If you’re looking for a book to read during lockdown, one that I enjoyed recently is Shaun Bythell’s Confessions of a Bookseller. Bythell owns The Bookshop in Wigtown and Confessions is a follow-up to his 2017 book, Diary of a Bookseller. Both volumes give an insight into a year in the life of a bookseller at a time when Amazon (both through its website and its kindle ebooks) has brought profound changes to the book trade. While there’s plenty of local interest for those of us who live nearby, the books have also been international hits, with the first one having been translated into more than twenty languages. There probably aren’t a huge amount of books in Russian or Korean which mention Free Press journalists and food ‘rescued’ from the skip behind Morrisons in Stranraer – but now there’s at least one!
If Bythell ever publishes a diary for 2020, there may not be a huge amount to report on for the time we’re living through right now, with his shop, like many others, closed indefinitely due to the current lockdown. It might be worth keeping writing though – at the present time there has been a surge in interest in diaries written by those who have lived through such times before. Two well-known accounts of the Great Plague of London in 1665 are found in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Samuel Pepys’ Diary. Defoe was only five when the plague struck, and the accuracy of his account, probably based on his uncle’s journals, has been debated down through the years. For Pepys, the plague came halfway through his famous diary, which ran for almost ten years, and consists of over a million words. It doesn’t however include the fake quote you may have seen circulating online about ‘a gaggle of striplings making merry and no doubt spreading the plague without a care for the health of their elders’.
Another diary which people are turning to in lockdown is that of Anne Frank. The account of her family’s 761 days in hiding before being discovered, without many of the things we take for granted, is a reminder of how much we still have. Just in time for self-isolating schoolchildren is a new Anne Frank Video Diary, with a couple of 5-10 minute episodes being released each week until May. Produced by the Anne Frank House, the series aims to bring the story to a new generation by asking ‘What if Anne had a camera instead of a diary?’.
Although not a diary, a similar account to Anne Frank’s is Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. The ten Booms were a Dutch Christian family who hid Jews in a concealed room, around 15 miles away from where the Franks lived. Like the Franks, the ten Booms were discovered and arrested in 1944. Corrie and her sister Betsy were sent to a concentration camp. Betsy died, but Corrie survived to write many books. The film version of The Hiding Place is on Youtube and a recent documentary about her life is available to anyone with an Amazon Prime subscription.
What can we learn from these accounts of others who have faced similar times? Claire Tomalin, in her excellent biography of Pepys describes his ‘elated response to the plague year when with death all around, he grabbed at whatever there was to enjoy’. One Spectator article from last month praises Pepys’ ability to carry on regardless, saying ‘it will be far better for our morale to read Pepys than it will today’s newspapers, which seem hell-bent on panicking people with their alarmist and speculative headlines’.
Defoe took a different approach. At one point, when trying to decide whether to stay in London or flee to the country, he opened his Bible, and found help in a passage that many others have turned to in recent weeks – Psalm 91. It encouraged him to stay where he was, and he wrote that ‘as my times were in His hands, He was as able to keep me in a time of the infection as in a time of health; and if He did not think fit to deliver me, still I was in His hands’.
As we take all recommended precautions, may we do so in that same confidence, knowing that ‘in your book were written the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them’ (Psalm 139:16).
The above article due to be published in this week’s Stranraer and Wigtownshire Free Press, however the publication of the newspaper has been paused for the foreseeable future due to the COVID-19 pandemic