The Library Book

by Anita Anand

  Since the contents of libraries were deemed valueless, the Coalition simply instructed its enforcement agency (formerly known as the Army) to burn the buildings to the ground. But after the first two incinerations, there were mass protests, and human shields were formed round many libraries. More menacingly, two offices of the enforcement agency were burnt down in retaliation. There was a broad suspicion, especially among the elderly, that once information and culture were only available digitally through the englandwideweb, truth would be easier for the government to control. To the surprise of many, the printed book began to take on a symbolic significance, as once it had done in the early years of printing.

  This standoff continued for several months, because even to the National Coalition the notion of scores of incinerated citizens as acceptable collateral damage seemed a little excessive. There was negotiation; promises were made, and then more promises, until – to the government’s surprise – the armies of white-haired activists agreed to stop protecting libraries in exchange for an official promise to keep them open, on terms and conditions to be mutually agreed. Naturally, as soon as the defendants withdrew, the government sent in its enforcers with the instruction that not a book survive. Indeed, there was a ministerial memo proposing that the very word ‘book’ should be withdrawn from public discourse. When the thing no longer existed, the word to denote it would surely not survive either.

  But when the official arsonists arrived to carry out their work, they discovered that all the libraries had been secretly emptied of their contents. One by one, often at night, books had been removed to safety. At first they were simply hidden, in attics, hayricks and henhouses. And so the government concluded that it had in any case won: the book had gone into internal exile and would die off when those armlinking old fools who had held up progress for the length of a summer died off themselves. Yet in this they were much deceived. The truth was only pieced together many decades later. But it seems that at first there was a samizdat circulation of individual books among trusted ‘readers’. Then, in a bold move started in West Yorkshire, the first underground mobile library was set up by a book-loving milkman whose horse-drawn cart held a secret compartment in which a few dozen volumes could be hidden. Since books were scarce and forbidden by authority, children suddenly valued them the more. Boldly, adults began meeting in ‘reading groups’, which passed round a single existing copy of a book and then discussed it in its absence; many of these groups were raided but without success. Finally, books began to multiply, from which the only conclusion to be drawn was that an underground publishing and printing company had been set up. The government, for all its enforcement agencies, was unable to discover either the location or the membership of this enterprise.

  Later, much later, this famous Defence of the Book was regularly compared by historians to the way in which culture and learning were kept alive by monks during the Dark Ages until better, safer times returned. And even if others maintained that this renaissance would have occurred anyway, it is nonetheless true that this Defence of the Book, both actual and symbolic, undoubtedly led to …

  THE PUNK AND LANGSIDE LIBRARY

  HARDEEP SINGH KOHLI

  Punk. Even the word, with its harsh consonant beginning and even harsher consonant ending, filled me with a certain dread. (For younger readers, we are in 1981. While we may have had running water and electricity we had still to experience the colonisation of our language by the Americans. Back then, Punk had absolutely nothing to do with Ashton Kutcher. Or Clint Eastwood.)

  The nihilism and anarchy of Punk was well documented; somehow it included random spitting, sculpted hair and safety pins. And also, amongst some Punks, there was a definite racist agenda. Understandably, it was this wing of Punk that most concerned my parents and me; not the early (nonracist) work of the Buzzcocks.

  I was twelve years old. Glasgow was hard enough work, given the sectarian divide and the confusion I caused by being a Sikh who openly attended a Catholic school. My bottle-green tie, blazer and turban combo nailed my school colours firmly to the mast. The last thing I needed was the introduction of Punks to Glasgow. Yet another potential kicking to run from.

  And in terms of avoidance, I had done a pretty good job, up until that cold, dark, late November evening.

  Langside Library was and continues to be a special place. It sits with prominence on Sinclair Drive, at the bottom of Battlefield Road, down the hill from the monument. Across the road is the Victoria Infirmary; in front of the beautiful sandstone house of books is a funny wee road set-up where the buses turn around, a terminus, a destination. Much like the library itself: a destination, where lives turn around.

  Every day after school I’d walk down to my wee mum’s shop. Sometimes I’d sit in the back and read magazines, carefully, before putting them back on the shelf. Sometimes I’d sit in the car and fall in love with Annie Nightingale on Radio 1. And sometimes I’d be told to go to Langside Library to do my homework.

  I liked the library. The smell of books. The comfy chairs. The stern, matronly librarian who had more than the faintest whiff of lavender and/or travel sweets about her. My mum grew up with very few books around her. This inculcated her with a sense of reverence towards them, a reverence she passed on to her kids. So being around books made me feel almost spiritual at times. I would sit on a hard, vinyl-covered chair, at a table, under an unforgiving light; I would struggle with my work while my uber-bright younger brother would have sailed through all his assignments and repair to the cosseted comfort of the reclining chairs where he would tear through a book for pleasure.

