by Ann Walmsley
We asked the men how they felt about reading a novel that unfolds as a series of letters between Juliet, the island inhabitants and others. I expressed how some of the early letters between Juliet, Sidney and Juliet’s friend Sophie seemed a bit precious and self-conscious to me. But Peter said it was “like being an invited eavesdropper. It made me feel like I was part of it. You get to be trusted with information people are willing to share only with people that are close.” And Javier said that he’d enjoyed another epistolary novel about an inmate who wrote letters home that tracked his transition and his moods. I recalled that one of the earliest epistolary novels in the English language was written by an inmate in Fleet Prison in the 1640s, James Howell.
The chaplain, who had also read that month’s book, said to the group that reading a book told through letters was like opening the mail. He was talking about that moment of anticipation before you open the seal of a personal letter. I realized that letters, after all, were a lifeline for people in prison. Under the rules at Collins Bay, however, by the time an inmate receives a letter, the seal is already broken. All letters in and out of federal prisons are opened and their contents inspected. If a security issue is suspected, the authorities also have the right to read the letters.
What strained credulity, according to Gaston, was that the British postal service delivered letters at the speed of email or a courier. Carol, who spent some of her childhood in England during the postwar period, explained that the Royal Mail prided itself on frequency and speed. “I still remember that people would wait for the afternoon post and a letter mailed in the morning in Scotland would arrive in the afternoon in London,” she said. “The postal service in those days was absolutely phenomenal.” By the time I was living in England, we received just one delivery a day, but the postman still delivered on Saturdays.
But wasn’t the whole letter thing a bit forced at times, Carol wanted to know. The men didn’t think so. “I liked the way the author did it to bring out the personalities of each character through their writing,” said Winston.
If ever there was a bookish novel, this was it. Juliet lost her book collection when her flat was bombed, she was in a book club in London that was encouraging her to write her novel and now she was wrapped up in Guernsey’s literary society in order to write an article about the value of reading. The men appreciated all of it. But most of all they liked how the book club evolved. “It started up kind of as a con,” said Javier. “But then it turned out the members found books that related to themselves.” Given the scarcity of books on the island, each member of the Guernsey Literary Society read a different book for their meetings, rather than all preparing to discuss the same book—kind of like the previous month’s book club at Collins Bay when the men talked about their summer reads. And some of the Guernsey members were inexperienced readers, like some of our prison book club members, tackling difficult books like The Letters of Seneca: Translated from Latin in One Volume, with Appendix, yet managing to extract something of value. In that case, the Stoic philosopher’s advice on behaviour kept that character from drink. The book society was one way the islanders skirted the occupiers’ restrictions and curfews. The parallels were obvious to the men, for whom the Collins Bay Book Club was a way of temporarily leaving behind the boredom and deprivations of prison. They were warming to their new identity as members of a book club, which they saw reflected in the story.
“If I told you that I thought the theme of this book was actually kindness in dire circumstances, what might your response be?” asked Carol. I thought about Elizabeth, hiding an escaped slave labourer, then paying dearly for it by being sent to a concentration camp herself.
Dread talked about the islanders sharing the roast pig when food and firewood were scarce, or making soap for people who hadn’t had soap for weeks. “They use each other and lean on each other for strength,” he observed.
It reminded Javier of his childhood in a poverty-stricken community in Montego Bay. “We didn’t have bathrooms,” he told the others. “Five in one bed. Kerosene for lights. Through struggle, people get closer. Those are the happiest memories.”
But Winston expressed doubt that such mutual support was possible for most of them present, given the neighbourhoods they were from. “Us in this room, we come from big cities, and don’t really have that sense of community. A lot of us never had positive social groups. You hang around with the wrong crowd. I never had an opportunity to sit down and bounce thoughts off each other or have the stories that we’re reading.” No one else stood up for a city neighbourhood where they had found community.
At the coffee break, I was chatting with Gaston and Peter when Carol joined us. “How would you like to be one of our book club ambassadors?” she asked Gaston. She had seen something in him that day that told her he had the potential to fill the shoes of Graham and Frank. And he had shown his ability to recruit by convincing Peter to join.
“Okay,” he said.
“Just be sure any new members (a) can come, and (b) can read.”
He nodded. And she whispered, “I’ll get you some extra books, the classics.”
It was a deal. She would help him be a “better person” by his statutory release date if he would help her build a better book club membership.
After the meeting, I sat down with Gaston for our pre-arranged one-on-one. He wanted me to know his story up front, assuming that I might be too shy to ask. Until shortly before he was arrested, he was a recovered crack cocaine addict with a previous conviction. He had gone several years clean and sober—long enough to make a life for himself. At forty, he had a wife and three children and a house and was juggling a freelance landscaping job in addition to his day job tending seniors’ properties for a social service agency. He had some recovered addicts on his crew, but then they stopped recovering. On some days after work they would ask him to drop them off at a drug house. Then one day, he followed them in. “In I walked,” he said. “And eight days later, I came out of that house, after spending about seventeen thousand dollars on drugs.” As Winston had said back in the book club meeting, hanging out with the wrong crowd could lead to trouble.
