Bomb damaged library during The Blitz.
Clark, Manager of Southwold Library told me, adding: “A love of people is as, if not more, important than a love of books.” They are the big, beating heart of a community. I was really struck by an interview with retired children’s librarian Claire Harris, who told me about her 28 years in the impoverished London borough of Stepney.
“What we lacked in funds, we made up for with our imaginations. One summer I had the idea to make the Titanic out of lolly sticks. The kids loved it! I could see their imagination growing as it took shape. Word spread and seamstresses from the local factories started donat- ing old cotton reels and people started leaving lolly sticks and matchsticks on the library steps. More and more kids took part until it was gargantuan. Six weeks it took us. After it was finished, I held story time under the stern and read nautical tales. You’ve never seen so many children so entranced. Lots of love and a library ticket, that’s all you need.”
And many are standing on the shoulders of giants.
“My old manager Pat was an irreverent, anarchic man in a tank top,” Deborah Peck, Library Development Officer for Canning Town, East London told me. “He was what you might describe as a character, but utterly brilliant. He used to run a Home Rounds Service to the elderly, the infirm and the vulnerable, basically anyone who couldn’t make it into the library. Pat understood that books were a lifeline. He borrowed an old suitcase and piled it up with books and items to evoke the past, a wireless, a Bakelite phone and old photos. On went the music, out came the books and the memories would flow. ‘You’re never alone with a good book,’ he used to say. I’ve never forgotten him. He shaped me into the library worker I am today.” When I started researching my novel,
38 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGTIAL
Bomb shelter library in the London Underground.
the Covid-19 pandemic struck and as I conducted my interviews over Zoom, the parallels between the work of wartime and Covid-era librarians struck me. Granted there are no bombs, but Covid achieved what Hitler never managed and for the first time ever, shut down our libraries. At the outset of war, The President of the Library Association, Paul’s predecessor
the grandly named, Arundell Esdaile wrote in The Library Association Record: “Patriotism is not enough. The right reading of books is one of the chief ways of maintaining and even enlarging the culture of the mind which knows no frontiers. And, after all, is it not on behalf of that culture that we are fight- ing to destroy that barbarism.”
July-August 2021
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