An Ode to My Childhood Library
Redbridge Central Library in Ilford, East London. That was my library. It was just “Ilford Central Library” back then.
I spent a lot of time there in my teens. Whole days. Sometimes when I was meant to be in school. School was difficult, I was different and the one-size-fits-all curriculum didn’t work for me. I also asked too many questions. So I took a hand in my own education. I liked what Isaac Asimov said:
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
Certainly seemed like the only kind for me (this is not life advice).
I loved books. They were sacred to me. I revered knowledge. As a non-religious person, my sense of awe and “something greater” came from books and knowledge. Goosebumps while reading a story or learning a new piece of information.
I didn’t have many books of my own. We were poor and my mother didn’t see the value of books beyond those required for school. When asking for money to buy a book she would respond “does it have resale value? Can you get your money back once you’re done?” Just her background and upbringing.
I was very careful with my few precious books, not opening them fully to avoid creasing the spine. I would never lend a book to anyone either, not trusting someone else to take the same care I did. I’m fine with lending books now — or rather gifting. Life lesson: never lend books, umbrellas or money.
I thought books were magic. Inert but once opened, coming alive. Crackling with energy. Transporting me to different places and times. Other countries, planets or planes of existence. Putting me inside different bodies and minds. Books were lucid dreaming devices, inducing a trancelike state, letting me vividly hallucinate while staring at thin sheets of wood pulp. Taking me on journeys. Changing me. They spoke to me, comforted me, scared me, made me laugh, made me cry. Books were as real as people. Often more real.
Telepathic recordings. Transferring thoughts, feelings, ideas and memories from another brain into my brain. Across time and space. Even from beyond the grave.
Books were portals. Which made the library a terminus. Pathways to many worlds (now I’m straying into Terry Pratchett “L-space” territory — the interdimensional space connecting all libraries).
I could happily sit in the library all day reading a book cover-to-cover, leaving when it closed and it was dark outside. The library allowed me to transcend the physical, social and economic limitations of my external reality. A safe space in which to imagine the unseen. Escaping, adventuring and journeying inwards. A theatre of dreams. Visual input, symbolic conversion, visualisation. It was DIY virtual reality.
Freedom.
I dreamed of ancient histories and far futures. Of dragons and spaceships. Utopias and dystopias. Robots and elves. I asked “what if?” and was answered in innumerable ways.
Science fiction and fantasy. Asimov, Bester, Clarke, Herbert, Le Guin, Tolkien. It wasn’t just escapism, those stories were vehicles for exploring and understanding the human condition. I was only interested in the big questions — going to the edges of what was known or could be imagined. Those authors and others were my guides and teachers.
It was literature, regardless what snooty literary gatekeepers may say about “genre fiction.”
I’d obsessively follow up on any references I came across in books, on TV or in real life. Star Trek The Next Generation quotes Shakespeare? I read Shakespeare. Babylon 5 recites Tennyson? I found Ulysses. Gateway drugs to literature, philosophy and art. Before Wikipedia there was the library.
Not just fiction — I was interested in physics, history and even religion. Read significant portions of the Bible and other religious texts. When school teachers wondered what I was doing when I missed school, it was that. Staying up all night reading. Sometimes even devouring school textbooks.
I loved the discovery of browsing shelves and stumbling across something new and unexpected. Like a book on making a Dobsonian telescope. Read it cover-to-cover despite not having the means or materials to make my own. Read about how to grind a mirror, have it aluminised and then test it for accuracy. I eventually got a small refracting telescope and would stay out on cold winter nights (perfect viewing conditions) cataloguing stars and looking at the Galilean moons. Thinking of Galileo under house arrest. Trusty reference books from the library on hand.
I’d max out my library allowance and hold onto books, renewing them as many times as I could. It was comforting to have a pile of books next to my bed. Friends within reach.
Terry Pratchett was putting out two to three books a year around this time. I was hooked on his Discworld series. It had started as comic fantasy and then evolved into some of the best social commentary of the time, covering wide-ranging issues — from race and class to policing and women’s rights. Comparisons to Wodehouse abounded. A new Discworld book was a big event for me, as exciting as the release of a blockbuster movie.
Sometimes a popular book I was after might not be available. Someone else may have put it on hold. Which was fine, I’d ask them to let me read it right there in the library. I’d sit, read and hand it back. Or a book was in a different library and would take time to transfer or was on hold for someone else. That didn’t deter me either, I’d find out which library, consult my trusty A-to-Z atlas, and walk there.
I’d missed so much school by the time the GCSE exams came around that I decided to not bother with them (just protecting myself really). I was chasing the third book in Arthur C. Clarke’s series which had begun with 2001: A Space Odyssey (written parallel to the making of the Kubrick film). I remember walking to a library several miles away to read 2061: Odyssey Three while I was meant to be sitting an exam. Great book. Halley’s Comet. Diamonds.
Tolkien and his legendarium became an obsession. I’d read The Hobbit at a younger age and then The Lord of the Rings (from my school’s library). I wanted more so read The Silmarillion and then found that Ilford library had the full 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth — Tolkien’s drafts and notes, compiled and edited by his son Christopher. I read them all. It was an over the shoulder look at Tolkien’s writing process. “Seeing” him write The Lord of the Rings, getting stuck at points and starting over again completely several times.
I especially enjoyed studying the invented languages of Quenya and Sindarin. Etymology tickled my brain. Some of the older editions of The Lord of the Rings had fold out maps of Middle-earth at the back. I am sorry to say I removed one for my own keeping.
I recently went back to that library in Ilford for the first time in many years — decades. It’s completely changed. Barely recognisable inside. Filled with tables and desks with people chatting or playing videos on their phones with the sound turned up. More a community centre and study space than a library now. I hardly see anyone reading.
Libraries aren’t book depositories, they’re places of quiet contemplation and reflection. Temples to knowledge. Quiet spaces are needed as a refuge from noise and the sensory overload of the outside world. Not just for reading. Especially for those who may not have anywhere else to go. There are a great many of those people, even more in recent times.
I eavesdrop on the students. The hustle is real. The pressures to study, prepare, and do well in exams. So much rote learning and recitation spoken out loud in the library. The books remain on the shelves. Inert. No time for them.
The library has had to adapt to the times. Unforgiving times which provide little incentive or opportunity for young people to sit with a book. Times which have diced attention spans up into 15 second segments.
I spent time in other public libraries around the world while travelling and made good use of them. From the magnificent State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, to the cosy little one in North Melbourne, or the Arapaki Manners Library in Wellington. And many others.
They were sanctuaries between my adventures on the road. Libraries are like embassies. Foreign soil. Not to countries, embassies to knowledge and stories. The country I was in didn’t matter as soon as I went into a library. It was L-space. I knew how to navigate its ways.
I read on a Kindle now but still prefer paper books. The realities of travel and minimalist living make that difficult. In a sense I carry my library with me now wherever I go.
The old library of my childhood may no longer exist in the form I knew it, but a part of it will always be with me and a part of me will always be there.
This post was written mostly in Redbridge Central Library.
Public libraries matter.
Oh, and I got to meet Terry Pratchett at a signing once. He was a wonderful human being.
