 2006, “Further Chronicles of a Disappearing World” published by Hachette Books, Ireland, 2009, and the most recent one “Recollections of Our Changing Times, also published by Hachette Books, Ireland, 2011.

These all are by photographer James Fennell and writer Turtle Bunbury. They follow the same basic arrangement, personal stories of elderly people in Ireland, with their photos alongside Most of the contributors are surprisingly much older than their images would imply. Their stories are simply fascinating and yet they describe in the main quite ordinary events. The style of writing is easygoing, the photographs are so lifelike that you feel as you read that you really know these people. Most of those within these covers are living in or near their original family home; in their lives they were not adventurers, nor keen travellers. Their lives are the lives of everyday folk, and yet there is something enchanting about them. My husband bought the first book in the series, and flew through it in a day. I bought him the other two for Christmas. If you buy them for yourself, they will definitely be very sought-after in years to come, not alone because they are so enthralling to read but for their value to social historians. In the photographs, besides the amazingly interesting faces of the subjects, you can see their kitchens and living rooms, the old fireplaces, the ranges, the pictures on the walls. Here is Paddy Gleeson, a farmer from East Clare who was born in 1904, talking:

'Once, I was coming to school and I met two fellows leading a three-year-old bullock with horns. On his horns was a placard -'The Land for the People and the Road for the Bullock'. And beneath the bull, they were dragging a man who was after evicting a poor widow woman from her home.' The widow's home had been knocked but 'the local people seen how fast it takes to build a house but they did it faster. She was evicted at ten in the morning and she was inside a house that night they built for her in the day! Timber and galvanised!'

In the second book, Denis Galvin from Kerry, born 1945, responds to an enquiry about his age:

'Stop a minute, if I were hung by a rope since I was in my early fifties, I'd be pretty quare looking by now.'   Well, it doesn't do to give too much away, I suppose.

In the third book in the series, Sam Codd of Wicklow, bonesetter, farmer and horse breeder, born 1926, talks about his cars:

'The first car I had was a Morris Minor and I never had anything else,' he says. 'I used to travel around a lot, as a bonesetter, and I do be in a lot of the old farmer places and all that craic. I had two cars here one time, one for taking the girls out on Sunday and one for everyday'.

As far as I can tell, it was the bones of animals he set, but who knows! He talks about the dances held in farmhouses after the threshing:

'They were great auld craic. I remember one lad, a fecker for doing tricks, who wasn't asked to the dance. So he got a ladder up to the house and threw a grain sack over the chimney and smoked out the people inside. He said “They asked me to the threshing, but they didn't ask me to the dance.” '

These books are indeed too beautiful to risk getting coffee rings on them. And if the surface of a coffee table is not available to someone to rest a mug on, I would imagine that mug rings would be an ever present danger. They are also fairly expensive, almost thirty Euro each where we bought them, but they are worth every cent.

Model and Miniature Railways, edited by Patrtick B. Whitehouse and John Adams, published by the Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited in First New English Library Edition dated 1976, turned up in a church book sale. It is full of photographs of miniature railways running through gardens, houses, countryside. There are tiny trains and ones big enough for children and even adults to sit on. Towards the back of the book are detailed plans of the little engines and carriages. When I saw this book I immediately thought “Sheldon would love this”. I don't know if you have ever watched the American situation comedy “The Big Bang Theory”, but Sheldon Cooper is one of the main characters in it. I never used to watch TV, but one day by chance I watched this, and now I know what it means to be a devoted fan. I watch every episode of it that I can. All the characters in it are wonderful, but most of all I love Sheldon. I saw an interview on Youtube with the actor who portrays him and it is amazing how different the actor is from his character. I think Sheldon probably has a type of Asperger's Syndrome. I find his character totally enthrallling, and the joy of the show is particularly in his relationships with the other characters. One of his many hobbies is model railways. If you get a chance to see this show, do take a look, and you will understand why this book would suit Sheldon. What a pleasure it would be to give it as a gift to him, and get one of his strange, grimacing smiles in return.

