The library is a church, a temple

Coaxing stories, searching for treasure

Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” Virginia Woolf

There is less ransacking, more fishing, in my case. I don’t even really know what it is I am doing, or what I’m looking for. Only that I need to create, that it has been so long since I looked at something other than The Ghost Lake, that I worry that the thing that makes me a writer might have left me. To launch a book is to be in a state of high alert - for reviews, opportunities, plugs, sales figures etc - for months at a time until you finally feel you can do no more to set it safely on its way. It is like push-starting an old car, pushing and pushing, finger tips on metal, bearing your weight against it, until the moment of ignition, of momentum, when it can sustain itself on its journey. It is like flying a kite; throwing the flimsy shape into the force of the wind and pulling and running until it has a life of its own. It is like many things. It is like being very tired.

To the library, then, to the place of books and history. To the reference library where the librarian has laid out papers and books that might be of interest to me, about a topic I may or may not write about. It turns out I will not write about the topic I thought I would, today at least, instead my head is turned by something else and I dive head first into the topic.

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

The library, Scarborough library, is on its third facelift, at least, since I have been coming to it. My first memories of it are of tall dark wood bookshelves and a reference room with long dark tables, big newspapers spread over them, old men reading them and a children’s section that was a smaller version of the adult’s library. My mum, because childcare was different in the days, would plonk me in the children’s section on a Saturday morning, with a stack of books in front of me, and go and do her Saturday chores around town. I would not leave my spot, not even to find more books, such was my shyness. If I did reach for more books, if the pull of them was stronger than my need to start quiet and small and unseen, then I would sneak to the shelves when I thought no one was looking, squirrelling books back to my little chair, my heart beating hard in my chest. My mum would return. We’d gather the books I wanted to borrow. Then the satisfying stamp of date, the plastic bag loaded, the bus trip home, windows steamed up, smell of wet coats and headscarves, the disappearing into a book silently as we travelled out of town back to our little semi on the outskirts.

I return, then, to this place, with my notebooks and pencils and a list of subjects I might be interested in and I wait for the thing that happens in libraries. I am no longer too shy to lift books from the shelves. I gather them to my desk, my little space, where I have claimed my seat with bag and pencils. I stack the books around me and I dip in and put like a wading bird. I wait for the insistent tug of a story wanting to be told. I fall into books of maps and the maps lead me to the people of a particular time and place and feel these long dead people clamour up against my ears like ghosts drawn to a spiritualist. I lose myself in their quick bites of life for a few hours and end up taking a sackful of books, a tote bag of books away with me. This is a thrill that has lasted my whole life - the thrill of the heft of a book bag on the shoulder, the sheer weight of stories waiting to be explored.

While I am reading, note making, building a picture of people and place in my head, the real, live people of Scarborough are passing through this room on their own quests - a man is searching for a photo of a long wrecked shop, a librarian is opening books for him, has on the tip of her tongue the reference he might need. A woman is searching for two names in her family tree. She is shown how to use the microfilm to look for newspapers, but she is panicked by it, can’t work out the tech and the librarian sits patiently with her, making the notes for her. Another woman comes in to fill out forms, take ID photos against the pale wall of the library reference room, she makes phone calls, ties up a job interview, submits an application. And in the corner a woman with a little bairn is being given advice by a charity about nutrition, feeding routines, bed times. I am sunk in my own stories, searching for the treasure and all around me the library with its infinite uses, its infinite places of safety is being an active, living place of security, strength, knowledge.

As I am booking my haul of treasure, my stack of books out - no longer with the satisfying stamp of the librarian, but rather a fascinating, clever device which you simply stack your books on - I spot my own book, The Ghost lake, on a shelf, bound with paper and a note - for the book club- and I realise that my book is now part of this story. I think about the safety I experience at the library, the sense of refuge, and I think about all those people coming in and out, and how all these knowledge points - the books, the computers, the staff themselves - are the bricks that make up the shelter of the people using it. This place is a church or a temple, a place of refuge, a place to come and worship your ancestors, and find out who you are and how to be, and now, my book there, on the shelf, a brick in the building, a footnote in the story of this place.

Book Club Questions

If you are interested in reading The ghost Lake for your bookclub - and please do think about it, I’d be happy to come along and chat, online or possibly in person - I’ve put some bookclub discussion questions on my website: Book Club Questions

The Ghost Lake is available in high street bookshops, online, as an ebook and an audio book. It’s also available at your local library.

Don’t forget the new paid subscriber course begins in October. Details here:

Until next time

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