FEBRUARY IS A DARK MONTH. IT HAS the virtue of being short, but that’s about it; Christmas is a distant memory, and spring seems a long way off. Need a smile? It might make you grin to learn that on page 16 you’ll see a review that another paper didn’t dare run — if I tell you that Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist, you may guess which paper. They commissed the piece but wouldn’t print it; you, dear readers, get the benefit. But we can do heartwarming smiles too: try this story.
Here’s our friend, Matthew Dennison, an occasional reviewer for these pages, heading home late one night on the Victoria Line in London. He is accompanied by his dog (crucial to the tale) and the manuscript, written in longhand and interleaved with vital research, of his forthcoming book on Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter. The dog — I told you the dog was important — starts to vomit. Matthew, in confusion and distress, leaps off the train . . . with the vomiting dog in tow, but, alas! without his manuscript.
That should have been the sad end of the story; especially as Matthew’s name, but not his contact details, were on the manuscript. You can imagine Matthew’s woe. What you perhaps might not have imagined is that an Albanian builder, Arbin Milkurti, would board the train, discover the manuscript and decide that This Must Be Something Important. But how to find Matthew?
Ben, as he’s known, went the next day to an internet café and Googled Matthew. Yes, we’re meant to be cross at Google these days, what with copyright and China, but still. Google threw up a reference to a gallery with which M had some connection. Gallery calls M a day later and says to M: we’ve had a very odd phone call from someone who says he has some papers of yours. This is clearly bonkers: shall we tell him to go away? No! And so Ben and Matthew met; and Matthew and his manuscript were reunited. Someone, B told M, had once found his passport on a train; he wanted, somehow, to return the favour, somehow. Literary history is littered with tales of lost manuscripts; rarely do such stories have happy endings. Poor Carlyle, when John Stuart Mill’s maid burnt the only copy of his A History of the French Revolution; no Ben to be his saviour then.
Why am I telling you this story? It made me smile. I hope it makes you smile, too.