The Library Book

by Anita Anand

  I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries since then, but I remember the spring of 1990 as the most intense study period of my life, probably because it was the first. To go somewhere to study, because you have chosen to, with no adult looking over your shoulder and only other students for support and company – this was a new experience for me. I think it was a new experience for a lot of the kids in there. Until that now-or-never spring we had come to the library primarily for the café or the cinema, or to meet various love prospects of whom our immigrant parents would not approve, under the cover of that all-purpose, immigrant-parent-silencing sentence: I’M GOING TO THE LIBRARY. When the exams came, we stopped goofing off. There’s no point in goofing off in a library: you’re acutely aware that the only person’s time you’re wasting is your own. We sat next to each other at the long white tables and used the library computers and did not speak. Now we were reading for our lives. After my exams I felt I owed those students a collective debt – all those John Kelly girls and John Kelly boys, kids from Hampstead Comp, and Aylestone (as it was known then) from La Swap and William Ellis. We may not have spoken to each other, except to ask for sharpeners or paper, but by turning up we acted as each other’s conscience. A reason to stay another hour, and another hour after that. It was a community of individuals, working to individual goals, in a public space. It’s short-sighted to think all our goals were bookish ones. I happened to be in the library in the hope it would lead me to other libraries, but my fellow students were seeking all kinds of futures: in dentistry, in social work, in education, in catering, in engineering, in management. We all learned a lot of things in Willesden Green Library, and we learned how to learn things, which is more important. I learned that ‘Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it’ and that the Brontës had a brother. I found out who Henry V was and what Malcolm X did. I came to understand why silence is necessary for serious study, and what the point of coffee is. I discovered that there exist people who write not just books, but books about books, and finding that out changed my life.

  Still, it’s important not to overly romanticise these things. Willesden Green Library was not to be confused with the British Library. Sometimes whole shelves of books would be missing, lost, depressingly defaced or torn. Sometimes people would come in just to have a conversation, while I bit my biros to pieces in frustration. Later I learned what a monumental and sacred thing a library can be. I have spent my adult life in libraries that make a local library like Willesden Green’s, like Kensal Rise’s, like Kilburn’s, look very small indeed; to some people, clearly, quite small enough to be rid of, without much regret.

  But I know I never would have seen a single university library if I had not grown up living a hundred yards from that library in Willesden Green. Local libraries are gateways – not only to other libraries, but to other lives. Of course I can see that if you went to Eton or Harrow or Winchester or Westminster – like so many of the present Cabinet – you might not understand the point of such lowly gateways, or be able to conceive why anyone would crawl on their hands and knees for the privilege of entering one. It has always been, and always will be, very difficult to explain to people with money what it means not to have money. If education matters to you, they ask, and if libraries matter to you, well, why wouldn’t you be willing to pay for them if you value them? They are the kind of people who believe value can only be measured in money, at the extreme end of which logic lies the dangerous idea that people who do not generate a lot of money for their families cannot possibly value their families as people with money do.

  My own family put a very high value on education, on bookishness, but it happened that they did not have the money to demonstrate this fact in a manner that the present government seems able to comprehend. Like many people without a lot of money, we relied on our public services. Not as a frippery, not as a pointless addition, not as an excuse for personal stagnation, but as a necessary gateway to better opportunities. Like millions of British people, we paid our taxes in the hope that they would be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally. We understood very well that there are people who have no need of these services, who really cannot see the point of them. Who have made their own private arrangements, in health-care and education and property and travel and lifestyle, and who have a private library in their own private houses. These days I also have a private library in my own private house. And I have a library in the university in which I teach. But if you’ve benefited from the use of shared institutions, you know that to abandon them once they are no longer a personal necessity is like Wile E. Coyote laying down a rope bridge between two precipices, only to blow it up once he’s reached the other side – so that no one might follow him. Apart from anything else, you may not be as wily as you think you are. One day, you might find that back on the other side of that chasm is where you want to be. You might discover how quickly an afternoon with a toddler passes in a local library, quicker than practically anywhere else. You might urgently want to know something about your street in 1894. You might realise that giving up smoking or writing a novel is easier to do when you’re one of a group of people all seated on some fold-up chairs in a circle. It might strike you that what you really want in life is silence. Despite the many wonders of the internet, you might suddenly long for the smell of old books.

