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of knowledge that I could afford to access with staff who had the time to talk about their treasures. I no
longer have a copy of the essay but many years later came across something similar and considerably
more advanced in the book Eighty-Four Charing Cross Road which also became one of my favourite
films. This true account tells of a New York writer’s correspondence with a London Bookshop during and
after the War as she orders books and falls in love with them and their “curators”. She reminded me of a
conversation that I had regarding a critique that had fallen below par and the book shop did not want to
order it for me. “What kind of Pepy’s diary do you call this? This is not a Pepy’s diary, this is some
busybody editor’s miserable collection of excerpts from Pepy’s diary, may he rot. I could just spit”,
(Hanff, 1980, P27).
This passion for decent books became my passion and I found this joy among the staff of my book shop
too and with Tom Kelly himself a serious reader of serious books. He and my stepfather taught me that
although books could be great fun and a passport to strange and exotic new worlds they were also a
crucial access to knowledge. He never read fiction but only biographies, his favourite which has been
passed to me after his recent death was the story of Joshua Slocum. Reading it now I came across an
entry that summed up an important aspect of my stepfather, Leslie Curtis: “As for myself, the wonderful
sea charmed me from the first. At the age of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on
the bay, with chances greatly in favour of being drowned.” My Uncle Les was swimming as soon as he
was allowed in to the local baths and there is a photograph of him as a tiny figure holding a huge
swimming cup surrounded by much taller and older young men. He taught me to swim and also to have
a deep respect and fear for the dangers of the sea. He would love to quote from Slocum: “The next step
toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage.
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