The Librarian

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Which way round did they do it?’

  ‘She never told me that.’

  ‘I’ve not drunk so much since …’ But she couldn’t recall when she had last felt like this: out of herself but in herself – not deranged, or estranged but – she searched for a word for it – yes, rearranged. Maybe that’s what the Persians had in mind. ‘I doubt I’ll be sober much before morning.’

  There was a fractional pause while the ambiguous world of chance, which is a mingle of genes and character and circumstance and sometimes a rare flash of good luck, hovered about them, offering and withdrawing and offering again evanescent possibilities, alluring, perilous, disturbing, awaiting their cue to become a living element in their long interrupted tangled history.

  Sam pulled himself up and sat, not quite looking at her. ‘We could defer any debate until the morning, that is if you’d like, perhaps, maybe to stay …?’

  Author’s Note

  The years I have spent as a novelist have taught me that there is no knowing how people will take one’s books. And I truly believe that a book is finally made by its readers. Books should not be ‘about’ anything but if this book expresses any special interest it is the interest I acquired as a child in reading. The Librarian grew out of my experience as a young girl with a superb local library and a remarkable Children’s Librarian, Miss Blackwell, whose surname I have stolen (I never knew her first name) for my protagonist. It is to Miss Blackwell that I owe many of the books and characters that have informed not only my writing life but probably my whole take on life, what seems to me to matter most, how I brought up my children and how I like to be now with my grandchildren. Several of the books I met through Miss Blackwell, and which appear in this book, became favourites of my two sons, one of whom, Rupert Kingfisher, is himself now a children’s writer. These in turn have become favourites of their children, which goes to show how a book can spread influence through the generations. My eldest grandchild, Rowan, one of the dedicatees of this book, already writes her own stories which are fed from this source.

  I have listed below those books that appear in The Librarian, many of which I first found in the Children’s Library of my youth. The book that features most significantly in this story, however, is Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, which after reading her first book, The Minnow on the Say (one of Miss Blackwell’s recommendations) I bought for myself with the birthday present of a ten-shilling book token when it first came out in 1958. It is still in my view one of the greatest children’s books of all time. The following year, I bought The Lantern Bearers, the last in the great trilogy on Roman Britain by Rosemary Sutcliff, the first two volumes of which, The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch, were also Miss Blackwell recommendations, and Warrior Scarlet, which remains my favourite Sutcliff (though the competition is steep).

  My Cumbrian uncle’s father was a local schoolmaster and knew Beatrix Potter when she had removed to Cumbria and become better known as Mrs Heelis, champion sheep-farmer. It was on his editions of her books that before I started school I learned to read. I am for ever in Beatrix Potter’s debt for so enhancing my vocabulary at a very young age and for her salutary example in the use of cadence.

  My Friend Mr Leakey was written by the brilliant and eccentric Marxist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, known to my parents through their membership of the Communist Party. His author’s autobiography for this, his only children’s, book is a model of how these things ought to read. I’ve included that too after the list below.

  T. H. White, author of The Once and Future King quartet, taught my father English at school (in between bouts of drunkenness – Tim White’s, not my father’s). He gave my father the copy of The Ill-made Knight which my mother was reading the night before my birth and which I like to fancy thus somehow got into my system. Sadly, the copy was destroyed later in a fire at Barlaston Hall in Staffordshire, where my father was warden for the WEA trade-union college and where we lived for the first few years of my life.

  It was through T. H. White that I met another author who has been a lifelong favourite of mine, Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose Christian name I have borrowed for my protagonist. While researching her matchless biography of Tim White, she came to interview my father, as one of his former pupils. By that time I had read her first novel, Lolly Willowes, and amused its author, who was as warm, witty and sharp as her books, by telling her that as a child – I was all of fourteen – I had wanted to grow up to be a witch. (She paid me the compliment of saying that I seemed to her ‘promising material’.)

  There are also books I borrowed from the library which don’t feature in The Librarian and which I still think of with nostalgic fondness. I raced through the Sadler’s Wells ballet books, for example, which were tosh, but engrossing tosh for a would-be ballerina, and two books I borrowed over and over again but never owned, The Rock Pool and Mossy Green Theatre. The latter, like Mr Leakey, is out of print and should be republished by an enterprising publisher to enchant new young readers.

