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 As
children growing up in the small Irish town of Newbridge in County
Kildare, our highlight of the week was the visit to the library. The
children’s section (which opened only on Saturday) was tucked
under the stairs. We were allowed two books - one fiction and one
non-fiction. I can still smell the wet raincoats as we crowded to
reach for the well-thumbed Secret Sevens, Famous Fives and adventures
of William. The two-book allowance would, of course, be read by Monday.
Thus was born a sister/brotherhood of wheeling and dealing the unlawful
swapping of books. The best known gangsters must have cut their teeth
in libraries like ours - who else but a knobbly-kneed Godfather with
adenoids and patchy haircut could allocate book-swaps for a penny
and have all the books back to the original borrowers before the following
Saturday? I look out for his name whenever True-Life Mafia stories
turn up.
But I had a secret stash of books. My father was a health inspector.
As such he was obliged to remove and burn library books from houses
struck down with tuberculosis, polio and other contagious diseases,
to prevent the spread of same. But my father, a scholarly book lover
and sometime creative writer himself, could never bring himself to
destroy books. So my brother Gabriel and I had the choice of all these
disease-ridden books. Mighty. There’s nothing like the threat
of a throat-gurgling death to make a book more exciting and fire the
imagination.
My brother became more interested in the diseases rather than the
books and went on to become a doctor. Me? My imagination is still
on fire, and I still think fondly of those wet raincoats as I write
for the child who never quite leaves that special part of our minds. |
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