Spitalfields

They came like vultures, hesitant, hovering, drawn by the pheromone of dying books. Many I knew — the dealer world is a small one. Tall Lionel in that same charcoal suit, shiny at ass and elbow, working the plastic bins like a hunting heron: perfect stillness, the stab down snatch up of a cloth-bound volume. Louisa in Louboutins, wearing a dust mask, her heels and trademark red soles teeter-tottering around in the dumpster as she flicked over broken-backed volumes with a litter-picker. She feared fungi that grew in the bindings of old, damp books. Terry Prentice-Hall. I thought he died years ago. I'm sure I went to his funeral. Still questing for the mythical Harry Potter first editions. Some faces I knew by repute: Nancy and Flea, the Parasites of Enfield. Q. R. Rice, wafted in from Oxford. His cotton manuscript gloves left no one in any doubt that Spitalfields was unendurable to anyone of refinement. Some I did not know by face or gossip: a woman and man in their twenties throwing academic textbooks into a wheelbarrow. "Charity workers," Tall Lionel wheezed. For a big man, he moved quietly. I hadn't seen him slide in close to my ear. "They send them to Africa, India, some needy shit-hole. Fuck me sideways, there's Niall Rudd. Last I heard he was doing three years in Ford. Always was a shite forger."

Some were not even dealers. I recognized Martin Parr, the photographer; that Spitalfields blogger and his cat; Dan Cruickshank, the architectural historian and television presenter. The Golden Page first opened its doors in 1933: it had long been a beating organ of Spitalfields.

I have drunk the legendary Vietnamese coffee and supped the sulphurous vegetable broth on the collapsing sofas. I have sat through poetry readings when I couldn't afford the electricity at home, I have sat through fifty shades of red political theorists and jeered Bliar Blair and his warmongering. I have huddled over the gas heater on February evenings, high on carbon monoxide. I have dragged myself up through Saturday hangovers to comb through the house clearances as they arrived out of the back of a van: first refusal on anything with a hint of war about it. That was my specialism, the Second World War. You specialize. There are too many books in the world. Tall Lionel hunted old SF paperbacks, Chris Foss covers preferred. Louisa in Louboutins dealt in crime, the pulpier the better. War for me, in hardback. There will always be a market for war.

Now The Golden Page was dead. The stock Richie could not flog even at ten for a pound was stacked in plastic boxes, on trestle tables, dumped in a steel skip on Folgate Street under a quick November sky threatening rain. The Liberty has always been a liminal place, caught between the City and the city, a gutter of refuge, a huddle of difference, pressed from both sides. Jews and Huguenots. The towers of finance and Banglatown. Gentrification won. Richie had been unable to resist the offer for the building. I would have too. Fuck Vietnamese coffee. Cappuccino in Umbria for Richard Frowse.

When we were sated, when we could stomach no more books, Tall Lionel suggested the Hawksmoor, to raise a glass to the old place, but I was dispirited by my colleagues, by their small-minded acquisitiveness, by the weather, by the thin drizzle now turning old book covers to pulp in the slowly filling dumpster. I wanted away from these ghastly fossils. I was of a different generation from my colleagues, but I understood that irst day when I caught another acquisitive eye working the stacks in Clapham High Street War on Want: this would be my cohort, my college, my congregation, for the rest of my professional life. Fingers around hot whisky on a cold evening, carping and moaning about postage charges, eBay T&Cs and PayPal's ever-increasing transaction times.

I made my excuses. Loot to log, titles to research, purchases to post. And the possibility of wonder. My chilled fingers had detected a discontinuity in the bound leaves of one of my acquisitions, an otherwise unremarkable and, to me, unknown book of poetry; Time Was. By E.L. Anonymous initials were enough to trigger my curiosity, as was the date. May 1937, Ipswich. No publisher listed. Decent paper, hand-stitched binding, header tapes in fair order and good fabric binding. Gold-leaf low-relief of an hourglass, half run through. As a free book, a dumpster find, it was worth picking up. But my fingers had sensed something more rare and valuable: an inclusion. A bookmark, perhaps from a long-dead English-language bookshop in a European capital — perhaps farther afield. Istanbul. Cairo. Perhaps a hand-stitched sampler, marking a page. A postcard. A love letter. Dried flowers; a nosegay, a posy, a rose clipped the night before battle. Photographs; best of all with love, with signatures, with farewells. Provenances, I called them. If they were connected with the book — a history of a campaign, a military biography, a popular, long-out-of-print thriller or crime story mentioned in the letter or card--I sold them. They added value. The orphans, the refugees, I kept.

The Tube was crowded and smelly. I let the book fall open where the insertion demanded. The smell of fusty paper, damp cover binding, obliterated the stink of fast food and electricity.

A letter. A single sheet, still creased from the envelope despite years between pages. My hands shook as I read it.

Dear Ben,

I watched the lights along the Western Harbour drop away until they merged with the dark horizon. I made the taxi driver take me out along Al Max until I could see the lights no more. I never thought they would take you away like this, in a troopship. I suppose His Majesty needs his photo-boy more than I do. I suppose we should have made more of the time. We never do. We become so lazy in love. But love is laziness, the gift of each other's time, to spendthrift or invest. I remember your arms, I remember dreadful gin, I remember the perfume of your hair. Your skin smells of honey. Those precious times — those precious rooms — at Osborne House and the Heliopolis Club. Rev Anson always suspected.

The barrage balloons are going up all along the Corniche. The air is wonderfully still, I swear I can hear the guns from the front. Light sparks along the western horizon. Christ knows what's happening out there. It reminds me of Russia, when all we could do was watch the world burn.

In three nights I fly. I know what you'd say: Alex is the oldest of pleasure-cities: be bright, be gay, drink more of the dreadful gin, drink a skinful. This city holds no attractions for me. Next to you, its pleasures are dry and stale. I need to be where you are, wherever you are. Ironic that I will leave later yet arrive before you.

I fear the next translation is not far off — you develop a sense for it, like smelling a storm. I dread being apart from you. Should we become separated, I'll leave a copy behind me, here in the usual place.

Time was, time will be again, Tom

Shingle Street

I have lived twenty years on this street of stones. I have known it in all seasons and all elements, in its many temperaments.

I know it in the easterlies, when the sky is black as judgment and the wind seems to strip the land back like skin peeling from a jaw and the sea drives hard onto the shingle and the knock of rolling pebbles becomes a thunder so great I can hear it from Ferry Road.

I know it in snow, those...