british bedtime stories

On the living room shelf of my childhood home was a book. In fact, there were countless books on our living room shelves, so many stories, voyages, words that saved and transported. But the one book I most remember, the book I am destined to inherit (my mom tells me) is the book of British bedtime stories.

Now, I believe the name of the anthology is not quite that, but it was something similar, and we always knew which book it was, with its thin pages and countless tales. I have googled the real name, looked in all sorts of ancient booksellers as I am tempted so often to search for my past now, but the copy that my mom has remains the only one I know of. The treasury was my introduction to so many writers: Forster, Joyce, even Wodehouse.

To put this book in its proper context, you must know that my mother is an Anglophile. She has never traveled to Britain, regrettably, and it seems at this point that she probably never will. Her England is one of dreams, Monty Python, Bleak House, murder mysteries, Spode china, Christopher Robin, the Lavender Hill Mob, tartans, Glyndebourne, Shakespeare recalled in senior learning series classes… England would indeed suit her, I am sure, if she found any bit at all like the stories we knew so well.

I may have been around thirteen when I first took down the book. The story that then struck me the most was one by John Galsworthy, “The Apple Tree.” It was a story of a grave at a crossroads, love forgotten, then remembered, lovers from vastly different worlds coming together, impossibly. It made my teenage heart dream, planting all sorts of bucolic fantasies of splendid love and possibility and rapture and heartbreak.

I find a sort of safety in these recollections, a delving into origins, language slightly altered by the crossing of an ocean, humour defining the way that we can speak the same language and still look at the world so differently.