I bought A Window in Thrums because L. M. Montgomery recommended it to me; she mentioned it in her journals.  She mentioned a lot of books she read in her journals, and since this one was by J. M. Barrie I decided to try it.  But this isn’t a book review, this is a Fiction Friday post.

I recently wrote about books as objects, especially pieces of history, and mentioned my copy of A Window in Thrums.  It’s a good story, but one of the most interesting aspects of my copy is the inscription on the flyleaf: “For Grandma from Mary Eunice, December 25th, 1898.”  I don’t know who Mary Eunice or her grandmother were, since I bought the book used online only a few years ago.  But shortly after buying it, I decided to write a story imagining who they might have been, and who else might have owned the book over the years.

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A Window in Thrums

            “Do you think Grandma will like it?” Mary Eunice asked, hugging the book to her chest.

            “Of course she will, dear,” her mother said firmly, continuing briskly down the row, eyes on the baskets of fruit for sale.

            Mary Eunice frowned, the frown of a girl just old enough to start questioning firm parental assurances.  “But will she really like it?” she persisted, hurrying after her mother.  “I want her to like it because she really likes it, not just because it came from me.”

            Her mother absently picked up an apple, put it down, and went on to the oranges.  “There’s never anything really fresh this time of year,” she muttered.

            “But, Mother, will she?”

            “What?  Oh, the book.  Yes, of course, you know she likes Mr. Barrie’s novels.”

            “That’s true,” Mary Eunice said thoughtfully, feeling reassured.  She watched her mother walk down the row but stayed where she was, to look at the book in her hands.  She enjoyed the proud thrill of ownership for at least the twelfth time in the last ten minutes since they’d walked away from the bookstore.  It was the first book she’d ever bought with her own money.

            Mary Eunice thought it was the prettiest little book she’d ever seen.  The cover was dark blue, with silver curls and swirls and a scattering of pink flowers.  The spine was the same, the back pale gray, the pages crisp and white.  Mary Eunice ran her fingers lightly across the silver title stamped on the cover: A Window in Thrums.  She checked on her mother, saw she hadn’t gone very far, and carefully cracked open the book.  She turned a few pages and found Chapter I.

            “On the bump of green round which the brae twists, at the top of the brae, and within cry of T’nowhead Farm, still stands a one-storey house, whose white-washed walls, streaked with the discoloration that rain leaves, look yellow when the snow comes.”

            Mary Eunice stopped reading with a puzzled frown and closed the book.  “Oh well,” she whispered to it, “I still think you’re the prettiest little book I ever saw, even if I don’t know what a brae is.  And Grandma likes Mr. Barrie’s writing.  That’s what matters.”

            Mary Eunice’s mother eventually found fruit she felt was satisfactory and they went home.  Mary Eunice wrapped the book up in colorful paper and tied it with a ribbon.  Grandma unwrapped it a week later, on Christmas morning.

            “Do you like it, do you like it?” Mary Eunice asked, fairly bouncing.

            “Mary Eunice, that isn’t polite,” her mother admonished gently.

            “I love it,” Grandma said, and gathered her up for a hug.

            “Look on the inside,” Mary Eunice said eagerly, opening the book to show the black handwriting on the first page.  “Mother wrote it for me because her writing’s prettier.  But I picked it out all by myself and bought it and told her what to write.”

            Grandma smoothed the page with one hand and read aloud.  “ ‘For Grandma from Mary Eunice.  Dec. 25, 1898.’  That’s lovely, darling.  You know I’m always looking forward to J. M. Barrie’s next book.”

            The book stayed nestled comfortably on the old mahogany bookcase in Grandma’s bedroom for the next ten years.  She read it three times, and cried over the ending every time. 

            By the time Grandma died in 1908, Mary Eunice had forgotten all about A Window in Thrums.  The book came into the possession of her Aunt Gladys, who took all the books from the mahogany bookshelf because she needed something to fill in her own shelves at home.  Her husband had just bought them a fine new house with lots of big bare bookshelves.  She put the book on her shelf without opening it.  It stayed there, untouched save for frequent dusting, until late in 1929 when both the house and most of the books were sold.

          A Window in Thrums was bought by a neighbor and slight acquaintance named Annie who had chanced to see one of J. M. Barrie’s plays only two weeks before and was now curious about his novels.  She read it, liked it well enough but thought the end was a little sappy and the thick Scottish dialect hard to read, decided she preferred the play, put it on her shelf, and left it there for several years.

           “Grandma Annie, how did you ever get so many books?” Jim asked one rainy afternoon, running his fingers along the spines.

           “I’ve been collecting books since before you were born,” she answered with a laugh.

           “What’s this one?” Jim asked, pulling the small blue book out from where it was wedged between two others.  By now the corners of the cover were bent a little and the spine had gotten a bit wiggly.  “A Window in Thrums.  What’s Thrums?”

            “A weaving town in Scotland.  I think J. M. Barrie invented it though.”

          “It’s a book about a window in a town in Scotland?”

         “Kind of.  Take it and read it if you want.  You might like it.”