Two books by The Diagram Group, both on the subject of games and sports, well justify their size, and could easily sit waiting to be consulted on any kind of table or shelf within reach of the sports pundit or card player. These came from a Christmas sale in the local Community Centre. The first is “Family Fun & Games”, published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. New York, dated 1992, and the second is “The Official World Encyclopedia of Sports and Games – The rules, techniques of play and equipment for over 400 sports and 1,000 games”, published by Paddington Press Ltd., New York & London, 1979. Although I am certainly no expert, I would guess that there is hardly a game not catered for in these books; card games of all sorts, parlour games, board games, all the rules for these are here in addition to, in the encyclopedia, the rules and regulations for every sport under the sun. I would say these books would settle many an argument for sporty types, and are worth their weight as reference books alone. They are in lovely condition; gone are the days when people donated torn or stained books to such sales, I am happy to say, and at a Euro each they were definitely a bargain. This is the sale where I heard a prissy seller say “My goodness, I didn't realise so many of the village people read books.” After hearing that, I was quite pleased to find two quite old and rare books, one signed by a rather famous author, in the boxes under her nose, and to realise that she didn't know an antique book when she saw one.

A highly colourful book full of easy to follow text and terrific diagrams and photos is “How Everything In The Home Works and how to take the sting out of repair bills” published by the Reader's Digest Association London 2003, Every machine and piece of home equipment you can think of is included, from electrical machines such as washing machines, kettles, breadmakers, ovens, to wheeled machines such as bicycles, scooters and roller skates. All kinds of cameras, analogue, digital and video cameras are covered, DVD players, CD players and so forth. The emphasis is on maintenance more than repair, the point being that if you understand your device and take care of it you won't need to call the repairman very often if at all. It tells you whether the job is one you can deal with yourself or is one that you should leave to the professional. The beginning chapters deal with safety, masks, goggles, how not to kill yourself, in fact. Reader's Digest books are ones that I think are very much taken for granted; I thought about this especially when I heard that the company might be in some difficulty caused by the financial recession. They are among the most useful books you will ever come across, just think of the Reader's Digest Book of the Car, or their gardening and houseplant volumes. Their digests and books are published in many languages; my sister and I became very competent at reading French in our teens, when our mother bought a boxload of French Reader's Digests at an auction. So it seemed natural that when I found “How Everything in the Home Works” sitting on a shelf in the recycling centre, I would make it mine immediately. It is in lovely condition, with not a single crease on a page, nor even a mark. I can't help wondering why it was discarded. The books to be found at the recycling centre in general call up that question. I don't wait too long for answers, for I'm away home with my new treasures.

Spoken Lives

Listen to people chatting in a café, the noise of cups, the gasp of a coffee machine making a background rhythm to the rise and fall of the narrative; the gentle murmurs of verbal correspondence soothe and lull, without the necessity of personal input. That for me is the beauty of books in which people tell their personal stories; reading them is like listening at a distance; I'm not involved but am captivated by the language, the naturalness of ordinary people speaking out their lives.

All the better if there are photographs of the speakers., as is the case in two of the books I am writing about tonight. Seeing the faces of the speakers adds depth to the experience.

“Forgotten Voices Of The Great War” is by Max Arthur, in association with the Imperial War Museum, published by Ebury Press London in 2003. It was put together from tape recordings of veterans of the First World War from both sides, describing how they were recruited, their training and their experiences on the Western Front and in the Gallipoli campaign. We have read of these horrendous events many times before; they never fail to shock – the waste, the total destruction, but above all the terrible innocence and ignorance of the recruits of all social groupings in believing that the war would last at best a month or so, at worst, maybe a year. Most signed up at the recruiting centres, but some British were actually recruited at the music halls; others were moved to enlist by the finger pointing poster of Kitchener. Germans described the elation of arriving at the Front in trains and being greeted with adulation and flowers; what shocked me most were the women. Mothers wept with pride as their sons marched away; young women, who didn't have to go to the front themselves, handed out white feathers to those they saw in civilian clothing (even soldiers on leave).

Rifleman Norman Demuth of the London Rifle Brigade says:

“As well as being given white feathers, there was another method of approach. You would see a girl come towards you with a delightful smile all over her face and you would think to yourself, 'My word this is somebody who knows me.' When she got to about five or six paces from you she would suddenly freeze up and walk past you with a look of utter contempt and scorn as if she could have spat. That was far more hurtful than a while feather – it made you curl up completely and there was no replying because she had walked on.”

Now when I read about the women left without men after those war years, I don't feel the same sympathy, even though no doubt not all women were like that. Later, with the draft, it was different....and I know they were different times, but one hopes that people would never be so easily led again. Then into the mind come images of body bags flown in from Iraq....Afghanistan...whence next?

