Libraries

 First published in Column 8, on the 7^th August, 1991. This version is slightly altered from the original.

 During the recent Dunedin Competitions I sat in a large room I hadn’t been inside for years. I ran my eye over a quiet corner where I’d spent half my childhood reading books on film until I could tell you everyone who directed this and everyone who acted in that. The shelves from which I’d taken the books were still there, but their worn brown boards are now bare, apart from a couple of bland pot plants.

The room used to be part of the old library. Now I know I’m always going on about libraries, but I’ve got to talk about something in this column, and who wants to mention rugby league ever again?

Sitting there I recalled the days when I was a shining, morning-faced schoolboy, creeping up the stairs and into the room so that the harridan of a librarian wouldn’t see me. Not only did she insist on silence from schoolboys, we also had to remove our caps in her presence.

The New Zealand room ran off the main area. It was years before I summoned up the courage to sneak a look inside. When I was little, several of us nosey altar-boys snuck upstairs in the parish priest’s presbytery – and got caught. I had something of the same feeling about venturing amongst the New Zealand books.

In due course I came to know every nook and cranny in the larger room. One nook was the little listening cupboard under the stairs, where there wasn’t enough space to swing your satchel. When I became a working man I used to spend untold hours eating my lunch in that close little cockpit while discovering the library’s vast resources of recorded music.

No doubt the harridan would have bailed me out for dropping crumbs in her inner sanctum, but she well retired by then.

Every inch of the old library was utilised: on the landing outside the chief librarian’s office were housed the theatre magazines, including Plays and Players, which in those days used to contain complete playscripts. I can remember standing there, (cap in hand), shifting my weight from foot to foot, soaking up A Man for All Seasons.

Down on the next landing, which extended over the main entrance then, were what was viewable of the books A H Reed had collected. Because the area was so small, these treasures were squashed up into glass cases, hardly able to be seen properly.

The library had a summer feel about it. One impression is of sunlight pouring into the large back room on the ground floor. (The children’s library, on the other hand, which I discarded after I’d considered I’d read everything of interest, always seemed to be like the land of Narnia, in a permanent state of winter.)

Incidentally, that sense of sunlight is lacking in the new library, which has been designed under the quite reasonable philosophy that books and light don’t go together. Somehow they survived in the old place, including those in the harridan’s upper room with its vast skylight.

The old library had warmth too. The polished wood surroundings and staircases gleamed, and perhaps because the reading public and the books were all squashed together, everything seemed cosier.

Now I’m not saying anything against the new library. In fact, I remember its opening as if it were yesterday.

I worked then in the Civic Centre right next door, and could hardly contain myself waiting for ten o’clock. My ten minute tea break stretched to half an hour while I raced up and down the stairs – including those that proved to be off-limits – taking in the immense sense of space, exploring everything I could lay my eyes on, trying to identify old friends (books, that is). In fact I was amazed there were enough books to go round. Where had they all been hiding in the old place?

I appreciate the new library for its roominess. But when occasionally I dream of libraries, the books, like cats on windowsills, purr in the sun, my sandwiches revolve at 33.3 rpm and the harridan smiles.

 

Mary Ronnie and Ada Fache - two of the Chief Librarians
I remember from my youth and childhood. 

I’m very unfair in this column to the librarian I refer to here as ‘the harridan.’ Libraries were quiet places in her time, and schoolboys were known to be noisy – especially en masse. I think the lady in question would have been Ada Fache, but I’m not one hundred percent sure, and from the photo above she doesn't appear in the least to be a harridan. It may not have been the City Librarian anyway, but some other staff member.

The Children’s Library was in a separate building about three minutes’ walk away. It was housed in a two-storey terrace house, and if the main library was short of space, the Children’s Library had no idea what space was. There were books in every conceivable place, like an old secondhand bookshop that’s sold a good deal less than it’s acquired. And it was dark.