The Journal of Dora Damage(56)
‘Mama. I think the angels are God’s babies.’
‘Are we not all God’s babies?’
‘Yes, but they’re the ones who stay up with Him in Heaven.’
So I kissed her, and padded downstairs to make up Peter’s poultice. I stirred up some bread and water in a pan, and when it was piping hot, laid out the boiling paste on a clean rag. Then I hurried back upstairs to find which extremity Peter required it on tonight.
‘No, not now,’ he moaned. ‘Not any more. Come to bed. Come, comfort me.’
And so I slipped off my smock, but instead of pulling on my nightgown I lay next to him in just my chemise, placed his head on my upper arm and stroked his cheeks, while he muttered at me. ‘Stay with me, nursie. Don’t leave me, nursie. Don’t go back to work, Dora.’
So I extinguished the candle, and lay still, in the darkness, listening to the chuff and pull of Jack’s saw in the workshop below. When Peter’s snuffles turned to snores, I extricated myself from his heavy head, pulled on my smock once more, and tiptoed downstairs. The clock was striking ten, and the night air was chilly.
Jack and I worked together, illuminated by a single candle stuck in the ridges of the book press, until he left me as the church clock struck midnight. I stopped as it was tolling two, extinguished the candle, and went into the kitchen where I cleaned the knives by moonlight with soda crystals and emery paper. I couldn’t have left them soaking overnight, for the steel blade would start to rust, and the handles would rot. I was tired, but I decided to set the Black Drop to brew there and then, as it would take several weeks to ferment: the mixture of opium, verjuice, yeast, sugar and nutmeg was my mother’s trusted recipe, only she had never had the privilege of pure Turk in her concoctions. Finally, I raked out the kitchen fire and laid it ready for the morning, and counted out how many candles we had left to see us through the foggy gloom of tomorrow.
And oh, those candles, with their tongues of light, lapping up our oxygen and our pennies. What tales they could have told of the pages they illuminated, night after night, in a little corner of Lambeth, in the depths of the sordid city!
Chapter Ten
Doctor Foster is a good man,
He teaches children all he can:
Reading, writing, arithmetric,
And doesn’t forget to use his stick.
When he does he makes them dance
Out of England into France, Out of France into Spain,
Round the world and back again.
The gardens of my bindings were not well trimmed, neatly bordered rectangles of perfection. They rioted and teemed; herbaceousness burst its borders; beds sprung with flowers that leapt instead of slept under the reader’s gaze. Flowers flourished together that should have been continents apart, but they seemed to like it like that, and so did I. My lawns were long and unkempt; they would tickle one’s ankles and one’s fancy as one walked. And after all, in a literature in which, I was to learn, ‘putting Nebuchadnezzar out to grass’ was a euphemism for the sexual act, I thought it kindest to give the old Babylonian King some long, luscious grass that was worth feasting on.
I found it hard to believe I was the only binder working with such designs. I imagined Diprose had others, like me, concubines in his harem, although I assumed I had the dubious honour of being the only woman of the lot. I could not help but wonder whether I should feel jealous of his divided attentions and how long my bindings would keep me in high favour. However many there were of us, our time had only recently come: I was to discover there had been a change in law only three years previously, when the Obscene Publications Act – better known as Lord Campbell’s Act – declared that it was not illegal to own immoral literature, only to publish and disseminate it. And so, as ownership was no longer a crime, the owners could commission bindings that were more flamboyant, exuberant, and, if the fancy so took them, demonstrative.
Before this, the dull bindings so berated by Knightley were necessary so as not to incite undue interest from the uninitiated. Some collectors would go further with their disguises, and put them in plain bindings, with a simple cross on the cover and a ‘Book of Common Prayer’ or a ‘Testament’ or an ‘Apocrypha’ on the spine, despite containing within pages most ungodly. Stories were legion of the auctioneers who, getting their hands on the estate of a deceased nobleman, would sell – without so much as a second thought or a scant perusal – the large number of plainly bound but less than innocent Bibles and prayer-books that lurked in the palatial library, to many an unsuspecting purchaser.
I had never considered myself a true innocent: I was aware of naughty goings-on, and naughty drawings thereof, and I was no stranger to the newspapers’ incessant debates about the development of photography and the possibilities for its misuse, but, despite having been brought up a bookbinder’s daughter, in So-ho of all places, I had never imagined that there would be such things as naughty books; there would be no need, I assumed, for a modern-day Paul to encourage those of the curious arts to burn their books. I had heard of the Vice Society, but had always thought that the members were proponents of the thing itself, that is, the vice. If a Bridge Society was where one played bridge, and a Bird-Watching Society was one that facilitated bird-watching, what, pray, was a Vice Society? Dedicated to the discussion and development of carpenter’s clamps, for all I knew.