  One Wednesday almost thirty years ago I found myself racing the fading light of an oncoming Glasgow winter as I shuffled off to Langside Library. (The gloaming won). The comforting warmth of the library was most welcome. A collection of the usual faces, the usual whispered voices and hushed tones belied the unique and surprising events that were about to unfold.

  There is a protocol in libraries; those of us that frequent them know how to move around the space noiselessly. We know the level at which to pitch a conversation when asking the staff for a copy of last year’s ‘oor wullie’ annual. We know this. Alan the punk didn’t.

  The image will never leave me: a cockney punk in the leafier enclaves of Glasgow’s Southside. Ripped tartan trousers, Doc Marten boots, spiky hair and a black leather biker’s jacket. In Battlefield. Incongruity in action.

  He removed books from shelves noisily; he strutted about noisily; he breathed noisily.

  It seemed ironic that the fat, brown kid in the bottle-green uniform and matching turban was, for once, not the strangest looking person around.

  I knew that a clock was ticking. The lavender-smelling librarian would have to act, would be compelled to say something to the noisy punk. It was just a matter of time. I kept watching him from behind a biology textbook, waiting for the inevitable denouement.

  The punk wandered over towards me. I was sure he would walk past. But he didn’t.

  ‘Oi, Paki. You got a light?’ He spoke this in his normal voice. There was nothing sotto voce about it. For a moment I wasn’t sure he was talking to me. The words seemed dislocated from their sense. I wasn’t a Paki. Why did he need light?

  ‘Oi. Paki. Have you got any matches?’

  Then it became clear that I was the object of his attention.

  ‘I’m not a Paki.’ A fairly basic riposte, but factually correct. And he was a few years older and considerably taller than me. He had heard my accent which seemed at that point to cause him no end of entertainment.

  ‘Scottie. You’re a Scottie. That’s funny …’

  No one ever thought I was Scottish. It was always assumed that I was Indian; the brown skin a giveaway.

  ‘Yes. I’m Scottish. And why’s that funny?’

  I have no idea where my bravery came from.

  ‘Never met a Paki Scottie,’ he said.

  His English accent seemed to be twice as loud as any other sound currently
occurring in the universe at that point in time. And the librarian had heard it.

  The details of the conversation that then took place are lost on me. All I know is that somehow I became inculcated in the act of anarchy caused by the punk. Me and the cockney punk found ourselves removed from the library after stern words. This joint ejection created an esprit de corps between us. We both felt wronged, but for very different reasons.

  The punk was intent on smoking a cigarette. He decided that this could best be done in the trees around the library. We stood in the lea of the library and he managed to find a willing smoker to share some fire. And I stood and spoke to a punk. He was still hugely entertained by the notion that brown people could sound Scottish. And I was hugely surprised to realise that behind the spiked hair, torn tartan trousers and biker jacket resided a fairly pleasant guy, a guy who felt as misunderstood by the world as I did. He stopped calling me Paki and started calling me Scottie. We chatted for a bit. He lit his second cigarette from the dying embers of his first and, almost unthinkingly, handed it to me to have a drag. I was twelve. I didn’t smoke. But somehow, in that moment, in that chance coming together of two disparate souls, I felt I couldn’t let him down. I dragged on the cigarette. And coughed for a few moments. He found that hysterical.

  We parted ways shortly thereafter, the last word he said to me was ‘Scottie’. And I trudged back. In the fully-formed darkness to my mum’s shop. And as I did, I thought about the library and how it had managed to let two such different people from two such different worlds collide. It took a visiting cockney punk to allow me, for the first time, to have my Scottishness expressed and accepted. And it happened in a library.

  I spent a great deal of time after that in libraries, through school and university and since. To reduce a library to simple architecture, bricks and mortar is a mistake. Similarly, to suggest a library is defined by the books on the shelf is erroneous. Libraries are very special spaces, spaces where people come together in separate but joint pursuits of knowledge, of learning. Libraries are the heartbeats of communities.

  A library was the place I met my first ever punk. A library was a place where I was able to claim my Scottishness. And a library was the first place I puffed on a fag. Two out of three ain’t bad …

  THE RULES

  LUCY MANGAN

  When life – or the government – gives you lemons, make lemonade, say I! Especially if you can’t find a member of the Cabinet, rabbit-punch him to the ground and squeeze the lemons in his blank, soulless eyes.

  The Big Society is here. And libraries aren’t. If you can’t see the opportunity here – well, then you aren’t the irrepressible optimist I took you for.

  I have, thanks to twenty years of more-or-less frenzied purchasing, more books than I can now read in a lifetime. The slowing heartbeat of print journalism could flatline any time and leave me bereft of job and purpose. The time has surely come to add a second string to my bow, and to give something back to my community, even if I have no idea who that community might actually be. But I’m sure you’re out there, and if you ever see me waving, do say hello, won’t you?

