The Journal of Dora Damage (17 page)
‘That will help. Now, I will wash Lucinda, and I shall hear her prayers, and I shall return as soon as I can.’
He was not best pleased, but I had to manage my household as well as I could. I wiped Lucinda with a cold flannel, helped
her into her nightgown, and hugged her – and Mossie – tightly as she said her prayers to us.
‘Mama. I think the angels are God’s babies.’
‘Are we not all God’s babies?’
‘Yes, but they’re the ones who stay up with Him in Heaven.’
So I kissed her, and padded downstairs to make up Peter’s poultice. I stirred up some bread and water in a pan, and when it
was piping hot, laid out the boiling paste on a clean rag. Then I hurried back upstairs to find which extremity Peter required
it on tonight.
‘No, not now,’ he moaned. ‘Not any more. Come to bed. Come, comfort me.’
And so I slipped off my smock, but instead of pulling on my nightgown I lay next to him in just my chemise, placed his head
on my upper arm and stroked his cheeks, while he muttered at me. ‘Stay with me, nursie. Don’t leave me, nursie. Don’t go back
to work, Dora.’
So I extinguished the candle, and lay still, in the darkness, listening to the chuff and pull of Jack’s saw in the workshop
below. When Peter’s snuffles turned to snores, I extricated myself from his heavy head, pulled on my smock once more, and
tiptoed downstairs. The clock was striking ten, and the night air was chilly.
Jack and I worked together, illuminated by a single candle stuck in the ridges of the book press, until he left me as the
church clock struck midnight. I stopped as it was tolling two, extinguished the candle, and went into the kitchen where I
cleaned the knives by moonlight with soda crystals and emery paper. I couldn’t have left them soaking overnight, for the steel
blade would start to rust, and the handles would rot. I was tired, but I decided to set the Black Drop to brew there and then,
as it would take several weeks to ferment: the mixture of opium, verjuice, yeast, sugar and nutmeg was my mother’s trusted
recipe, only she had never had the privilege of pure Turk in her concoctions. Finally, I raked out the kitchen fire and laid
it ready for the morning, and counted out how many candles we had left to see us through the foggy gloom of tomorrow.
And oh, those candles, with their tongues of light, lapping up our oxygen and our pennies. What tales they could have told
of the pages they illuminated, night after night, in a little corner of Lambeth, in the depths of the sordid city!
Doctor Foster is a good man,
He teaches children all he can:
Reading, writing, arithmetric,
And doesn’t forget to use his stick.
When he does he makes them dance
Out of England into France,
Out of France into Spain,
Round the world and back again.
T
he gardens of my bindings were not well trimmed, neatly bordered rectangles of perfection. They rioted and teemed; herbaceousness
burst its borders; beds sprung with flowers that leapt instead of slept under the reader’s gaze. Flowers flourished together
that should have been continents apart, but they seemed to like it like that, and so did I. My lawns were long and unkempt;
they would tickle one’s ankles and one’s fancy as one walked. And after all, in a literature in which, I was to learn, ‘putting
Nebuchadnezzar out to grass’ was a euphemism for the sexual act, I thought it kindest to give the old Babylonian King some
long, luscious grass that was worth feasting on.
I found it hard to believe I was the only binder working with such designs. I imagined Diprose had others, like me, concubines
in his harem, although I assumed I had the dubious honour of being the only woman of the lot. I could not help but wonder
whether I should feel jealous of his divided attentions and how long my bindings would keep me in high favour. However many
there were of us, our time had only recently come: I was to discover there had been a change in law only three years previously,
when the Obscene Publications Act – better known as Lord Campbell’s Act – declared that it was not illegal to own immoral
literature, only to publish and disseminate it. And so, as ownership was no longer a crime, the owners could commission bindings
that were more flamboyant, exuberant, and, if the fancy so took them, demonstrative.
Before this, the dull bindings so berated by Knightley were necessary so as not to incite undue interest from the uninitiated.
Some collectors would go further with their disguises, and put them in plain bindings, with a simple cross on the cover and
a ‘Book of Common Prayer’ or a ‘Testament’ or an ‘Apocrypha’ on the spine, despite containing within pages most ungodly. Stories
were legion of the auctioneers who, getting their hands on the estate of a deceased nobleman, would sell – without so much
as a second thought or a scant perusal – the large number of plainly bound but less than innocent Bibles and prayer-books
that lurked in the palatial library, to many an unsuspecting purchaser.
I had never considered myself a true innocent: I was aware of naughty goings-on, and naughty drawings thereof, and I was no
stranger to the newspapers’ incessant debates about the development of photography and the possibilities for its misuse, but,
despite having been brought up a bookbinder’s daughter, in So-ho of all places, I had never imagined that there would be such
things as naughty books; there would be no need, I assumed, for a modern-day Paul to encourage those of the curious arts to
burn their books. I had heard of the Vice Society, but had always thought that the members were proponents of the thing itself,
that is, the vice. If a Bridge Society was where one played bridge, and a Bird-Watching Society was one that facilitated bird-watching,
what, pray, was a Vice Society? Dedicated to the discussion and development of carpenter’s clamps, for all I knew.
