Navigating Bereavement Through Books

With Anna Sewell, Louisa May Alcott, Enid Blyton and my Mum

My Mum was a great reader and she instilled in me a love of reading from a very young age.  One of my earliest memories is sitting on the highly polished step inside the mobile library which came to our village, pouring over Topsy and Tim books, I had pulled from the shelves to take home. Meanwhile Mum gathered armfuls of books for her and my Dad. Westerns for him and romance and historical fiction for her.

In recent years, whenever I visited her I would peruse her shelves seeing what had been added since I was last with her. Many books in her later life were gifts or ones she had picked up from various charity shops. She usually came home from her visit to her Doctors surgery pleased that she had bought a book or two from the for sale shelf conveniently situated next to the pharmacist, but equally cross that she hadn’t been able to resist. She repeatedly said “I really don’t need it” but usually followed this up with, “but you can never have too many books”.

She taught me well!

Despite the sadness of packing up the life of someone you love and miss, there is joy to be found in discovering memories tucked into their possessions. The ornament sitting on the mantelpiece you never liked but now can’t bear to give away because they loved it, or the letters you wrote 30 years ago, carefully tied together in bundles.

Then of course, for me, there is the books.

Since she died we have inherited her books. I say we because they belong to both me and my brother, but we both know it is really me! I am the one with the vested interest. I am the one who will vet every single book before it leaves her house!

Her bookcases are filled with a collection of paperbacks and hardbacks in no particular order. Many are books I have shared or swapped with her over the years, many are those we as a family have bought her. And then there are the books she owned when she was a little girl. Sunday school prizes. One called ‘The Loveliest Story’ was presented to her in 1947 for Advent from the then rector of her church, who inscribed and signed it Revd William Mather. Inside her Daily Mail annual from 1951 is a hand written message of ‘Happy Christmas from Aunt Clara and Uncle Charles’. A pocket book of Common British Birds was a school nature prize presented in 1952 when she was 10.

Then there is her collection of Enid Blyton’s. As a small girl I loved these and spent many hours lounging on sofas and floors reading The Circus of Adventure, The Island of Adventure, The Castle of Adventure and all the others in the series. I imagined I was friends with Philip, Jack, Dinah, and Lucy-Ann helping them solve mysteries and capture crooks.  They transported me to another world and I loved that Mum had read them too when she was small.  Since she died I have rediscovered these books and now have them in my writing room where now they transport me back to my summers with Enid Blyton.

The book which was most precious to her and is now most precious to me is her copy of Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. The cover is thick cardboard, now aged and shows a faded picture of Black beauty and his mother Duchess. Inside on the first page Mum has written in childish capital letters ‘Sylvia Diane Aldridge Jan 1948’. I don’t know if it was a Christmas Present or if she bought it herself with money she might have been given for Christmas, I don’t know why I never asked her. The pages are thick, rough and yellowed, some barely still attached to the spine, and the illustrations although aged are still glossy, and of course terrible old fashioned. This was Mum’s favourite book. It was the one her Mum used to read to her when she was small. Mum’s mum, my grandmother died when I was 8, so my memories of her are a little hazy, but I remember her as kind and loving, always wearing an apron and usually sat by the rayburn in her kitchen. I have always imagined Mum as a child snuggled up beside her as she listened to stories of Black Beauty and Ginger absorbing a love for stories which she would eventually pass on to me

At Mum’s funeral one of her dear friends read an extract from Little Women. This was her other favourite book.  She never failed to get sentimental at the mention of Beth March, and it is a book she shared with me when I was much younger, and one I too have read many times since. Soon after she died I bought myself a beautiful Harper Muse painted edition of Little Women and leafed through it in those early days of grief focusing on passages which I felt brought me closer to her. I have yet to go back and read it in full, but I will, when I am ready.

Mum was kind and sympathetic, she cared for others and never put herself first.  Characteristics found in the stories of Little Women and Black Beauty of which she was so fond.

As I begin to clear her shelves and leaf through the pages of these books, there are tears as memories come flooding back, but there are many smiles too as I remember with gratitude the joy we shared through reading. As I continue to navigate the uneven path of loss and bereavement I do it with her books by my side and the love of reading she gifted me tucked tightly inside my heart.

I think she would approve.