A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip. Alexander Masters
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who owned the diaries. As well as no name or return address, on the pages inside there were no obvious descriptions of the writer’s appearance, his or her job, or identifiable details of friends or family members. Everything that a person uses to clarify themselves to another person was missing. Why should ‘I’ bother to put them there? ‘I’ knew them already.
What could Dido do with this journal? She couldn’t take it to the police – they’d laugh at her. She couldn’t burn it – that would be criminal.
She gave them to me. It was now my job: I was to find out who was the rightful heir of these ‘living books’, and return them.
She’d put the diaries in three boxes. The original Ribena bottle crate had no lid; one side was caved in and the top half-shut-up, like a punched eye. The last person to touch this box before Dido was the person who’d thrown it out. There was nothing written on the outside except those shouts about ‘5d!’ No packaging label. Nothing with an alternative address. One of the hand holes was ripped clean in half.
The biggest box was thin, plain and approximately the length of a thigh. It bulged meatishly. Through the gaps in the cardboard I could see strips of lurid-coloured modern journals.
The third container was torso-sized and originally for a Canon portable photocopier (‘ZERO warm up time’). It was shiny and strapped down with duct tape. On one edge there was a label, addressed to The Librarian, Trinity College, Cambridge.
Perhaps the diaries belonged to a Trinity don, I thought, and got depressed.
The Ribena box was the one that interested me most.
I imagined the hands of the person who’d pitched it into the skip were still half there, glowing on the cardboard, and wondered if careful scientific analysis could reveal whether the injuries the box had sustained as it landed in the skip were because it had been hurled (perpetrator enraged) or lobbed gently (perpetrator calculating). Using the torch on my mobile phone I peeped through the torn hand hole. The diaries inside had been packed with incompetence. Large dark-coloured journals were separated by single pocket books, leaving narrow shelf-shaped gaps in the layers, like rock caverns. In one corner, a thin hardback had been flattened down with such force that its spine had broken. Many of the books were rotting along the edges, and mossy-coloured, as if I had caught them secretly returning to trees. The cover of one was coated with regular stripes of white mould, like the fungus you get on old cheddar cheese.
I pressed my nose against the hand hole. It smelled crisp and mournful.
There were twenty-seven diaries in this box in total. The first I picked out was a pocketbook: quarter-bound, blue, with a red spine. Inside, a printer’s advertisement read ‘Denbigh Commercial Books’ in a border made of moustache shapes, which made me think of signs swinging in a mid-western breeze and Clint Eastwood clinking into town. On the facing page, the seller had stamped his details in purple ink: ‘W. Cannings Ltd, 23/5 Peckham High Street, London’. The price was marked in the top left-hand corner, handwritten in pencil: 3/10.
Inside, the pages were crammed to the brim with handwriting. The letters were confident and generous, occupied all the available space on a page with six words to a line, and apart from occasional merriments in the letters ‘J’, ‘H’ and ‘d’,
the script continued with almost mechanical regularity from the front cover to the back. It was not a purpose-made journal. No printed diary could have been manufactured to accommodate this writer’s need. Some entries were four thousand words long; a few were even longer; no day was left alone. It was an ordinary pocket notebook, ambushed by a person’s desperation to record his or her life. At the top of the first page, written inside square brackets, as though it hardly mattered, was the year: 1960.
I felt unexpectedly moved by this detail. A tube I could look down seemed to puncture the blur of the last fifty years and pop out again, fifty miles away in South London, beside the diarist as he (in my mind it was already male: there was a destructive element about the way the writing filled up the page – like a boy stamping on fresh snow) walked up Peckham High Street. I put my eye to this tube and blinked at my new friend. Who was he? Why was he moving at such a pace? Was there something about him that already said, ‘You will end up in a skip’? I saw Cannings the stationer’s as a low-ceilinged room, the brass bell above the door shaking off the noise of the traffic outside as my man entered. I imagined a flight of steps in the centre of the shop leading to a basement store, and a stout assistant gloomily wrapping up a parcel beside the cash register. I had not read a word of these books, yet already the diarist was clear in my mind: his height, the colour of his fedora hat, his energetic walking pace, the fact that his brown shoes were not brogues (I hate brogues).
The entire Cannings volume covered two months, from October 16th to December 16th, and many pages had excited-looking comments, put in as after-thoughts, running like bubbles up the margins. It was as though the book had been scooped into wordy water and brought out, gurgling.
I noticed that the covers were warped, and thought for a moment that the book had been bent, as if crammed into a pocket that was too small; but then I discovered the distortion was caused by a small mound of folded inserts stuffed at the back of the diary. The writer, unable to stop himself rushing on even when he’d reached the end of the book, had spilled his text onto torn-up segments of letter paper. Scribbled up the margin of one of these extra sheets, in handwriting as pale as a whisper, were the first words I read:
Hope my diaries aren’t blown up
before people can read them – they have immortal value.
The Cannings diary feels as though it was produced by someone mesmerised by writing. The letters in the body of the text are large, and have been put down at speed in soft pencil or ballpoint pen.
The next book I picked out was a cheap, thin, black notebook, covered in washable rexine. Here the handwriting was smaller and in blue fountain pen, and from a year later:
I must continue with this starving life – the long slogging hours with only a sandwich for lunch – the work must so fill & dominate my soul …
He is working on one project in particular – the greatest of his life. But, as with all the things that matter to him profoundly (such as his name, his sex, his address, his physical appearance), he doesn’t say what this project is. It is simply ‘it’. He doesn’t describe ‘it’ even vaguely, either because that would be dangerous, because he is a spy or a bomb maker; or because ‘it’ is so obvious to him, so much a part of him, that ‘it’ must be on a par with his existence.
I cling to life very desperately – feel I could do great things – very afraid of physical disaster, nothing could be worse – could not bear to die before I had given of my gifts to the community – have already worked & suffered so to bring my gifts towards fruition.
In some sections of this journal there are more crossings-out than others, more words have been underscored and the handwriting is more uneven: injure, atmosphere, doesn’t believe me!! so hungry! I’ll kill them!
One must live dangerously, take risks, or one otherwise is in an ordinary metier all along … I now see I can do it.
I had a dream, of beating Peter up.
Aged fifty-four
The freshest diaries contain the oldest handwriting.