I reach into the box, without expectation. I have thought of many ways of dealing with the ‘not now boxes’ and what those thoughts have taught me is that I will not have the perseverance needed to research and write the detailed story behind everything that is in them. And yet, somehow I can’t just let them go, unhandled, unlooked at, unregarded, uncared for.
I fear that if I start to handle them, one at a time, to feel their presence, their history, their value, that I may not be able to let them go at all. Finding reasons to keep things when I am trying to pare back my life feels counter-intuitive, but I hear a whisper that says if I was willing to let them go, if I had no compunction about it, if I was certain that there would be nothing I would want to keep or to find a very specific home for, then these things would not be in boxes, they would have gone with all of the other history that I did let go, in removers’ vans, in skips, and recycle bins, and bags to charity – all of the things I let go with a hope that maybe they would find another home, another life, another use, but let go none-the-less and decided not to think about afterwards.
Only, I do think about them: the things I let go. I was told, that way madness lies. We cannot hold on to everything. We are not meant to do so. We are meant to choose what we will hold, and give over to others our surplus. Surplus to requirements is a phrase I have yet to negotiate peace with. It feels insulting to say that something someone once treasured is surplus to requirements. I am trying to find my path to accepting that what it really means is over-abundance, joyful excess, available to be gifted, shared, reframed, reformatted, reused, recycled, re-loved.
Letting things go is necessary. Things sometimes, simply need to be removed to create Ma (間) – what the Japanese call ‘negative space’, but we might simply call space…the gap, the emptiness, the waiting-to-be-filled-or-not potentiality.
I couldn’t keep everything. I had to choose. Now I am beginning to choose again.
I reach into the box, without expectation. I pull out a Holy Bible. The word Holy is not my value judgement. It is how the book is labelled. In format it is a little under 4” x 6”. Bound in black leather, that overhangs the pages. If you wrapped it with a cord or a leather thang, bound it tightly the overhangs might just meet all around, protecting the precious pages.
The rigidity of the card beneath the leather holds, but in handling it, the book feels soft and warm and well-handled. It begs to be caressed and held. And when I pick it up, it asks to be breathed in. It asks to be smelled, and I oblige.
It smells of church. I am being specific here. It does not smell of temple or synagogue or mosque – although my experiences of those are limited – it smells of British damp and stone and old books and libraries. It smells of pews and pulpits and a particular form of prayer. It is a scent I recognise, for all my Sunday School was in a new plain brick-built chapel scarcely older than I was.
It has the feeling of a book that has been well-travelled, the look of one that has been well handled and the integrity of one that has perhaps not been often read. The bindings are intact, the gilt-edged pages do not fall open at favoured passages, there is not a corner turned or a forgotten bookmark. I wonder where this book has been and whether it was ever read. I wonder if, maybe, the stories were familiar enough – known by heart or half-remembered doesn’t matter – familiar enough is enough, to know the essence of something doesn’t need us to know the thing entire. I wonder if its owner carried it and the knowing it was there to be called up if needed was enough. I wonder if in the times of war it flew in the air, or if it was left safe at home. I wonder if its owner ever did what I cannot resist doing: holding it, feeling the weight of its words, that sit somehow lightly in the hand…if he ever felt the need to bring it to his face and breathe in the history of its scent. I wonder, simply, what this small book meant to him.
I wonder if its precisely one thousand pages were a co-incidence or if the type had been designed to achieve that end.
I wonder if his eyesight, after days in tropical sun and nights of flying through frigid air, was up to deciphering this print. Mine are not.
I love that there are maps. One is labelled “Palestine in the time of our Saviour”. The other is headed “The travels of St Paul”. I love that each page is bordered with the historical dates, the boldness with which these dates start, at Genesis, with 4004 B.C. The certainty of it. A book printed by the Oxford University Press stating that the world was created a mere four thousand years before Christ walked upon it…surely even when this was printed that could no longer be common belief. And yet, there it was. In black and white on gilt edged pages between leather covers, the whole smelling of history and cold stone and mustiness.
The blank front page is inscribed in blue-black ink in a confident hand,
Richard.George.Meale.
Born. 7th December
1922
I find the inscription strange. There is no dedication as such. Just the name and the date. Would it have been a birth present? A christening present? The full-stops are interesting too. Richard. George. Meale. So emphatic a way of announcing a name. Born. As if simply being born is itself such a momentous achievement. Perhaps it is.
Tucked inside is a photograph. At first sight it looks like a little girl, a toddler with a mop of blond curls and a dress and dimpled knees, tiny white socks and button-bar shoes, but I’m sure that’s Richard. I didn’t know him for very long and I knew him in the 1980s, a good sixty odd years after that photograph, but I’m sure it’s him.
That doesn’t really make sense though. If it is his Bible, he wouldn’t carry a picture of himself would he? Then I remember Paddy. I was never clear on the relationship, but I think Paddy was a sister…perhaps it’s not Richard I see, perhaps it’s his little sis. My link to the family is too fractured with too much blood-red and spleen-yellow water under the bridge for me to find out now.
