Kia ora, I know we’re going to hell in a basket but before the shit hits the fan let me pay a tribute to libraries and librarians.
I’ve been fired up by the news that Auckland City Council is considering (among other things) to cut library hours to help raise money for all the great things they want to do for Auckland.
Let me just tell you how much libraries have contributed to my well-being e.g. health, work and happiness.
I was eight when I started my love affair with libraries. I had just read my first long book. My mother said I could go to the library and change her books.
Responsibility had been mine since I was three when I was put in charge of my brother and sister – that’s how I developed my bossy ways and my liking for being in charge. It was also how I grew into responsibility and in spite of my best efforts I have never been able to become irresponsible. I have tried, Medusa knows I’ve tried but I’ve not shaken the habit of responsibility.
So off I went to the Taradale Library, about a mile away. I don’t remember being worried or thinking I couldn’t do it. Mum read crime novels, the cosy kind – good puzzles but no real characterisation – Agatha Christie was a prime example.
All I had to do seas make sure I didn’t take home a book Mum had already read.
This where the librarian, Miss Yeo, came in. She had a long box with cards in and she could whizz through the cards and know if Mum had borrowed a book before.
What was even better was she didn’t mind this skinny dark girl, with an angry expression (inherited) marching up and saying, ‘Please, where are the murder mysteries?’
‘My name is Miss Yeo,’ she said, ‘what is yours?’
We got that sorted and she showed me where to look. I had already decided that the only sure way to know if Mum had read the books before was to read them myself. But at that stage I wasn’t really interested – I was more into (for example) Keeper of the Bees (Gene Stratton-Porter) and the Emily Books (LM Montgomery). In the next few years it was to be Mills & Boon, Crime novels, Dorothy Sayer (Oh Gaudy Night) and Ngaio Marsh (Oh murders in a theatre?), Poetry and Nonfiction.
Since then libraries, librarians and me have led a charmed relationship. I walk into a library and immediately feel like I’m home.
When I was twelve and working a 40-hour week I relied on the Taradale Library’s one late night for changing books – when I left the Woollen Mills and began work at a Printer and Binder job in Napier, I went to the Napier Library in my lunch hour. There I read along shelves like a vacuum cleaner, opera, ballet, painting, crime novels, romance novels, classics, poetry, plays. I read omnivorously. I couldn’t possibly have retained what I read, there was no discipline to it, it was hunger for something, a desire to understand all the things I didn’t know, in fact, to know everything. I was convinced that everyone else knew everything and I wasn’t going to be left out just because I hadn’t gone to High School.
Without exception then and since, Libraries and Librarians have been key to this hunger for something – knowledge, escape, whatever.
Now I go into the local library and see lots of kids and young adults, reading, researching, smiling, arguing at the computers. I see young Mums with piles of storybooks. I see readers like me searching the large print shelves, giving up, and going to the ordinary print shelves.
Just last week I heard the Principal of an upper North Island school say, ‘I don’t want any more money, I have enough, I want amenities for the kids I teach.’
I stopped and thought – when have I ever heard someone say that before? Have I ever heard anyone say that before? Maybe the Auckland CEO, Councillors and officers of Auckland City Council could take a hint? And leave the libraries alone? You never know – there might be a kid of eight just like me looking for a home away from home.
Renée
