Library kids

 

Saturday morning childhood ritual, in the early 1970s, North of England : It's Saturday morning so you don't have to be up early for school. Go and swim at the local baths (that's what we called a swimming pool then) and when you had done the awkward dance of getting your clothes back onto that never-quite-dry-skin and had a cup of their sixpenny cocoa, you would spend the next two hours in the nearby public Library, because you were a Library Kid.

There are many of us. You will know if you were, and I think most of the people I grew up around probably were, even if they didn't talk to you about it. It is a generally solitary, but very enjoyable state of being, a Library Kid. And of course, if at all possible, you did not go there with your Mum. You don't want to have someone saying that you've been too long when you have only been there for two or three hours.

I bet - if you are one of us - you can close your eyes and remember all the look and feel of the place. Ours was quite modern but still had that satisfying smell of inked paper, wood polish and the plastic sleeves that protected the books. Children have a better sense of smell than adults, but I can still remember the smell of opening a new book. The large format full colour ones had more of a smell than the novels. An encyclopaedia generally had an aroma you could detect with your eyes shut. And you will remember what the chairs were like because you spent so much time on them. I am not sure the librarian would have liked children sitting on the floor reading (a trip hazard for pensioners, at the very least). 

Library Kids were also explorers of the different filing systems that our precious shelves used. We soon learned how to find the author or subject we needed. But we all remember that crushing disappointment when we have the full number of a book and work our way through the numbers on the shelves, only to find that some bugger has already borrowed it. 

There are different flavours of Library Kids, but we all used the Library to feed our particular habit. There are the 'got to read em all' fans of one favourite author. It could be Enid Blyton, Eleanor Farjeon or - a little after my time - Jacqueline Wilson. Now, it could be the author of 'Captain Underpants' or the 'Wimpy Kid' books, whatever floats your boat. The 'got to read em all' Library Kid had an encyclopaedic memory for all the titles by their author that they had already read, and a connoisseur's eye for the spine of that rare title that someone else had always borrowed.

My particular Library Kid flavour was the nerdy 'Non-fiction' book one. I would take home unfeasibly large colour volumes that told you everything you needed to know about castles, or France, or World War II aircraft. Diagrams, photos, tables, those were my catnip. I slid over into the scary 'reference' part of the library on a regular basis. I suppose really I was just waiting for the Internet was invented, so that all knowledge would be at my fingertips, including diagrams.

Talking to other Library Kids, it is clear that there were feelings we all shared. The idea that there was a a world that you could dive into by opening the pages of a book is something that all of us felt. It implies a sort of control or magic, because you have the key to the world when you take that book home. It wasn't really escapism, and I think it was much less disruptive than the form of 'escape' provided by social media and mobile phones. Although the on-screen form pretends to be interactive on a human level, I have tried both book and screen this 24 hours, and I can tell you easily which of these escapes  makes me feel happier and calmer. 

I'm glad and proud to have been a Library Kid. Never did me any harm (twitch, twitch at the smell of a newly opened new book..) It leaves me with very warm feelings whenever I enter a library or a bookshop. It makes me love the feel and heft of a volume that you are going to enjoy reading, and of course it has filled my mind with ideas, characters, emotions. 

To all the Library Kids reading this, I salute you.