Chapter 19 Joyce
Joyce
‘Libertatem per Lectio’
Friends. On this strangest of wartime days, I leave with you my favourite Virginia Woolf quote from A Room of One’s Own .
. . ‘I like reading books in the bulk . . . Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.’
Yours with love, Joyce
Ten hours to go. Then it would all be over. The travelling library would park up for good. So many stories would remain unread, imaginations just that bit duller, lives a little more colourless.
‘Ready?’ Adela asked, shaking her from her reverie.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ Joyce replied.
Adela eased her foot off the clutch and they drove in silence to their first stop, Joyce gazing out of the window as North London slid by.
The sky was a handkerchief of clear blue and a fresh breeze chased clouds across the patched-up rooftops.
London was such a curious sight these days.
Pigs in royal parks. Allotments in Buckingham Palace.
Libraries built over underground tunnels and bunk beds on station platforms.
‘I wonder what Dorotha’s looking at right now?’ Joyce didn’t know what made her say it.
Adela’s fingers tightened round the steering wheel.
‘I dreamt of her last night. She was standing in front of a high bridge and I kept pleading with her to cross the bridge, to get to safety. But instead, she turned to me and smiled mysteriously. Then she was falling, falling through a deep, dark forest, but instead of trees it was filled with books, their spines the trunks.’
Joyce lapsed into silence, trying to work out what to reply, when her gaze was snagged by a newspaper billboard.
‘Pull over.’
Adela parked and Joyce dashed out and bought a copy of the Daily Herald.
‘Oh no . . .’ she cried, scanning the headline.
‘What is it?’ Adela called from the library van window.
But Joyce couldn’t speak.
virginia woolf believed dead.
the novelist and essayist, who has been missing from her home since last friday, is believed to have been drowned at rodmell, near lewes, where she and her husband, leonard sidney woolf, had a country residence.
mr woolf said tonight: ‘mrs woolf is presumed to be dead. she went for a walk last friday, leaving a letter behind . . . her body, however, has not been recovered.’
The words became jumbled as tears filled Joyce’s eyes.
‘Oh no . . . oh gosh no . . .’
Joyce felt floored.
‘Virginia Woolf is missing, believed dead,’ she managed eventually.
‘I’m so sorry, Joyce. I know you were a fan of her writing. You and my sister.’
Joyce got back in the travelling library, feeling like she was not in her own body. ‘I know it sounds silly,’ she said at last. ‘It’s not as if I knew her, but through her writing I felt as if I did.’
Her thoughts went immediately to Dorotha.
Virginia Woolf had been the catalyst to their friendship.
From the moment Dorotha had pressed A Room of One’s Own into her hand, Woolf’s pen had drawn a bridge between the two women, spanning an ocean and connecting their hearts and minds.
When Joyce settled down with a Woolf novel, Dorotha never felt that far away.
They had both helped her see the world afresh.
But now there would be no more Woolf books and Dorotha would slip further into the void of uncertainty.
Woolf’s death felt like some awful prelude to the death of their friendship. But she could not share that with Adela. They drove the rest of the way in silence, both lost in their own thoughts.
Adela pulled to a stop at The Grove, in Highgate village, and Joyce unlocked the library, folding down the library steps.
A bittersweet pang hit her as the alkaline tang of books and the scent of old leather washed over her.
She glanced around the small, book-lined interior of her mobile library.
If a library could talk – could tell its own story – what tales this grand old lady would spill.
The people she had ferried to safety, the stories and secrets whispered by the stacks, the dreams indulged in this hallowed little space.
Joyce thought back wistfully to the launch.
People without books are like houses without windows.
How much bleaker and narrower all their lives would be when this library closed down.
She turned and frowned. There was usually a huge queue to be found here. This stop was right opposite an ARP unit, and not far from a munitions factory. Sometimes the queue snaked down the street and around the corner. There wasn’t a soul about.
‘Strange,’ she mused. ‘It is Wednesday two p.m., yes?’
‘Yes,’ Adela confirmed. ‘This is our regular advertised time. Where is everybody?’
‘I don’t know. Busy, I suppose. Come on then, we may as well head to the next stop.’
A short while later they pulled up at Twisden Road.
This was always Joyce’s favourite stop. It was close to a textile factory staffed by the most raucous girls she’d ever met, who loved nothing more than a gossip and a bodice-ripper. But today there was no clicking of heels, no dirty laughter.
