Children were singing in Bungay library this morning. I remembered Cassie, in Saffron Walden library.
One early spring day she was sitting by the ‘Book of the Day’ display, spry in her eighties, immaculate in rust linen culottes, a burgundy short smock, leather bag at her hip. A twenty-something girl in pastel pink sackcloth and Gestapo boots was overseeing the children singing here.
Cassie told me, ‘It’s hardly encouraging children to use the library for silent and studious purposes. Today alone, the bus as sung about has had wheels on it, a horn on it, people on it, windscreen wipers on it, a conductor on it and a service dog on it.’
I asked, ‘What does the service dog go...do?
She answered in song, 'The service dog on the bus goes snuffle wuffle calm, snuffle wuffle calm, snuffle wuffle calm. The service dog on the bus goes snuffle wuffle calm, all day long. Apparently.'
Moving like a tide, the children’s attention shifted from pastel sackcloth girl to Cassie. Twin boys in yellow dungarees stood up and stared, wonderingly. Some children began to join in with her.
‘No, children, please, thank you,’ flapped pastel sackcloth girl. ‘Not only do we never, ever talk to strangers, remember, we never, ever randomly start singing with them, neither.’
Cassie, pointedly, said, ‘She could get something here in the summer, perhaps. They do Shakespeare in the Gardens. You can never hear the words. The man who directs the summer season drinks for the rest of the year. He has a private income.’
Cassie was also empress of the library jigsaw table, and made sure to keep 'the men' off it. She would label (often wrongly) finished sections of puzzle, Cassie Trent has joined these pieces together herself, let no man put them asunder.
‘There’s one of the men,' she said, 'who you would think was a Bernard, but isn’t, keeps trying to get me to join a jigsaw group. I said to him, “Why would I want to? Doing a jigsaw is a pastime. If you have many hands to make light work of the sky or sea or grass, or whatever, it would pass less of your time.’
She tried and failed to fit in pieces of a ship’s sail. ‘I’m not anti-men, you know. In my twenties, to get myself a new washing machine – shop display model but fully plumbed in – me and the High Street electrician had it off. And a few years later, when I was having my affair with the manager of Barclays, he came round to mine with a rickety little bald man. Came up to my middle; teeth a non-starter. And this man announced he’d taken a shine to me, and he had a house that had lain empty for the past seven years that could be mine for a song.' She stuck out her elbows. 'So, off we three went down to the house, arm in arm, like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. There was black and furry margarine in the fridge; bath half run with what had gone the colour of a wee sample you'd be worried about, a sock lying where blankets had clearly been pulled back with a view to whoever had been under them doing a flit.' Cassie stuck out her elbows again. ‘Off the three of us went once more, to the bank this time. I had a whole mortgage by one o’clock.’
She drew her elbows back in, shaking her head. ‘I wish now I hadn’t rushed things. If I’d used my feminine wiles a bit better, I might have ended up a good two streets nearer the estuary.’
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