  One last word: Miss Blackwell had a fierce dislike of Enid Blyton and I have given this prejudice to her namesake. I mention this as people often imagine that a character’s views reflect those of the author, just as they imagine that what a character does is what the author has done or might do. And I suppose that this may sometimes be the case. My editor, for example, was concerned that the views expressed by Dee in this book about her husband’s sexual exploits might be misread as my own views and cause some outrage. I reassured her that my readers would have a sufficient grasp of my interest in human blind spots and the very different moral climate of the fifties not to make that mistake. And by the same token, I don’t share Miss Blackwell’s or Sylvia’s opinion of Enid Blyton. While her books are not lastingly important to me, as a child I enjoyed them and I still think that her Famous Five books in particular are good in their own way. It was a great spur to my enthusiasm that my atheist Socialist parents, otherwise unusually tolerant, refused to have Enid Blyton in the house and, as a consequence, I was obliged to read the Famous Five round at a friend’s, where I was also allowed Chocolate Spread sandwiches made with sliced white bread. My parents also outlawed the Beano and the Dandy on the, I now suspect, spurious grounds that the printers of these comics were forbidden to be unionised – happily, I was able to read those in wet playtimes at school. This had the interesting effect that for many years sliced white bread, Enid Blyton, Dennis the Menace and God formed an unholy alliance in my subconscious, one that I naturally wanted to be part of. I have lost my taste for sliced white bread and chocolate spread but I still have time for Enid Blyton, who got children to read who might not have done so otherwise and for that alone she deserves praise. But in any case, tastes differ, thank goodness, and not even the best children’s librarian is, or should be expected to be, perfect.

  Recommended reading from East Mole Library:

  E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers and collected children’s works

  Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland and all the Finn Family Moomintroll books

  Ernest Thompson Seton, The Trail of the Sandhill Stag

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

  Beatrix Potter, collected works

  Gwynedd Rae, Mary Plain books

  Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill

  Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

  George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind

  Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives

  Eric Linklater, The Wind on the Moon

  Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand

  Andrew Lang, The Blue, Brown, Olive and Lilac Fairy Books

  Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons and following series

  Mary Norton, The Borrowers, The Borrowers Afield

  P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mary Poppins Opens the Door

  Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding

  Norman Hunter, The Incredible Adven
tures of Professor Branestawm

  Leila Berg, Trust Chunky, Little Pete Stories

  Philippa Pearce, The Minnow on the Say, Tom’s Midnight Garden

  Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School, What Katy Did Next

  C. S. Lewis, the collected Narnia

  Jack London, White Fang

  Noel Streatfeild, Ballet Shoes, White Boots

  T. H. White, The Once and Future King

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

  Geoffrey Trease, Cue for Treason

  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

  Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

  Dr Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

  L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables series

  J. B. S. Haldane, My Friend Mr Leakey

  PROFESSOR HALDANE has been used for experiments since he was about three years old, when his father started taking blood out of him. Some of the things that have happened to him are nearly as queer as the things that happen in this book. For example, during the war he was working on how to get out of sunken submarines, and some of the work was done in air that had been squeezed up so tight that he could not even move his hand through it very easily. He thinks a lot of the magicians in old days were only doing, or trying to do, what scientists and engineers do now, and that science can be more exciting than magic ever was.

  He is 55 years old, and a communist. Besides experiments to find out how he works, his scientific work has mainly been about heredity. He hasn’t felt like writing stories for children since about 1933, when Hitler got power in Germany, and the world became a nastier place. But he hopes the world will get nicer again now that we have won the war; and then perhaps he will feel like writing more stories. The nearest things to a dragon that he has in his house are two she-newts called Flosshilde and Berenice. His cat is white and deaf, but she can turn somersaults. He is bald, weighs about 15 stone and is fond of swimming.

  THE BEGINNING

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  First published 2018

  Copyright © Salley Vickers, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Image: Young Woman with Book, 1934 © Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Deyneka / DACS, supplied by AKG-images

  Designed by Edward Bettison

  ISBN: 978-0-241-33025-8