It was the same story at Sharpleshall Street, on the corner of Regent’s Park Road and Camden Square.
They scanned the silent street.
‘Maybe the council are right to shut us down,’ she said at last. ‘We’re not exactly in demand today.’
‘Poppycock,’ Adela said bluntly.
Finally, a middle-aged man in a mac stopped in front of the van. ‘Tea, please.’
‘Sorry but we aren’t a WVS van,’ Adela replied. ‘I can lend you a book though.’
‘A book!’ he exclaimed.
‘Yes, we’re a mobile library.’
The man wrinkled his nose. ‘No thanks. I hate reading.’
‘Philistine,’ Adela muttered.
‘I beg your pardon!’
‘I said, can you not see the sign?’ she said, gesturing to the side of the van.
The man stomped off.
‘Come on,’ Joyce said, feeling a stab of disappointment, ‘we may as well head to the last stop.’
She hadn’t been expecting bunting and cake, but it would have been nice if a few of their patrons had turned out to wish them well. The whole of Swiss Cottage underground knew it was their last day, after all.
They pulled up outside St Pancras Town Hall. As they did, Joyce realised the steps were crowded with people, busier even than when they had launched the library here four months ago.
‘Must be a run on free disinfectant,’ she mused.
‘I don’t think so,’ Adela replied, turning off the engine. ‘Look closer.’
Every person on the steps or milling about outside the town hall was reading. There must have been close to 200 people, all holding a book in their hand.
Joyce and Adela glanced at each other.
‘What on earth . . .’ Joyce breathed.
At their arrival, a tiny figure in a feather boa rose to her feet on the library steps. Mitsy was holding a placard in one hand and a megaphone in the other.
‘Don’t close the book on our mobile library,’ she said, her voice reverberating off the town hall.
Flanking her were Lilley and Rosie.
‘Save our library! Save our library!’ More people joined in with the chant, adding their angry voices to the protest.
Speechless, Joyce scanned the febrile crowd.
Half of Swiss Cottage underground were gathered on the steps, reading or chanting.
And faces she’d not seen in a while, like Nan, who she had first read to all those months ago in the shelter.
All the regulars on their stops were here, clutching homemade banners that made Joyce’s blood race.
In war, libraries bring us peace. KEEP THE MOBILE LIbrARY ON THE ROAD, and her personal favourite . . . Save our library. Bookworms will die.
And sitting together on the top step were Harry and Elfreda, wordlessly reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. He glanced up from the pages and smiled at her, his gaze so full of love. In that moment, Joyce fell that bit harder.
She felt something tug at her hand. She glanced down and saw the little boy from the school hall in Canning Town. He was holding Peter Pan in one hand and a sign in the other.
Reading saved my life.
His mother Jean stepped forward shyly. Gone was the exhausted, traumatised woman she had last seen boarding a coach. In her place was a calm, rosy-cheeked woman.
‘Don’t worry,’ she smiled. ‘We only got the train up from Kent for the day. When I heard about this protest, I knew I had to come and support you.’
‘You didn’t have to do that, Jean,’ Joyce gasped.
‘Oh, but I did. What you did for us . . .’ she broke off, struggling not to cry. ‘It was the first bit of real kindness I’d been shown for many months.’ She laughed through her tears. ‘And as for him, he’s virtually read the print off that book.’
She broke off. The town hall door swung open and a bespectacled man stood, puce with anger.
‘You’re causing a public spectacle that is detrimental to morale.’
‘Take your morale and shove it up your hole!’ Lilley yelled, grabbing the megaphone off Mitsy. ‘Save our library . . . Save our library . . .’
Dore strode up the steps.
‘Aah good, Mr Silverman, disperse these people immediately.’
It was only a fleeting glance, but Joyce noticed it. Dore looked at Mitsy. She smiled and nodded. Dore drew himself up to his full five-feet-two-inch height.
‘I shall do no such thing, Mr Foster. These people have a right to protest. This mobile library is the glue that holds together our community. Need I remind you that the Public Library Act 1850 was a social reform designed to improve the physical and moral health of the British public. We ought to be ushering people through the door, not closing it in their face!’
‘Need I remind you, Councillor Silverman,’ he hissed, ‘that as chair of the borough libraries you’re sailing perilously close to the wind.’