Gaston’s wife had no idea where he’d been. His employers fired him, not just because of his eight-day absence, but because they discovered he’d lied about not having a criminal record when he originally got the job. A mentor and benefactor who’d handed him several lucrative corporate landscaping contracts also pulled his business. And during the drug bender, Gaston had sold his nine-thousand-dollar truck for a thousand dollars to buy more drugs— meaning he had no equipment to stay in business anyway. “When I left that drug house, I had nothing. I lost pretty well everything— everything that I’d worked for.”
Although within six months he’d managed to get a job as a machinist and downsize his family to a condo, he obsessed about the lost money, especially when his wife was home on maternity leave with a new baby—their fourth child. “I’m thinking, I’ve got to be further ahead, so I talked to a few of my shady friends about how to make some money. And to make a long story short, I was robbing banks.”
He claimed that robbing banks tapped into a deep resentment that he’d nursed ever since a merger in the 1990s cost his mother her long-time bank job. “I remember her being devastated,” he said. “All the senior staff were fired on the spot and escorted out of the bank like criminals. She became a miserable, angry woman.” Gaston was a teenager at the time. “So I bore a big grudge against the banks. I thought they ripped everybody off.” At the same time, he was fascinated with his mother’s tales of robberies at her branch, which targeted the bank vaults, not the tellers’ cash drawers. His voice had a strained edge and I could tell he was still angry. “I think I formed an actual hatred toward banks,” he said, turning to look out the window and not have to meet my eyes.
“You rob the first bank and it’s addictive like a drug, pretty close to the same as a cocaine rush. The adrenalin is a high in itself beyond anything I’v
e ever done. You run out of the bank, you’ve got handfuls of money, you’re into a vehicle and speeding off. ‘Go, go, go!’ I did thirteen banks in one month.” Often he was high as well, he told me.
He didn’t attempt the vault heists that his mother had witnessed as a bank employee. He lined up like all the other customers, sometimes with a goatee, painter’s cap or other disguise, and passed a note to a teller instructing her to hand over her cash, insisting on no bundles with exploding dye packs. Then he would leave quietly without causing a fuss. “It was a terrible thing to do,” he said to me, his blue eyes looking straight at me. “It could have terrified people.”
The gig was up when he walked into the drug house one day with a robbery note in his pocket and a gut instinct that something was wrong. He took the note and placed it on top of a cupboard to get rid of it—just before police stormed the house and arrested him. “I was relieved, to be honest with you,” he said. “I was glad it was over.” The police were ready to charge him with six or seven robberies, he told me, but he copped to thirteen and pleaded guilty, which reduced his sentence to six years less time served, crediting three days for every one day of dead time waiting for trial.
He wanted to assure me that telling me the story wasn’t about boasting. “What I did was horribly wrong. And I embarrassed my family. We were members of the Salvation Army church. We went to Bible Study on Monday nights.” He couldn’t meet my eyes.
The pitch of his voice suddenly deepened, and he sighed, as though exhausted. For a moment he stopped talking and through the open window we could both hear the seagulls calling and bursts of shouting from seg. Why was it that the only word I could ever pick up as the guys in the hole called to their buddies was fucker? In the chapel next door, other guys were singing “Amazing Grace.”
I asked him if his wife had forgiven him, whether she was in solidarity with him.
“She forgives me, I think. The fortunate thing is I had a lot of years of sobriety. In ten years, I think back and there’s never been an argument between us. She stood by me but this will be it. She said if it ever happens again, she couldn’t do it again.” He clasped his hands together and his voice broke, as though he was afraid of ever crossing that line.
I asked if he really thought he wanted to do the “great books” challenge and journal about it. His schedule was already packed. He worked full-time at CORCAN during the day, so only evenings and weekends were free. But he said that he had a schedule that he followed rigorously and he’d written a journal during his previous jail term about books he was reading. He was up for it. His “sign from God” that he was on the right path with reading the classics was the mention of Jonathan Swift, an author of classics, in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I promised to bring him a journal next time.
I thought about how Gaston had read Gulliver’s Travels because it had been significant for Aminata in The Book of Negroes. Surely if Gaston, who came into prison with a grade nine education, could do that, I could sit down with Charles Lamb’s Selected Essays of Elia, the book that launches the story in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I’d never read Lamb, but was vaguely aware of him being a contemporary of Keats. I made a note to find the essays at my local library.
And then, as though he’d just got another rush of adrenalin, Gaston launched into a description of how the book club had changed him. “You get a chance to relive the book, but through everyone else’s eyes. What makes this book club so interesting is people bring alive the points that you don’t even notice. I was thinking about the history and the love story in the Guernsey book. I never thought about the kindness.” He described how, even though this was only his third meeting, he was already breaking his “mind your own business in prison” rule and chatting with some of the black book club members in the yard about how far they were in that month’s book and what the main character was doing. And to my delight he mentioned that Carol’s passionate defence of descriptive narrative in Such a Long Journey had stayed with him. “I don’t just look for flashy bang and cool story, anymore, but I’m looking at what the writer might be thinking, or the words he’s using, or the way he’s phrasing it. It doesn’t have to be the kind of books I used to read: Sidney Sheldon and fantasies, fairy tales and all these crazy lives. But real life.”