         Jim took it and read it.  He was older than Mary Eunice had been in 1898, and he understood the parts about the brae and the discoloration and so on.  It wasn’t much like most of what he read, usually adventure stories and mysteries.  A Window in Thrums was a quiet book, about an ordinary family leading their life in a poor town in the hills of Scotland.  Jim liked it.  He would have been embarrassed and denied it to his friends, somehow feeling the admission would make him look sissy, but in truth he liked it.  Sometimes he’d secretly read parts of the dialogue out loud, when there was no one to hear.  Jim was Scottish on his father’s side.  Grandma Annie was his mother’s mother.  His father’s father, Grandpa Samuel, had been a gruff man with a twinkling eye and a thick Scottish burr to his voice.  Jim liked to read lines like “Syne he creepit oot o’ the bed an’ got the staff and gaed been for Leeby” and remember how Grandpa Samuel used to sound telling stories.  He kept the book on his shelf in his room, pulling it down to page through it now and again.   It stayed on the shelf until Jim died in Normandy in 1944.

          It was three months before Jim’s mother could stand to do anything with Jim’s things.  When she finally emptied his room she put all his books into a box, sealed it up tight, and put it down in the basement.  More boxes piled up around and on top of it, and that box of books didn’t see light again until Jim’s younger sister cleared out the basement when their mother sold the house to go into a nursing home.  She donated the box of books to the public library.

          The library sorted through the books, and sold most of them at that year’s annual book sale.  A Window in Thrums was picked up, along with several dozen others, by a used book dealer and taken to his shop.

          “Find anything good?” his assistant asked, looking through the books with a pencil in hand, ready for pricing.

           “Nothing special,” the book dealer answered, working over a ledger at his desk.  “But when they’re selling them for a quarter each, I figured I didn’t have anything to lose.”

           “How about this one?” the assistant asked, picking up the small blue book and flipping to the title page.  “A Window in Thrums by J. M. Barrie.  Never heard of him.”

           “He’s the guy who wrote Peter Pan,” the dealer said without looking up from his columns of figures.

          “Peter Pan was a book?  I thought it was just a Disney movie.”

          “Most Disney movies were books once.  Barrie wrote the original.”

          “How do you know this stuff?”

          “That’s my job,” the dealer said, totaling a column.  Then he paused, and grinned a little.  “And I just read Peter Pan to Andy a few weeks ago.  Now he keeps jumping off his bed trying to fly, he’s driving his mother and me crazy.”

           The assistant laughed and then looked down at the book again with slightly more respect.  “So is this one worth anything?”

           “Nah.  Peter Pan still sells but nobody wants anything else by Barrie anymore.  Mark it a dollar-fifty.”

           “Right.”  The assistant turned to the first page to mark the price.  “Hey look, somebody wrote on it.”  He whistled one low note.  “1898.  Just over 90 years old.”

           The book dealer glanced up.  “It’s written on?  Make it a dollar then.”

          “90 years old, you’d think it would be worth something,” the assistant remarked, writing a neat “$1—” in the top right corner, above Mary Eunice’s note.

           “Not when everybody looks at it and says ‘who’s J. M. Barrie?’”

           The book was put on a shelf and was bought almost six months later by a distracted father looking for a birthday present for his teenage daughter, who happened to like to read.  The assistant, feeling and sounding very knowledgeable, told the father that J. M. Barrie was the same author who wrote Peter Pan.  The father had only a hazy idea of what his daughter liked to read, but thought she liked fantasies.  He bought it.

           A Window in Thrums is not a fantasy.  The daughter, Jennifer, only read half of it.  She thought it was old-fashioned, hard to read, and lacked plot.  She marked her place with a scrap of light blue ribbon, which she left in the book when she put it away on a shelf, unfinished.  The book stayed on the shelf longer than Jennifer stayed at the house.  After Jennifer had gone away to college, moved out of the house and gotten married, her mother cleared out the overstuffed bookshelves and sold A Window in Thrums at her garage sale.

             All the books at that sale were bought by a man named Mike, who was an authorized seller on Barnesandnoble.com, selling used and out of print books.  He listed A Window in Thrums’ condition as acceptable, and priced it at $2.62.  Two months later a college student named Jess bought it, shaking her head at the ridiculously low prices on J. M. Barrie books.  She couldn’t decide whether to judge it convenient or unfortunate, and to be sad or pleased.

              The package was greeted with great delight when it arrived.  “My book finally came in the mail,” she told her roommate as she brought the package into her dorm room.

             “What’d you buy?”

             “A Window in Thrums,” Jess answered, using scissors to cut the cardboard.  “It’s a J. M. Barrie book.”

           “Who?”

          “He wrote Peter Pan,” she answered almost automatically, used to getting this reaction to most of her favorite authors.

          “Oh.”

          “I’ve been wanting to read it for a while.  I’ve read a couple others by him that were good, and L. M. Montgomery mentioned liking this one in her journal.”

          “Who?”

         “She wrote Anne of Green Gables.”

        “Oh.”

         She pulled the book out of its wrapping and looked at it with a proud thrill of ownership.  The cover was scratched in places and the spine was worn and faded.  The pages had turned yellow, a soft, tanned shade.  “I love old books,” she remarked, and buried her nose between the pages to catch the scent of old paper.  “I think this is the prettiest little book I ever saw.”

         Jess liked A Window in Thrums.  She had an immense fondness for J. M. Barrie’s writing style.  It was old-fashioned, but it was soothing somehow.  She enjoyed the thick Scottish dialect—it was like a puzzle that got easier to decipher the more she read.  She didn’t cry over the ending, because she never ever cried over books no matter how much she loved them, but she did find it sad.  She liked the story, and she liked the book itself even more, because it was like owning a piece of history. 

          After finishing reading she turned back to the very first page again and ran her fingers across the black writing.  “For Grandma from Mary Eunice, Dec. 25, 1898.”  She wondered who they had been, and what path the book must have taken in the more than a century since that Christmas day to end up in her hands.