The picture has been folded and is ink-stained. Maybe it was sent from home in a letter to a war zone, a reminder of home, a silly sentimentality, a do-you-remember? A know-that-we-remember. Perhaps.
~ / ~
I open the book at random. The Book of Nehemiah. The subtitle across the top of the page reads The names of those who had married strange wives, but that relates to the end of the Book of Ezra. I’m not familiar with either. I don’t know my Bible.
In memory it feels as though the Methodist teachings of my childhood took us straight from Genesis to Matthew. Creation of the world to a totally new philosophy…from the fall from grace to one road to regaining it…missing out any of that messy eye-for-eye stuff, moving straight to other-cheeks-turned, from the vengeful god to the loving one. We must have done the bit about floods and arks, and burning bushes, and promised lands – the bits that have more resonance now as the bushes are burning again and the floods are coming – but I’m sure I never understood the story about the whale. Then again, I think Moby Dick is over-rated too.
The book sits on my desk as I write. I think about it as ‘the book’ rather than “The Book”. I was brought up Christian and rejected the faith. If there is anything ‘holy’ about this book for me, it is in the nature of it simply being a book, a very old book. It is the artefact that entrances me.
It would seem (from the look, from the inscription, from a brief internet search) to be about 110 to 130 years old.
It sits on my desk as I write and I keep picking it up. Holding it. Strangely, whenever I do so, I automatically lift it into both hands, thumbs meeting across its front cover, fingers interlaced supporting it behind. An automatic prayer stance? Whenever I pick it up I am struck by how tactile its leather cover is, worn, wrinkle-smooth in the way of the skin of a sunburnt much-loved elder…and just as desirous of being stroked again, and held, and valued for the intrinsic being as much as for the knowledge held.
Wisdom is a gift of age, but the price is that the wisdom is more valued than the vessel that holds it. An old woman of the village is respected and her wisdom sought…but maybe what she really longs for isn’t that respect but the love that passed with youth, the kindness of a touch, skin to skin, gentle or rough, the value of the thing in and of its self. Empty. Whole.
I love the book simply as a book. The more I think about it. The more I touch it and wonder about the life it has led, the more I know that this first thing out of a box I am supposed to be emptying is a thing I am unlikely to let go.
As I keep going back to it, I notice that there are turned corners. The pages are so thin, they don’t stand out. I take a step back to read them…what pages are marked and to ponder why.
I read the pages, several of the Psalms and somewhere in the middle of Daniel, and I am not moved by anything I find there. I am not moved by the language or the story or the sentiments. I wonder again if the pages were deliberately marked or not. There is a deal of begging for mercy and prayers for the defeating of enemies. Perhaps I live in the wrong time, or have the wrong sensibility to fully understand.
~ / ~
I go back to my own shelves, to my mother’s Bible. Slightly larger in plan, its page-edge-gilding rose-coloured with only a hint of gold. The inscription in the front of this one is in her hand and is a simple date: 1958
Half-heartedly written, tiny, slantwise across the corner, as if it were a trespass, a despoiling, to write anything at all. No other thoughts, no claiming it as her own. Mam’s relationship with religion was something I never fully understood. I know that she did not want to be married in church and had to be persuaded to it by her sisters. She conceded that as she was moving away, a non-church wedding might look rushed or forced and would reflect badly on the family she was leaving behind. I took it all to mean that she was not a believer.
And yet every time she went to church, she would kneel before seating herself. I never saw her put her hands together in supplication. I never saw her take communion. I never talked to her about what she felt or believed or knew. But I remember that she would walk into the stall, and then kneel or crouch, her right hand closed, thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, eyes closed. Silent.
I don’t know if she prayed, or spoke to her lost father and brothers, or simply took those moments to breathe in the hushed calm of a house of worship, which we all feel whether we are of the faith or not.
My parents married in 1959. I suspect that her bible was bought as a preparation for a church wedding. I can’t help feeling it never got much use. If Mam had a faith, it wasn’t a church-going, bible-reading kind of faith. It was a warm, empathic, human, loving kind of trust.
I often asked Dad about his beliefs. Normally he would respond with humour, but not always. He once said we tried to make sure you had enough information to make up your own mind. Another time he said sometimes you need faith, because that is all there is. He said it, as if he had been there.
~ / ~
I pick up the old book again, and hold it and smell it and look at the photograph of that child long dead. I will never know much of its history, but what I can know with reasonable certainty is that it has lived in this bungalow almost as long as the bungalow has been here. If the telling I have of the history of the property is accurate, then for half its life, or thereabouts, that book has lived here. I may never read it, but it would be wrong to make it homeless. Clive & I never got around to uniting our families, so maybe there’s a tiny bit of resonance to be found it placing his stepfather’s Bible alongside my Mam’s. Each to be valued for what it is, even if I don’t know ‘exactly’ what that is, perhaps more than for what it has to say.
~/ ~