Heinrich Beutow was a German schoolboy in 1914. “My memories are those of a child of course. I was in a small German garrison town in 1914 and I remember very well the tremendous enthusiasm. ....I shall never forget the day when they marched out to the trains. All the soldiers were decorated with flowers, there was no gun which did not show a flower. Even the horses I think were decorated. And of course all the people followed them. Bands playing, flags flying, a terrific sort of overwhelming conviction that Germany now would go into war and win it very quickly.”

Kitty Eckersley, a mill worker in Clayton, near Manchester, described how her young husband joined up: They went to a show at the Palace Theatre: “...when we got there, everything was lovely. Vesta Tilley was on stage. She was beautifully dressed in a lovely gown of either silver or gold. But what we didn't know until we got there was that also on stage were Army officers with tables all set out for recruiting. She introduced those songs, 'We Don't Want To Lose You, But We Think You Ought To Go' and 'Rule Britannia', and all those kind of things. Then she came off the stage and walked all round the audience – up and down, either sides, down the middle – and the young men were getting up and following her. .....I don't quite know what happened but she put her hand on my husband's shoulder – he was on the end seat – and as the men were all following her, he got up and followed her too.” Sounds like mass hypnotism, doesn't it? Followed by what we now know was mass murder.

In “Catching Both Sides of the Wind”, by Anita Jackson, five black pastors in Britain in 1982 speak about their lives. This book was published in.1985 by the British Council of Churches, London, and it turned up on the shelves of the recycling centre in lovely condition. Once again, as in any conversation, some things stick out. It's hard to know what is the truth. I found one of the pastors more frank than the rest. The others all seemed to be trying to convey how much less permissive a society it was in the West Indies than in Britain when they arrived during the 1950s.. In their former homelands, according to a couple of the pastors, the church educated and the people looked up to them, and were quite conservative in their behaviour. Reverend Robinson Milwood, a Methodist Minister in London says

"....let me go back and make clearer what I mean by black values. A black value in family life is that the child leaves his family home only for his own home......The permissiveness in Western culture now means that little value is placed on respect for elders in this country, and this has been the main reason for the gap between the black young and the parent generation....There is a clear-cut hiatus between black adults and youngsters in this country,.....”

Pastor Ira Brooks, a Pentecostal Minister, says:

"In the West Indies there's no such thing as a child being born out of wedlock being unlawful. It was common for a man to cohabit with a woman, and she was his wife. And people didn't see anything wrong with that until different standards made it a disgrace to live like that.” He went on to say that people of his generation in Britain were often fearful that their children would find out what life in the West Indies had really been like.

What is the truth? No doubt, as usual, it is somewhere in between the two poles. As with information gleaned from café conversations, who knows? Sometimes we tell it as we want it to be. Appearances seemed to matter a lot. A brother of mine worked in a factory in London as a young man, and laughed as he told me about some of his fellow West Indian workers, who arrived in suits and with briefcases containing only their sandwiches, changed into working clothes, then did the same in reverse at going-home time. It was important to them that neighbours and relatives believed they were office workers for prestige purposes. In the book,there are pretty bleak stories about the way even black pastors were treated. The police, all the pastors were agreed, were not helpful to the black man. Of course they were talking in the 1980s about thirty years earlier, when they had come to Britain. However, the feeling seemed to be that in the 1980s not much had changed. Sometimes it seems from news reports on TV even now that things haven't changed all that much. Most of the pastors hoped to go home eventually, although as one said, their children being British was a kind of a trap for them, because the children had no desire to go back to their parents' homeland. Landlords exploited them, what is new about that tale? Furnished flats had smelly beds bought secondhand, anything was good enough for black tenants. The Irish shared that experience. Thank goodness for modern tenancy laws. But these are the things you don't read about in history books, and yet they are the stories of people, and surely are more important than events. It seems to me that most history is actually the history of politics and warfare, with anything else incidental. I myself did not realise that oral histories of ordinary people's lives were something fairly recent. Now that I think about it, of course it was the advent of the tape recorder that brought these stories to the fore.