Its full title, according to Diprose, was the Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded at the turn of the century by the
Church of England (presumably embarrassed by having purchased one too many fake Bibles from house clearances). It supplied
the Metropolitan Police with information regarding the sale, distribution or exhibition of obscenities – after which a search
warrant could be issued, and obscenities seized and destroyed unless their innocence was proved in court – but I never imagined
that I would become part of the chain of supply they sought to crush.
Three guineas a volume was the price at which the volumes on which I worked would sell, or so Diprose told me. Three guineas
a volume. Or three pounds and three shillings. Or sixty-three shillings. Or 756 pence. These were not books for the common
man. Lord Campbell’s Act was a ruling only for the rich; the lower classes, presumably, would not have known what to do with
such literature, and if they had, the excitement in their loins would have driven them to storm London’s own Bastille, and
a revolution was not what Lord Campbell or anyone else up there wanted.
No, these were rich men’s books that came into my house, and their owners certainly seemed to take great pains not to make
me feel like a common woman. Not only did the next hansom to stop on our cobblestones bring several crates of books and manuscripts
– which I had to store in the parlour for want of space in the workshop – but also a pale blue parasol trimmed with point-lace,
a tortoiseshell hair comb edged with gold filigree, and a black-and-purple feather fan.
It was Jack who spoke sense to me. ‘What you gonna do with them? Strip ’em and use ’em to fancy up your bindings?’ And he
was right. Whenever would I use these superfluities? ‘Be careful, Mrs D,’ he said. ‘Be careful of the roses. It’s always the
nobs who cause the most trouble.’
And again, he was right. The roses were not just the ones who bought the books. They had lead roles in them, too. The men
in these books were not street-sweepers or sewer-flushers, closer though they might be to bodily functions: they were kings,
dukes, barons, and in the literature that had Knightley’s stamp on it, caliphs, emperors, maharajahs, and the Dey.
Ah, the Dey.
The Lustful Turk, or Scenes in the Harem of
an Eastern Potentate
was the fine 1828 first edition promised to me by Sir Jocelyn, and it told me more than I ever needed to know about the dark
Dey and the white women whose legs were at first forcibly, and at length willingly, opened to him. My mother, the governess,
had taught me to keep mine closed all the while, and my husband had furthered that lesson. What had I been missing?
The answer to that was the most extraordinary feature of the Dey’s anatomy. It troubled me greatly that the poor women he
seduced at first considered it an object of terror: it was, variously, ‘that terrible instrument, that fatal foe to virginity’,
‘the instrument of my martyrdom’, ‘my stiff virgin-stretcher’, ‘his dreadful engine’, ‘the terrible pillar with which he was
preparing to skewer me’, and ‘the enormous machine buried within her’. But then it became, to those very same women, once
they had succumbed to their apparently pleasurable fate, ‘the uncontrolled master key of my feelings’, ‘nature’s grand masterpiece’,
even ‘that delightful instrument that attunes my heart to harmony’. Such a change of attitude to ‘this wonderful instrument
of nature’ is simply, I learnt, the passing of time: it is the ‘terror of virgins, but delight of women’.
But this was not simply a story of passion awakened time and again: the Dey may indeed have converted many a terrified virgin
into a hedonistic woman, but that was not to be the end of it. For what a reduction befell his mightiness at the end! After
his attempt to deflower one of his new harem girls (not in the way that nature intended, but in the hellish, secondary, dark
orifice), the girl took her rightful revenge by cutting off the organs most vital to the Dey’s manner of existence! I considered
this a curious exaltation of those parts of his anatomy; I could not for one moment see the appeal to Sir Jocelyn in a story
that left the central male character so emasculated. But, ah me, the Dey so loved his two English girls that he gave them
his ‘lost members preserved in spirits of wine in glass vases’, and sent them back to England with them, where they bestowed
them upon a girls’ boarding school, to be shown ‘as a reward for good behaviour to the little lady scholars’.
I was spoilt for imagery to put on the cover of this extraordinary volume, but did not know how bold I dared be for Sir Jocelyn.
On finishing the book I could not shake the image of the parts in glass vases from my fevered brain, but, much as I relished
the disarmament of that terrifying weapon, I felt Sir Jocelyn might have accused me of focusing on the wrong part of the story.
Instead, I paid homage to his previous visitation to my humble workshop, and settled upon a central minaret shape surrounded
by intricate geometric tile shapes, within which basked a beautiful woman, whose finely embroidered robe slipped fetchingly
about her shoulders. And between two slender, white fingers, she held rather suggestively a solidly gold-tooled, diamond-shaped
confection, which explained the enigmatic smile on her face.
And on the back, the insignia of
Les Sauvages Nobles
, with the word
Nocturnus
underneath, betwixt two ivy leaves.
It was always my endeavour – my very point of ‘modernity’, according to Diprose – to distil the essence of the book in the
cover design. Yet nowadays I scarcely had time to read most of the manuscripts before binding them; I would simply scan them
briefly, and, for the most part, this was a blessing.
