The Magic of the Library by Sheena Wilkinson

I loved Emma Pass's recent post about falling in love with books, and it made me think about the origins of my own lifelong love affair with stories. It started with the library. 

Libraries made me. It’s as simple as that. They made me a reader, and being a reader made me a writer.

the estate where I grew up 

I grew up in the middle of the Northern Irish Troubles in an estate in east Belfast. I was a feisty, mouthy little thing with a tendency to get myself into bother in the street. I remember one neighbour biting me when I broke his Lego gun. In an effort to keep me from such charmers my parents encouraged the local library, where only nice children went, as an alternative playground.

But I didn’t need encouragement. In Cregagh Library, in the mid-seventies, I fell in love. The world of stories was wider and richer than the world of the street. I wandered the prairies with Laura Ingalls Wilder and shivered with her through the Long Winter; I longed to go to the Austrian Chalet School and be best friends with Jo Bettany, or to Malory Towers with Darrell; I fell into adventure with the Famous Five and solved clues with the Five Find Outers. I was a Borrower.

the local library -- where it all began  

Library books were fat hardbacks with shiny covers. You could borrow three at once and that made a good armful. They bore their borrowing histories on the page of return dates. I thrilled to be part of that history every time the librarian took my card and stamped my book. The most popular books – and I was not a child of especially esoteric tastes – often had a second or even third page glued on top. Occasionally I would borrow a book with few other stamps and wonder which other girl (I scorned boys) in the greater Cregagh area also liked Daddy-Long-Legs or Peter’s Room. If only I could find her, I was sure she would be a kindred spirit and not the sort to bite in the street. 

     

I used to stay in the library until closing time and walk home in the dusk, often snatching a read on the way home, leaping from lamppost to lamppost. I couldn’t wait to get safely indoors to find out if Harriet the Spy would be unmasked, or if Pa would make it home through the blizzard. (He always did.) 

Harriet was the first fictional character I met who wanted to be a writer, closely followed by Jo March, though Jo wasn’t a library friend, Mummy having bought me a copy of Little Womenas soon as I could read. (What are daughters for, after all?) Home friends were solid and dependable, library friends sometimes elusive. Oh, the pain of needing Harriet or Laura or the Fossil sisters on a particular day and not finding them on the shelves! In vain did I hide my favourites (I was not a public-spirited child); the librarians always dug them out and returned them to the right places on the right shelves.

Or perhaps they found their way home by magic. The library, after all, was that sort of place.