  But even if none of these things apply to you, even if community is your idea of hell, the principle remains. Community exists in Britain, and no matter how many individuals opt out of it, the commons of British life will always be the greater force, practically and morally. Community is a partnership between government and the people, and it is depressing to hear the language of community – the so-called ‘Big Society’ – being used to disguise the low motives of one side of that partnership as it attempts to worm out of the deal. What could be better, they suggest, than handing people back the power so they might build their own schools, their own libraries? Better to leave people to the already onerous tasks of building their lives and paying their taxes. Leave the building of infrastructure to government, and the protection of public services to government – that being government’s mandate, and the only possible justification for its power. That the grotesque losses of the private sector are to be nationalised, cut from our schools and our libraries, our social services and our health service – in short, from our national heritage – represents a policy so shameful I doubt this government will ever live it down. Perhaps it’s because they know what the history books will make of them that our politicians are so cavalier with our libraries: from their point of view, the fewer places where you can find a history book these days, the better.

  THE LENDING LIBRARY

  KATE MOSSE

  I first saw her on a Thursday afternoon. She was ahead of me on the path, walking fast as if to keep an appointment. Her hands were dug deep in her pockets and her shoulders hunched. A green belted jacket and pleated skirt, white shirt just showing above the collar and shoes suitable for pavements, not mud. Seamed stockings. Later, I realised why she looked familiar and why the look of her struck a false note. But not then. Not that first time.

  I stopped, puzzled I’d not noticed her before. The path, at this point, was narrow and accessed only from Mill Lane, and though I usually walked down to the estuary in the afternoon, when I could get away, it wasn’t a popular destination. Although the lights of the Lending Library were visible on the far side of the field, most local people avoided the path. Too deserted, a bit too wild and overgrown and that November it had rained and rained.

  She was too far ahead to make out her features and, besides, she didn’t turn round. But her brown hair, visible beneath the rim of her cap, looked salon curled and from the way she moved, I thought she was about my age. That, too, stuck in my mind. Those who did come out this way were mostly old men with time on their hands, or farm workers taking a short cut across the fields to the big houses up along. Not girls in their twenties.
/>   I followed her along the path, in that awkward proximity of strangers. I picked up my pace, feeling my black Wellingtons slip on the mud. Was I hoping to catch up with her? I’m not sure, only that she stayed precisely the same distance ahead. But when I rounded the bend in the path, she’d vanished. I stopped again, trying to work out where she’d gone. There was a trail that cut down through the reed mace to the water’s edge, white stones marking a route over the mudflats at low tide. The sea was right up, though, and not even a local would reckon you could get across. I looked behind me, in case she’d doubled back, but there was no sign of her. What else? An odd smell, like rotten eggs, like seaweed on the shore in summer.

  Thursday 24th November 1955, an afternoon like any other. My routine, in those days, rarely altered. On Monday and Thursday afternoons, I helped out in the library as a volunteer. It was a debt, of sorts. When I was growing up, the library was the one place I felt was mine. We had no books to speak of at home and, besides, my stepfather didn’t think girls should waste time reading, but in the library I was let alone. No one shouted at me, nobody took the Mickey. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I travelled the world in the company of Agatha Christie and Eleanor Burford and S. Rider Haggard, dreaming of being a writer myself one day. My name on the front of a book. And though nothing came of any of it – the war and our situation put paid to that – I retained an affection for the place. When I found myself back in the town twelve years later, it seemed the obvious place to work. And even now, as I stepped through the big oak doors and breathed in the familiar perfume of dust and polish, life didn’t seem so bad. It was my sanctuary now, as it had been then.

  That Thursday the library was closed. A burst pipe had flooded Natural Sciences and we had all been sent home. So after I’d cleared the table and the dishes were stacked and drying on the draining board, I asked our neighbour, Mrs Sadler, if she wouldn’t mind staying on for a while anyway, so I could slip off.

  I went out the side door, turning the handle slowly so as not to disturb him. Old habits die hard. Over the main road, quiet in the drowsy part of the afternoon, down Mill Lane and out onto the estuary, where the salt marshes lay spread out like a battered old map. When we were children, my brother forced me to climb down the bank into the muddy creek. I was scared of the black, tidal water, but I was more frightened of Harry’s temper and always did what he told me. It was different on my own. Then, I could kick my heels. Bright days when the chill sun bathed the Downs in the distance in a chill yellow light. Stormy days when black clouds scud the horizon, the smell of bonfires heavy in the air. The soft days of spring, when pink ragged robin and southern marsh orchids pricked the green, or the white flowers of lady’s smock, the Collins Guide borrowed from the Natural History section in the pocket of my regulation school coat.

  We moved away when I was twelve, too young to understand the whispers or the way neighbours fell silent when my stepfather went into the Woolpack Inn. Harry signed up, went to war, and never came back. Later, I realised there had been rumours even before it happened. I had never wanted to come back, but my stepfather had been insistent and my opinion wasn’t taken into account. As his mind unravelled, something had drawn him back.

  There was a footbridge over the creek now. Sometimes I stopped there a while, the wooden handrail greasy beneath my fingers, and told myself that, despite it all, things were better now. Time and the war had buried the past. Wiped the slate clean.