So, when I opened
Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman
of Pleasure
, at the point where she describes the impressive member of a young fellow as ‘not the plaything of a boy, not the weapon
of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard, that had proportions been observ’d, it must have belong’d to a young giant’,
I could not help but select a glorious vermilion morocco, and tool down the centre a maypole, prodigious in size but innocent
in nature, around which a single voluptuous woman danced, clutching two ribbons in her joyfully outstretched hands.
Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria
was bound in dark-green hard-grain goatskin with scarlet silk doublures. I blind-tooled the edge with hearts, stars and butterflies,
and gold-tooled in the centre a beguiling Venus extracting a myrtle leaf and some berries from the garland binding her hair
(as she does at the beginning of Book Three), to give to Ovid along with her pearls of wisdom in the womanly arts. Her instructions
were most novel and intriguing to me.
One must lie on one’s back, if one has a beautiful face and attendant features.
But if one’s rear is better, better to be
viewed from the rear.
But if it is the breasts and the legs which cause delight, one must lie across the bed beneath the beholder
. .
I had never beheld these parts of my body in this way, unfamiliar as they were to me as far-off parts of the globe. For the
first time in my life, I started to wonder about my best angle.
Another book, a slim, anonymous volume, which intrigued me, mentioned in passing an extraordinary, magical place, called the
Clit-oris. The author was unspecific as to its exact co-ordinates, but it sounded as if it should be in Africa, or Xanadu,
or Timbuc-Tu, so elysian were its qualities, especially for the female of the species. As it was an adventure story of sorts,
I gave it a spine of grey snakeskin, and on the black silk cover I embroidered an ornate compass, surrounded by waves, islands
and fishes in gold, silver and coloured threads, and on the back a naked woman rode a dolphin towards foreign shores.
But, what to do with the new edition of
Venus School
Mistress
, or
Birchen Sports
, amongst plenty others similarly entitled by a certain Mr R. Birch and others? Before spring 1860, I had lived twenty-five
years assuming that the cane was something to be feared, and its use avoided through good behaviour, but I learnt soon enough
that there was many a person in this strange world who were zealous disciples of the birch, and indeed, myself became extraordinarily
learned in its occult pleasures, in word if not in deed. I could now instruct one on how to keep a supply of birch in water
to ensure its freshness and suppleness, and of wooden, metal and leather instruments of torture that surpassed the birch in
their ability to scourage, fustigate and, verily, phlebotomise. I discovered that those who lived too deep in the country
to frequent the flagellation brothels in the metropolis were blessed with natural wonders that far exceeded the birch: the
holly brush, the furze bush, the butcher’s bush and, oh, most joyfully, in summertime, green nettles. I learnt of the eminent
noblemen who regularly go for a salutary whipping in order to reap its extensive health benefits (it warms the blood), and
how those who called for the banning of birch discipline in educational establishments were depriving an entire generation
of the pleasures and passions awaiting them in later life, the taste for which would be developed in youth. ‘What a treat
in this seminary for the idolators of the posterior shrine!’ exclaimed one character in one of the dusty manuscripts, and
indeed the seminary to which he was referring could have been Damage’s workshop at one point, so replete was it with flagellatory
tracts.
And so it was, with such intriguing information at my fingertips, that I reached for Peter’s old birch cane with as much menace
as I could feign, and called sternly for my little boy Jack, and when he arrived, sweating, together we spliced it, sanded
it and re-varnished it, and then we inlaid it in sections, four reinforced struts running down the front and back covers,
and I was to understand it raised more than a chuckle back at Diprose’s establishment.
Harder to develop a design for were the collections of plates with brief introductions but otherwise few words that already
had their own visual style, and not always to my aesthetic. For these, I resorted once again to the language of leaves, flowers
and herbs; from the ‘secret love’ of acacia to the ‘remembered friends’ of zinnia, I had something, no matter how fragile,
behind which to hide. Lilies were safest, due to their ambiguity, but the temptation always to resort to the cautionary oleander,
and to eschew the lustful coriander, was great.
Sometimes I was repelled, sometimes charmed, but always arrested, never bored. How strange the models looked, all tangled
limbs, enlarged appendages and gaping orifices! Not one single image was anything like any amorous picture I had hitherto
imagined; they were love unromanticised, but for that reason, possibly more authentic. One particular plate was entitled ‘cunnylyngus’:
in it a man was behaving to a woman as a dog to a bitch, sniffing her crotch, and licking her with his tongue. My sentient
mind screamed, Iniquity, diabolism, bestiality! until it heard a quieter, but similarly reasonable, voice in my head argue
that it had never seen an animal behave in this way, licking another with such concern for the pleasure of the other. Something
in me responded to this sense of transcendence, that in these pages there were higher, and not lower, energies at work. Even
the most unwholesome of them, which inverted the tenderest act between a man and a woman into a display of violence and viciousness,
held up to me what I had often felt underpinned my whole existence as a woman, but for which I had previously no visual representation
in this world of convention and delicacy. I had not known that men could feel this way about women, but now that I saw it,
dare I write that I felt gratitude to the images I was seeing for helping me make sense of foundlings and baby-farms and fallen
women?