“Perhaps, if bookshops can be haunted, No. 4 Sheep Street can claim more ghosts than most. Haunted certainly by my father”

That was my father’s opening line to his unfinished memoir discovered a few days after his death in 2002. He called it The Life and Death of a Stratford Bookshop, but it was so much more than that. Aged seventy, he had decided he must at last tell the truth about his overpowering and eccentric father, Captain William Jaggard. However it seemed he couldn’t bring himself to finish his heartfelt story. It ended abruptly.