A Note on the Author
by Boris Starling
F
our days after finishing
The Journal of Dora Damage
, my sister Bee (as Belinda was universally known) was admitted to hospital for a long-scheduled operation to remove a cyst
from her bile duct.
The operation initially seemed a success, but in the small hours of the following morning her hepatic artery burst, sending
her into cardiac arrest.
The surgeons saved her life on that occasion, but she never left hospital again. Seven weeks and two further operations later,
Bee died of septic shock. She was thirty-four, and married with two young children.
We held a memorial service for her a fortnight later, on a bittersweet late summer day of swirling emotions. The lovely funeral
director who watched over Bee’s coffin was, physically if not in personality, an absolute dead ringer for Mrs Eeles. Bee would
have been tickled pink.
Several hundred people packed a small country church to say their farewells to Bee; and of all the readings during the service,
the one about which people talked most afterwards was the prologue of this book.
‘Before we are born,’ it says, ‘St Bartholomew, patron saint of bookbinders, presents our soul with a choice of two books’:
a gold-tooled one whose beauty fades under the drudgery of the proscriptive, pre-ordained fate therein; and a plain, rough
tome which gradually flowers into a masterpiece as its blank pages are filled in by a soul who lives life according to its
own dictates.
There is no doubt as to which of St Bartholomew’s two books Bee’s soul chose.
Her story was truly one of free will and personal inspiration. She was bottled sunshine, a woman of vital, vibrant, amazing
energy; a bright, shining star, a creature of the light, a joy-giver and life-enhancer who lit up the lives of all those who
knew her. She loved people not just for their qualities, but for their imperfections and their differences.
Bee was no saint, and would have hated to have been remembered as one. Her wit could be scabrous. She didn’t suffer fools,
because she, fiercely independent and ferociously intelligent, expected as much from others as she did from herself. She didn’t
indulge those she felt had let her down; she was quite prepared to jettison friendships she felt were no longer so. And she
could be difficult, as can most people who are worth knowing.
Above all, she was that rarest of creatures; someone true to herself, for good and for bad.
For those who knew and loved her, Bee lives on in a myriad of ways, one of which is the book you have just finished. She would
have been thrilled that you have read her novel; even more thrilled if you enjoyed it, of course, but equally prepared to
have debated its shortcomings with you if you didn’t.
The Journal of Dora Damage
was a labour of love. All first novels are personal, to a large extent; how much more so this one, when there can be no more
after it? There is so much of Bee in Dora, but never more so than when she says, at the end of the prologue, that this book
‘conceals the contents of my heart, as clearly as if I had cut it open with a scalpel for the anatomists to read’.
February 2007
Belinda Starling lived in Wivenhoe, Essex with her husband and children and died in August 2006.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book is set in Linotype Sabon, named after the type founder, Jacques Sabon. It was designed by Jan Tschichold
and jointly developed by Linotype, Monotype and Stempel, in response to a need for a typeface to be available in identical
form for mechanical hot-metal composition and hand composition using foundry type.
Tschichold based his design for Sabon roman on a font engraved by Garamond, and Sabon italic on a font by Granjon. It was
first used in 1966 and has proved an enduring modern classic.