  For the next week, my stepfather’s health kept me indoors. I couldn’t go to work, couldn’t even get out to the shops. We were locked together, he and I. One of those things. I’d always been scared of him, and he’d never shown any affection for me, now Mum was gone it fell to me to look after him. There was no one else. So it wasn’t until the following Thursday, December 1st, that I went back to the marshes. I changed into my boots as I left the library, then wrapping my shoes in brown paper and putting them in my handbag, I set off along the same path. It was a blustery day and the gulls were shrieking out at sea. Only as I got out onto the marshes did I realise I’d been half looking out for her, giving her the time to show herself. But she wasn’t there. As I climbed up to the flint sea wall, I was aware of a knot of disappointment in my stomach.

  That afternoon, I walked all the way to Oak Pond, where an old rowing boat lay abandoned in the silted water, and the trees hung low. I smoked a cigarette and thought about some domestic worry or another, before turning back. I’d been gone longer than usual and so I hurried, knowing Mrs Sadler would be ready in her hat and coat at the door. Four o’clock, I remember looking at my wristwatch.

  Then, on the far side of the silent expanse of water, I saw something flash. At first, I thought it was the lights in the library, but then I realised it was too far over. A light, right out in the middle of the marshes where Cornmill House had been. Damaged by fire and the high tides each spring, its black and rotting features had been a childhood landmark. They’d pulled it down last year, Mrs Sadler had told me. After ten years, it still attracted too many gawpers, too many ghouls. A shrine, of sorts. I narrowed my eyes. Another flash, bright, gone, then another. A signal of some kind? A shiver went down my spine and I pulled my coat tight around me, remembering how the newspaper reports claimed Cornmill House had been used as a rendez-vous long before it became notorious.

  Smugglers evading the excise men, ghosts, enemy spies. I took out a local history book and read up on it. Drawings, maps of underground passages, rumours, I knew the history of the house backwards though I’d never been inside. My brother Harry boasted he’d gone in once. Seen writing on the walls and blood on the stairs, he’d said, smears on the glass where prisoners had been kept.

  At first, I thought he was making it up to scare me. I didn’t believe him. Later, when the police came, he denied he had ever been there. But as I listened through the crack in the door and heard him wriggle like a fish on the line, I knew for certain he had been in the house and knew the worst it had to tell. I told no one. No one asked me anyway. Harry had signed up not long after and been posted off to France. He’d died a couple of weeks later and his secret died with him.

  I hadn’t thought of it for years. Now, the sight of the light flashing on that cold December dusk, the memory of our old kitchen, the fug from the stove and the condensation on the inside of the windows, came rushing back. My mother’s red hands twisting at her pinny and the look of calculation in my stepfather’s eyes as the copper questioned Harry, and I was back there again.

  I took a deep breath, in, then out. No sense in raking it all up again. The house was gone. Harry was gone, Mum too. My stepfather no longer knew who he was. And if I had seen a light where Cornmill House used to be – and already I was no longer sure – odds on it was only someone carrying a lantern over the fields to Apuldram or to the church. Nothing funny about it.

  I looked for the book in the library the following Monday, but it had been taken out of circulation and there was nothing else in the local history section that caught my fancy. Besides, it was ever so busy. I had no time to think about the light on the marshes or Cornmill House. We put up the Christmas decorations. Children from the village school came to sing carols around the tree. We made paper chains.

  The nights were bad that week, though. My stepfather woke two or three times between midnight and six, a bad conscience, Mrs Sadler said. So by the time the next Thursday came around, I was tired to my bones and tempted to go straight home. But, telling myself the fresh air would do me good, I set off once more along the path. A mist had come in from the sea and everything was muffled, suspended, though I could hear the suck of the tide and the call of black-headed gulls massing in the harbour. It was cold, proper December weather, and the chill seemed to soak through my woollen hat and mittens.

  I’d barely gone a few steps when I noticed the smell again, the same as a fortnight ago, though far stronger. A foul stench of rotting seaweed and mud and rust. Then I heard something moving in the reeds alongside the path. N
ot a noise quite, more a shifting of the air. I walked faster. The sound kept pace with me, a kind of rattling, shimmering, in the rushes to my left, then a loud crack of the reed stems underfoot, as if someone was pushing their way through towards the path.

  I stopped. Someone was close by, I could feel it in the pricking of my skin. Slowly, I turned round, 360 degrees, eyes pressing into the white, but not able to make anything out. Torn between turning round and going on, I took a few snatched steps more, then stopped again. Ahead of me now on the path was a figure, come out of nowhere. Blocking my way.

  I gasped then with relief. It was the same woman, dressed just the same as before.

  ‘You gave me –’ I started to say, then I stopped. There was something odd in her silence and the way she was standing, her head down, hands hanging loose by her side. My heart missed a beat.