I watched him walk down the hall and turn left toward the CORCAN workshop. Then I packed up my satchel and left.
On the drive home, I thought about the lessons of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The authors seemed to be saying that anyone, in any circumstances, with some literacy, could find community, shelter, kindness and belonging through reading and discussing books. I reflected on the two book clubs in Hampstead to which I had belonged during my time in England. When I first arrived in London, I knew almost no one, and was caught up in unpacking boxes, settling my daughter into her new school and learning how to drive on the left. But Carol Clark, a warm and generous American woman who was the wife of my husband’s boss, reached out to me and invited me to join her book club, Literary Ladies. It was ridiculously large, with about forty members, so it could meet only at the houses of those members who had more spacious living rooms. An American expat named Sue Rees ran it, and as I recall, at that time she charged members two pounds per meeting to cover her administrative costs. Each month, she began the meeting by providing a profile of the author, reading from her notebook with its tiny perfect lettering. Who her sources were, she never revealed, but she treated us to biographical details that I could find nowhere else.
Her rule at that time was British authors only, because who knew how long each of us expats might remain in London. Every spring, she organized a bus trip to study an author or group of authors in depth, with individual members researching interesting aspects of the author’s life or milieu. One year, we chartered a bus to Belgium and northern France to trace the lives of World War I poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. I’ll never forget many of us tearing up as one member read aloud Rudyard Kipling’s 1916 poem “My Boy Jack,” about his son who went missing at the Battle of Loos. That achingly sad opening line, “Have you news of my boy Jack?” Other years we explored the Shropshire pottery towns of Arnold Bennett novels and the knitting mills of Cheshire, which was Elizabeth Gaskell country.
My other London book club was, in contrast, small. Just five or six members, including my dear university friend Jane Crispin, who I discovered—thanks again to Carol Clark—was living just two blocks away. Jane not only invited me to join her group, but, together with another member, bought me a copy of that month’s book, Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, and dropped it off at our house because the next meeting was only a few days away. In Jane’s group, we read without restrictions and I loved the intimacy of our gatherings.
Living in Hampstead meant being reminded of some of my favourite authors at almost every turning in the road, with Blue Plaques marking the buildings in which they once lived. It had long been a literary and artistic community within London. Keats, whose poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” my husband had once recited to me at the beginning of our relationship in university, had lived at the bottom of East Heath Road on what is now Keats Grove. Daphne du Maurier, whom I read avidly in my teens, had resided at Cannon Hall, the former courthouse at the end of our lane. A childhood favourite of mine, Eleanor Farjeon, whose The Little Bookroom is a collection of literary fairy tales that I read to this day, had spent many years not far away, at 20 Perrin’s Walk. I still have that book, though the dust jacket with its charming illustration by Edward Ardizzone is long gone.The novelist David Cornwell (John le Carré) had a house nearby and signed my husband’s entire collection of le Carré spy novels. I thought I had landed in a writer’s paradise.
As I pulled into the driveway of our Toronto house, my thoughts of Hampstead fell away. I was home.
The morning after the Guernsey book club meeting, I hurried over to the library. I found that there were no copie
s of the Selected Essays of Elia described in the novel and only two circulating copies of Lamb’s Essays of Elia in the entire Toronto Public Library system, which indicated just how obscure it was. A nearby branch had one of them: a nice 2009 trade paperback edition by Hesperus Classics with a foreword that described how it was originally published in 1823. I discovered that Lamb was a noted British critic and essayist in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and a popularizer of classic works of literature. He had spent time in Hampstead with Keats. And like some of the Romantic poets in his circle, his subject matter was often a nostalgia for old England. According to the foreword, Essays of Elia became a popular staple in British households for the next hundred years.
I opened the cover, eager to indulge my own nostalgia for London, hoping he might have something to say about Hampstead, and eager to continue to revisit my own memories of happy times there with friends among the English and expat communities. I was taken immediately by Lamb’s opening essay describing South Sea House, which still stands near the corner of Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate, and his word portraits of miserly bachelor clerks who worked there for the South Sea Company. Lamb himself was a former employee of the company, which was notorious for the eighteenth-century stock speculation and collapse known as the South Sea Bubble. His writing was authoritative and playful, making me laugh at his description of a South Sea clerk with “frizzed-out” hair who was “melancholy as a gib cat over his counter all the forenoon.” I could conjure the image.
It had been years since I’d read literature of that vintage, with verbal flourishes and antiquated references that I didn’t understand. Like Gaston, who had decided he was “overthinking” Gulliver’s Travels, I just let Essays of Elia flow over me. Without Gaston, I would never have discovered Lamb.