“Dublin Street Life & Lore – An Oral History” was written by Kevin C. Kearns, and published in 1991 by Glendale Publishing Ltd., Dun Laoghaire, Ireland., and I found it at a book sale some years ago. It's full of stories told by elderly people who lived and worked in the city of Dublin from the beginning of the last century. Here are the voices of lamplighters, dockers, postmen, chimney sweeps, pawnbrokers, street dealers, newspaper boys, jarveys, even fortune tellers. Some of the reminiscences are surprising.  This is Lizzy Byrne, Moore Street Dealer, at the time of the book aged 82, talking about the Easter Rising:

“..I remember the Rebellion...1916. I was playing on Henry Street when that happened, beside the Post Office. We didn't know what it was, we were too young. We heard the shouting and people got all excited. They were afraid for their life! We locked ourselves up for nearly a week. You'd be afraid to come out. It was only fighting between two certain crowds, you know. But we let them go on with it and it only lasted for about a week.” That is quite a casual description of the Rising that led to the foundation of the new Irish state.

There was one particularly sad memory, told by Willie Murphy, a docker 79 years old when he speaks in the book. He is describing the 'readings' dockers had to endure every day to have a chance of work. The stevedore stood calling out the names of those who would have work that day, calling his own family and relatives first, and this was the 'reading':

“At readings men had it in their minds that there was something at home wanting on that table. And if they didn't get a job that just put them down in the depths. Heartbreaking. It's true.....you could see the tears in their eyes. And they'd run from one read to another cause there'd be readings for other ships. Like some of them we'd call cross-country runners cause they could run that fast to get to another read. As soon as one reading was over you could see them run...” It doesn't bear thinking about, what it must have been like, how soul-destroying, how crushing on self-esteem. No matter what things are like now in Ireland, they are better than that. Also let's not forget that they are still like that in other countries, something we shouldn't forget when immigrants come to us in hopes of a better life.

There was humour too. This is Mickey Sheridan, a 68 year old Jarvey in 1991, talking about another old Jarvey:

“,,,And one old chap, Barney Doherty., had a big old heavy horse under the cab. It should have been under a plough and not under a cab. He wasn't a smart-going horse. So the fare he had in the cab put his head out and says, “hey, jarvey, will you put on the lashes? I can walk quicker!”. And he'd three articles with him. So Barney opened the door and says, “if you can walk quicker there's the path..and there's your three articles of luggage to keep you from breaking into a gallop!” Oh, they were characters.”

I lost a book friend two days ago, the second in a year. He's been a friend for a long time, but not what you could call a really close, see-every-day kind of friend. When we were in touch, it was usually to do with books, and we could talk about them for hours. We would ring each other if we heard of a book sale; he had a friend who ran a bookshop in Dublin, and if I needed a book I would ring him and he would ring his friend to see if he could track it down. One time I was looking for a really obscure title called “The Confessions of Zeno”, an English translation of Italo Svevo's “La Coscienza di Zeno”. This was in the days before you just looked it up on the computer and bought it online. I had searched and phoned everywhere without success; a few minutes after I rang him, he got back to me in great glee saying that incredibly his friend in the bookshop had actually had that very book in his hands when he called, and in the afternoon he brought it to my house still elated over the coincidence. A major part of Svevo's story is Zeno's efforts to give up smoking. My friend shared that problem with Zeno. In November he told me he was dying and the day before yesterday he did.

In life he was a soldier, and later a fireman. One story he loved to tell was about how, going to the fire station one morning in his uniform and halted at traffic lights, he spotted a car going on fire. Leaping out of the car he grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran over and put the fire out. The astonished driver said to him “My God, you fellows certainly are quick”.   He was funny and clever, a wonderful raconteur and unpublished writer; but above all, he loved books. If there are celestial libraries, I will know where to find my two friends when I make that journey myself. Does that sound strange? I can't help noticing that nature has her reasons, for everything . After we have left our teens and twenties, we are not so fast on our feet any more; younger people beat us at most types of active sports. Even if we are very fit, we were probably fitter when we were younger. It is the same with all animals – the older become slower. There is no longer a need for speed. If this is not true of all people, it certainly is of most. Also at a certain age, we stop reproducing, especially if we are women. Once again, this is a physical part of our lives declining because we have fulfilled that part of our destiny. But right up to the moment we die, we can study, read, absorb information of all sorts. Is this some shortsightedness on the part of nature? I think not. And so let us all, eventually, adjourn to the Great Library.