Public Library and Other Stories Read Free Page A

library.
    It started before the time they’d let us walk to school by ourselves. But for some reason we were allowed to do this. First it was the branch library. We were eight or nine years old and we went most days. We’d get out our books, cycle home and read them in the garden in one go. It was an independence thing for sure – we went, chose, borrowed, pedalled home, read what we’d got, then went back again, chose again, came home again and read. We’d throw our bikes down outside its doors – I remember that like it was a part of it, and that we didn’t have any money, but that we didn’t need money: here transaction was a whole other thing. There was a scheme where you got points for taking out books and when you’d reached a certain number of points the prize was that you got to help the librarian tidy up the shelves. We all wanted to do that. We read as much as we could so we could win that prize. The librarian was canny.
    Then the new library was built, a terribly stylish five-storey building, a giant addition to the borough where we lived. A real frisson came off the place, it still does when I remember it opening. It was cleverly imagined, beautifully designed. Inside the children’s library there was a sunken reading space that went down into the floor, a small-scale amphitheatre where we sat, citizens of thought, books open on our knees. Across from us there was a window into the place where adult readers could go and listen to records on a great big semicircular sofa – the librarian, momentarily transformed into
DJ
, would put the record on a turntable on the librarian’s desk and the people listening would plug in a set of headphones behind them on the sofa to hear it, music for free.
    Art too: this was also the floor where you could borrow paintings and prints; you could take home a work of art to make your own home as stylish and modern as the library. Downstairs was fiction. Above us were the study carrels where the older children did their homework and all the pupils from different schools met and hung out together. It was exciting. It was like the future would be. In fact I got my first Saturday job there, which was the first time I saw the amazing off-floor facilities they had, the modern stacks full of – well, everything.
    I can’t tell you what the opening of that library was like where we lived – it was an event. It was a really fantastic moment in my life, in our lives, a moment of real change. The brand new building brought with it the idea that our local history was important – that books were important, but also that we were too, and that where we lived was, that it had a heritage and a future that mattered. There was something very grounded about that beautiful new build. I’m pretty sure that’s why we were allowed to go there, on our bikes by ourselves like we did, so long as we cycled on the pavement there and back and were careful about the traffic.

Good voice
    There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.
    Did you know about this? I say to my father. There was a German linguist who went round the prisoner of war camps in the First World War with a recording device, a big horn-like thing like on gramophones, making shellac recordings of all the British and Irish accents he could find.
    Oh, the first war, my father says. Well, I wasn’t born.
    I know, I say. He interviewed hundreds of men, and what he’d do is, he’d ask them all to read a short passage from the Bible or say a couple of sentences or sing a song.
    My father starts singing when he hears the word song.
Oh play to me Gypsy. That sweet serenade
.
He sings the first bit in a low voice then the next bit in a high voice. In both he’s wildly out of tune.
    Listen, I say. He made recordings that are incredibly important now because so many of the accents the men speak in have disappeared. Sometimes an accent would be