I found the book in the building where I went to Sunday School when I was a kid - on the RAF base at Kinloss in Scotland, so I imagine this dates the memory to the late 1970s / very early 1980s. There were two parts to the Sunday School building - one where the main activities of Sunday School would take place - colouring sessions based on Bible stories etc, and an adjoining room that one would have to walk through to gain entrance to the aforementioned main Sunday School room. This secondary room - a square space with high, square windows- in my memory seemed to be used as a kind of storeroom; bits of nativity play paraphernalia lying about, photostats of typewritten scripts, old piles of paper, once perhaps greatly important, all now forgotten and lost in this room that people only passed through - or met their children in when they had finished church.
It was not on a Sunday School day that I discovered the Book of Epidemics, but on another day - perhaps when I was ill from school with some mild and dreamy childhood illness - or more likely recovering from one, as I wa snot at home in bed with an Armada Book of Ghost Stories or the latest Beano. I was with Mum, who was engaged in some activity connected with the Sunday School building - perhaps planning for a fete, or maybe for the next nativity play. I say I was with my mother, but I remember her as being in the main part of the Sunday School building while I waited for her in that messy adjoining store-room. It was amongst the magazines and discarded Sunday School flotsam that I found the book. I do not remember the title of the book but I remember the contents,('The Book of Epidemics' is a name I gave it myself, and then only today, when I began thinking about it for the first time in years, and needed a title for this piece). The interior of the book was full of old black and white photographs (and what black and white photographs do not seem old?) while the words, crammed thick dense lines I could not have read of in any great detail given my age, described the occupants of the photographs, or rather their fates. In my memory, as may be ascertained from title given to the book, the contents seemed to be a list of epidemics. The photographs showed, I remember, classrooms of children and church congregations. The italicised sentences below the photographs told of how half the people in this photograph died in the epidemic or perhaps how none of the farmworkers survived the sickness. I am, of course, guessing as to the exact words. I cannot remember them in any detail, no matter even if that memory might be flase, but am giving a flavour of what the text might have contained.
The book haunted me that day, whispered through that white, creamy afternoon in which I may have been recovering from a mild childhood illness myself, with the words of disorders and illnesses I had not come across before; typhoid, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis and cholera. Lists of the names of the dead. What would it be like, I wondered, with all the feverish imagination of childhood -that certainty of an almost memory- to live in those times. I imagined rumours and playground whispers under skies turning drizzly with those rumours; that classroom, three of them have come down or perhaps they went out in that rain, and the sickness came with it. Grey premonitions, damp and unwelcome forebodings. I pored over those photographs that seemingly endless afternoon, prodding the skin of those images -those haunted eyes, those hooded smiles- with fingertips that had not - happily - known the kiss of smallpox or chorea.
This is my remembering of the Book of Epidemics, a darker remembering that I had perhaps thought when I began to write this. I do not believe the Book of Epidemics ever existed, and, like the school in the November woods of yesterday's posts, is perhaps a reconstruction of a film, a ghost story, a school project, maybe even playground rumours and mathematics class urban myth. Also in my memory I remember the fear of those polio epidemics, an iron-lung terror, and those tales of it being passed through water, inside infectious swimming pools, in post-blitz streets flattened by Nazi bombs and ongoing renovations.
I am not obviously old enough to remember the fear of Polio, but, like the Book of Epidemics, it lies somehow in my memory. I do not know why, and perhaps this is just as well.
(dedicated to Thomas Ligotti and his story 'Gas Station Carnivals', a tale about memories of things that never existed - never could exist - but nonetheless continue to do so).
