A stirring Canterbury tale of his very own
In today’s exciting episode our hero rescues a 650-year-old customs officer from the forbidden pit of horrors. But first, a quiz question: an expert is interviewed on television in his or her office or study; what forms the backdrop to the interview?
Oh bravo, you’ve got it in one. It’s books of course. Shelf upon shelf of books, abundant and unmissable.
‘‘Look,’’ say the books, ‘‘We are the food that fed the mind you’re listening to. Be very impressed.’’
For books are the oldest symbol of knowledge. Even in these digital days, when a mobile phone can swallow a city library without straining, books retain their aura as our intellectual treasure house. Books are totemic, quasireligious. To defile them is a crime. To burn them, unthinkable.
So books pile up. Not just the bad ones – celebrity chef books, All Black biographies, Hemingway – but also the books you read once and know you’ll not go back to. In my garage I have boxes of books that I don’t know how to sell but couldn’t throw away.
But then at the local dump I discovered a crate for unwanted books. Where they went from the crate I didn’t know but it shifted the moral responsibility from my shoulders to the council’s.
Which is why last weekend when I packed a trailer with household junk and a prehistoric television set and drove it to the dump, I also took a box of books. But at the dump I couldn’t find the book crate.
‘‘Sorry,’’ said the dump lady, ‘‘but we don’t take books any more. We just can’t sell them. You’ll have to dump them.’’ ‘‘Dump them!’’ I said. ‘‘Mmm,’’ she said, and shrugged. Backing up to the dump pit I adopted my patented technique of jack-knifing car and trailer, then asking the bloke in the next lane if he’d like to take over. He had a bald head, a van Dyck beard and a Holden T-shirt and was delighted.
Men love to show off manly skills. And I love to give them the chance.
Every trip to the shopping mall should go via the dump. It is the flipside of consumption, tails to acquisition, heads, the anus of industrial capitalism. Seagulls screamed, the air was granular, and down in the horror pit a diesel dinosaur shunted the leavings and pickings into the maw of some giant underground compressor.
I lobbed in two spavined chairs and a broken shovel then took care to ensure that the prehistoric television landed on the concrete screen-first. But I hesitated with the box of books. Was this the moment, after 60 years, when I’d forsake my culture? It was. I threw the lot. They fanned out over the floor of the pit.
And I spotted him immediately. Chaucer. The complete works. Bought for university in 1976, studied a little in that first year, unopened since. Chaucer, born 1343, died 1400. Chaucer who spent 10 years as Comptroller of His Majesty’s Customs.
But it wasn’t for his customs work that he was buried in Westminster Abbey. And it wasn’t for his customs work that King Edward III awarded him a gallon of wine a day for as long as he should live. It was for his poetry. It was for the Canterbury Tales. It was for pinning down in words the variety and truth of the 14th century. Chaucer, the father of literature in modern English.
Could I forsake Geoffrey Chaucer? Could I leave him to be shunted by the diesel dinosaur and ripped and crushed and buried in a landfill? Reader, I could not.
The pit was festooned with notices equating entry into it with certain death. But the diesel dinosaur was facing away from me, and I could see no hi-vis vests to shout at me. With the agility that once induced Miss Turner to commend my forward roll, I clambered over the safety rail, jumped down into the horror pit, snatched Geoffrey from the floor and hugged him to my bosom.
Getting out of the pit was not the straightforward manoeuvre it might once have been. When Miss Turner commended my forward roll I weighed seven stone. Today I weigh 17.
But as I struggled on the pit’s rim with my legs sticking out like Winnie the Pooh at Rabbit’s place, a hand reached down, and I looked up into the van Dyck beard of Holden Man. I seized the proffered hand and he hauled me out.
When I showed him The Complete Works of Chaucer, published by the Oxford University Press, he smiled. ‘‘You effing idiot,’’ he said.
‘‘Indeed,’’ I said, ‘‘and thank you,’’ and I drove home morally intact.