Mr Lloyd ran the local bookshop when I was a child. Conveniently located on the high street, next to a café, it was on my way home from school. So, most afternoons, Mum would go for a coffee and leave me to browse the books in the shop under the watchful eye of Mr Lloyd. He was a well-loved figure in the town and seemed to know most people by name. In the past he had been an English teacher at the local comprehensive, so he had taught many of the people who had stuck around in the area.
Mr Lloyd’s bookshop was one of those Aladdin’s cave sort of places. Treasures piled high and tucked into every available nook and cranny. You were as likely to discover a gem by crawling on the floor as you were by actually browsing the shelves. At the front of the shop Mr Lloyd had constructed a comfortable reading bench in the bay window, stuffed with all different sizes and varieties of cushions, mostly from local charity shops. I have so many fond memories of my after school hours, tucked up on that bench with a book and my favourite cushion, the one that looked like a whale and was made of blue fleece.
I was allowed to buy one book at the weekend if I had been good as part of my pocket money arrangement. But Mr Lloyd never minded if you just wanted to come and use it as a library for a while, reading something for half an hour before returning it and coming back to it the next day.
The locals had no idea how Mr Lloyd sustained such a business. Comments ran along the lines of…
“He can’t make any money from it.”
“Oh but you know I think he does own the building.”
“But what about the business rates? There’s no way he makes enough to pay those, surely?”
“I heard that he inherited some serious money from an uncle or something.”
“Was that why he took early retirement, do you think?”
“Could be… Could be.” Etcetera, etcetera. No one knew for sure and it seemed rude to ask. But, as a bookworm eight-year-old, such pithy questions of financial viability held no interest for me.
The most exciting thing about Mr Lloyd’s bookshop was his story exchange policy. He had a long-standing agreement that if you brought him a story that you had written and he liked it, he would exchange it for a book of your choice from the shop. In my eyes, this became the only reason to write stories, not that I needed much encouragement. He would display these stories on their own special shelf on the wall by the counter and anyone could ask to read them, but they were not for sale. In the whole time I knew him I never knew Mr Lloyd to reject any stories, except one, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
From the time I was eight to when I was ten, I watched this collection grow steadily. First it filled one shelf, then a second was put up underneath, then it spilled onto a nearby bookcase, and ultimately took it over. I was proud to say that I was responsible for a good portion of these works. I enjoyed writing stories about anything and everything, and often I would illustrate them too. Eventually I taught myself to fold pages and stitch them together to make actual, if primitive, books. My parents were always encouraging, but as busy people who were not experts in literature, their comments, though usually praising, contained no actual critique. Plus, as my parents, I was never sure just how much to trust their opinion. However, as an ex English teacher, Mr Lloyd would give much more specific feedback. He would always be complimentary, but would also tell me when some parts of a story worked better than others, and why; when I was repeating myself too much; or, when the language choice was a little off. I probably learned more about writing from him than from any teacher I had before or since. Over the years, I ended up amassing quite the home library as a consequence of Mr Lloyd’s generosity.
Mr Lloyd made me want to push myself more in my stories. I would try out different genres, many that I was unfamiliar with. Horror, science fiction, espionage, thrillers, and romance, though I found writing romance stories not to my taste. As a small boy, girls were still icky, but I had a go all the same. My story “Jim and Megan Kiss at the Movies,” was definitely not my best effort, but it earned useful critique and a book in exchange anyway. If I remember correctly, that was my last romance story.
My favourite things to write were adventure stories. I loved nothing more than creating a daredevil character with a ridiculous name, like Maxwell Fearless, or Francis Voyager, then putting them in a seemingly impossible situation and finding some clever and daring way for them to get out of it, probably grabbing some treasure on the way to magnanimously donate to a local museum.
This blissful period of my childhood came to an end when I decided to really try and impress Mr Lloyd. I had recently read an adventure novel and there was a passage in it that I liked so much that I lifted the whole thing and put it in my next story. It was a tale of a man who washed up on an island after a storm and had to build a raft to try and get home. He spends three weeks at sea, fighting off dehydration, hunger and sharks, before being rescued by a passing cruise ship. I had thought that there was no way that Mr Lloyd would notice this blatant theft, but of course, he did.
As usual, I had gone into the shop after school and given Mr Lloyd my story, before settling myself snugly on the bench by the window, watching him read out of the corner of my eye. After a few minutes of reading I suddenly saw the smile slip from his face. He pulled the paper a little closer to his face and re-read the page. My stomach dropped through the bottom of my scuffed leather shoes.
“Michael,” he called to me. “Could you come here a minute?” My cheeks flushed. I had no idea what to do. I slowly got up and went over to the counter, my heart dancing a violent beat in my chest. He sat forward in his old, battered, red leather swivel chair and peered at me over the top of his glasses.
