By Vincent J. Doherty

 

“The Irish like Dickens. You’re Irish aren’t you?” The ‘expert’ on Dickens and the Irish was Bob the secondhand bookseller in the market place near our new London home.
“Nice set of books,” he added, sensing a sale and recognising me from previous transactions.
Already familiar with Oliver Twist and the murderous Bill Sikes, the orphan Piper, the saintly Joe Gargery and the escaped convict Abel Magwitch, here they were with Scrooge and Tiny Tim in front of me, a treasure trove, all of Charles Dickens’ novels together.

I picked the precious well-worn volumes off the shelf admiring them one by one while assuring my waiting grandmother that possession of them would enhance my education no end and surely speed me along the fast track to the higher echelons of academia.

“Two quid the lot,” was Bob’s price. A bargain but not bargain enough for a widow’s pension in the Fifties. With a regretful shake of her head she turned to walk away. Sensing he was about to lose a sale, Bob countered, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Make it two bob each. Thirty two shillings the lot.”

My grandmother hesitated, probably calculating quickly how much she could afford, then looking in her purse before carefully counting out the cost while I gleefully gathered my precious prize.

1958 London was a very lonely place for a thirteen year old boy from a small Irish town. Arriving in that bustling city a few weeks before, homesick and far from everything and everybody I was familiar with, I’d found myself in strange surroundings barely coping with busy people who even spoke differently from me.
A rare consolation during those bleak times was our Saturday shopping expeditions to the market where I invariably managed to drag my grandmother towards Bob’s stall – if only to gaze longingly along the often ragged shelf after shelf of ‘treasures’.

She was not a great reader let alone a woman with a lot of book learning, but my grandmother wanted a good education and a ‘white collar’ job for me at the end of it. Through no fault of her own during the long ago days of her childhood she’d never had an opportunity to enjoy much of an education.

No older than ten and barely able to read and write, she was taken out of school to work at home looking after a younger brother while her widowed mother earned the family’s keep day and night at her sewing machine.
There was little time for reading anything apart from the local newspaper now and again and books were an expensive luxury when there was so much to do and hardly enough time to do it. Barely into her twenties she was married and had four children in as many years before widowhood by the time she was thirty.

The years between the World Wars were hard years for poor people. Doctors and medical treatment of any kind cost money and death was a too frequent caller.
First she lost a daughter, dead at eighteen months, and then a son, gone at four, finally her young husband soaked through damming flax and succumbing to pleurisy. All but destitute, her home was a farm labourer’s cottage and when there was no farm labourer living there there was no cottage. Instead it was back to her mother’s home with her remaining daughters and the sewing machine.
In an ideal world she would have gradually made her way and lived happily ever after but Ireland in the Fifties was not a land of great opportunities for many. I would receive a good education but whether I would be able to earn a decent living at the end of it was another matter.

When she might have been liking forward to the ‘cottage with roses round the door’ it was time instead to ‘up sticks’ and set off ‘across the water’.
I think she was as quietly proud and fond of my new Dickensian acquisition as I was.

“You’ll have these books when you won’t have me,” she told me quietly as I arranged all sixteen volumes of them carefully on a makeshift shelf. I had her for scarcely another year but I read all my Dickens eventually, most of them more than once as they’ve become my constant companions following me faithfully from one place to another throughout the rest of my lifetime.
They’ve worn well most of them but ‘Little Dorrit’ is in danger of falling apart and ‘Hard Times’ has seen better days. It took me a long time to ‘achieve’ a ‘white collar’ job and I’ve never made it to the higher echelons of academia but all these years later I’ve still got the treasured novels of Charles Dickens. ÷