  I’m going to start my own library. Both a borrower and a lender I’ll be!

  All I need is a rubber stamp, a few index cards and – in keeping with the idiosyncratic stock, which runs from Norah Lofts to Philip Roth via Narnia and includes not one but two biographies of Mary Pickford, which recent discovery did cause me to wonder whether I shouldn’t hand over all my credit cards and financial decisions to my next of kin whenever I come within fifty miles of the Book Barn) – a handful of idiosyncratic rules. To wit:

  1. All applicants for membership must provide a recently defaced picture of a cabinet minister, a packet of Tunnock’s caramel wafers and a ten-minute go of a lovely kitten.

  2. Silence is to be maintained at all times. For younger patrons, ‘silence’ is an ancient tradition, dating from pre-digital times. It means ‘the absence of sound’. Sound includes talking. Such a state was thought to allow longer and deeper engagement with a task – here, ‘reading’ – and we are attempting to resurrect the custom. We’d probably have more luck resurrecting Etruscan haruspicy, but you’ve got to try.

  3. I will provide tea and coffee at cost price, the descriptive terms for which will be limited to ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘no/one/two/three sugars’ and ‘cup’. Anyone who asks for a latte, cappuccino or herbal anything will be taken outside and killed. Silently.

  4. Opening hours are noon to midnight. I’m not a morning person.

  5. There will be no food provided or permitted in the library. Less because I am concerned for the state of my books than because I am concerned for mine and other users’ sanity if they have to hear you masticating.

  6. That word was ‘masticating’. If you thought it was something else, please stay away from this and any other library.

  7. Please place mobile phones in the box provided. They may or may not be returned to you depending on whether or not I fancy upgrading my Nokia Average.

  8. Patrons may be accompanied by kittens at any time, dogs by special arrangement, babies by very special arrangement, because they’re not quiet and they bugger up mornings too.

  9. Central heating settings shall be decided by a show of hands. In the event of a tie, votes of menopausal women shall count double.

  10. Dog-ear my pages and I’ll dog-ear you.

  BAFFLED AT A BOOKCASE

  ALAN BENNETT

  I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled. He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered. ‘All these books. I’ll never catch up,’ wails the young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears, and in The Old Country another young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out E.M. Forster with a big cigar. Orton himself notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in.

  The first library I did find my way into was the Armley Public Library in Leeds where a reader’s ticket cost tuppence in 1940; not tuppence a time or even tuppence a year but just tuppence; that was all you ever had to pay. It was rather a distinguished building, put up in 1901, the architect Percy Robinson, and amazingly for Leeds, which is and always has been demolition crazy, it survives and is still used as a library, though whether it will survive the present troubles I don’t like to think.

  We would be there as a family, my mother and father, my brother and me, and it would be one of our regular weekly visits. I had learned to read quite early when I was five or six, by dint, it seemed to me then, of watching my brother read. We both of us read comics but whereas I was still on picture-based comics like the Dandy and the Beano, my brother, who was three years older, had graduated to the more text-based Hotspur and Wizard. Having finished my Dandy I would lie down on the carpet beside him and gaze at what he was reading, asking him questions about it and generally making a nuisance of myself. Then – and it seemed as instantaneous as this – one day his comic made sense and I could read. I’m sure it must have been more painstaking than this but not much more.

  Having learned to read, other than comics, there was nothing in the house on which to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuar
y, with both of them fans of the naturalist R.M. Lockley. There were a few volumes of self-help in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by buying a horse and riding through England.

  The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in stained glass which by 1941 was just beginning to buckle. Ahead was the Adults’ Library, lofty, airy and inviting; to the right was the Junior Library, a low, dark room made darker by the books which, regardless of their contents, had been bound in heavy boards of black, brown or maroon embossed with the stamp of Leeds Public Libraries. This grim packaging was discouraging to a small boy who had just begun to read, though more discouraging still was the huge and ill-tempered, walrus-moustached British Legion commissionaire who was permanently installed there. The image of General Hindenburg, who was pictured on the stamps in my brother’s album, he had lost one or other of his limbs in the trenches, but since he seldom moved from his chair and just shouted it was difficult to tell which.

  Such veterans of the First War were much in evidence well into the 1950s. As a child one encountered them in parks, sitting on benches and in shelters playing dominoes, generally grumpy and with reason to be, the war having robbed them of their youth and often their health. The luckier and less disabled ones manned lifts or were posted at the doors of public buildings, a uniformed and bemedalled conciergerie who were more often than not unhelpful, making the most of whatever petty authority they were invested with. And so it was here, the commissionaire’s only concern to maintain absolute silence, and not at all the companion and friend novice readers needed on this, the threshold of literature.