“Michael, did you write all this yourself?” There was no anger in his voice. I almost wished there had been. Instead, he just sounded a little sad. Without thinking I nodded, committing myself to the fraud. I didn’t trust myself to speak. He sighed and slowly removed his glasses, setting them on the counter. “Michael,” he said again. “I know that you didn’t write this bit,” and at that he held out the offending page of the story, complete with my illustration of a skinny bearded man in torn shorts spearing a fish with a sharpened stick. I didn’t know what to say, so I stayed quiet and looked at my shoes, not wanting to meet his eyes.
“I’m sorry Michael, but I can’t exchange a plagiarised story. Have you heard that word before?” I shook my head. “It’s when you pass off someone else’s work as your own.” He paused, smiling at me again. “You’re a good writer Michael. If you go home and re-write this part of the story I will gladly exchange it.” He handed back my pages. He was right, and he was being kind, but I was so embarrassed that I practically snatched the story from his hand and fled the shop. That night I tore the pages into tiny pieces and put them straight into the recycling bin.
I didn’t write any more stories for a while, and not too long after that we ended up moving away, so I never saw Mr Lloyd again. It was a bitter pill to have that as my last memory of him. His lesson was powerful though. In the years since that episode, I gradually took up writing again. I got a degree in English and eventually, after many false starts, became a published author. I never plagiarised anything ever again.
On a recent trip to see my agent, I had cause to drive near that old town again and, on a whim, decided to drive through and see if the old bookshop was still there. I parked up and walked down the familiar high street. There had been a lot of change, but some things were still the same. Maggie’s café was now an art shop selling oil paintings and unusual furniture, what had been the Asda was now a Tesco, and the wine shop with the bright blue door was now a pilates studio, with a bright blue door. But, on the whole the street still had the same charm. I found that my pulse was quickening as I drew near, fearing the worst, that the bookshop would be gone. But no, there it was. Paint a little faded, windows a little grubby, but otherwise Mr Lloyd’s Bookshop was pretty much just as I remembered it. The lights weren’t on, so I peered into the window and then tried the door. Closed.
“Are ye lookin’ for Mr Lloyd?” An old man with a bag of heavy shopping was addressing him from the other side of the road. I stumbled back from the shop and turned around.
“Oh…um…yes. Does he still run the shop?”
“Aye. But he’s no well at the moment.”
“Oh really?”
“Aye, bad heart,” he said, tapping his own chest as if Michael might be unclear as to where the heart was.
“Where is he?”
“St Bernards.” He pointed down the road. “Up in town.”
“Thank you,” I said, turning back towards my car and waving goodbye to the man who gave a perfunctory wave back.
The meeting with my agent was mercifully short and afterwards I drove straight to St Bernard’s hospital. I sat in the car for a while, not knowing what to do. Should I really just walk in? Would he even remember me? There must have been hundreds of kids whose stories had passed through his hands over the last twenty years.
Suddenly a thought struck me, and I got out my memo pad and pen and began to write. He may not remember my name, I thought, but I’m sure he would appreciate a story. It didn’t take me long to fill a handful of pages. I carefully ripped them out, folded them up, and made my way to the hospital entrance.
I hate navigating hospitals, especially ones like this that have grown out from an original building like some endlessly replicating amoeba, so that there was no logic to which department was connected to the other. Eventually I managed to find him. He had a bed in a ward on the second floor, occupied by only two other people, who were both asleep. I recognised him immediately. Other than having a bit less hair and a few more wrinkles he was exactly the same. But then to me, as a child, he had always looked old.
He was sat up in bed, the same pair of gold-rimmed glasses resting on his nose, reading a book that was carefully balanced on his knees. The little table by his bed held more books on top of which was a precariously placed mug of tea. I approached quietly, and was almost at his bed when he looked up. He regarded me over the top of his glasses.
“Hello Mr Lloyd,” I said. “I…I don’t know if you’ll remember me but I used to come to your shop a lot…I’m…”
“Michael,” he beamed. “Of course I remember you. Come, come, sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to the hospital-standard green plastic chair on the other side of the bed.
“I can’t believe you remember me,” I said. “It’s been nearly twenty years.”
“I never forget a face,” he smiled. “Especially one who wrote me so many stories.”
“I see you still run the shop. Are you still doing the story exchange?”
“Oh yes. And if I recall, you still owe me a story.” I gave out a gasp laugh. His memory was astounding.
“That’s actually why I’m here,” I said, holding out the folded sheets of paper. “I wrote you something.” Mr Lloyd’s smile grew so wide it looked like it was trying to escape his face. He took the pages from me, reverently.
“No plagiarism this time,” he chuckled. I smiled back.
“No…definitely not this time.”
“Good.” He re-settled his glasses on his nose and started to read.
Mr Lloyd ran the local bookshop…
