Growing up, I had a library tan – skin as pale as pages, freckles foxing a face I was careful to keep cast down. Your eyes are more likely to get blacked if the bullies see their faces reflected back. Long before I knew I liked boys, I preferred books to football. The one time I joined in I scored straight away only to learn, as my team ran at me, it was an own goal. “Never mind, Professor,” my mum said.
Within a week of moving up a class at Keir Hardie Memorial Primary School I’d hungry caterpillar my way through the book corner. Luckily we got weekly visits from the big yellow mobile library, its suspension springing as I jumped on. Even parked by the school gates this bus could take me anywhere – Narnia, Nimh, the very gates of Mordor. I dreamed of stowing away.
I could fly with flights of dragons, I could unmask the witches, I could do whatever I wanted. In books I could be brave. In books I could be safe. The gas bill came before books at home but that was alright because when I got too big for the mobile (and anyway I’d nearly read it dry) I joined Newarthill Library.
I could fly with flights of dragons, I could unmask the witches, I could do whatever I wanted
Growing up bookish and bullied in the shadow of a vast steel plant long since rusted, on top of coal mines long since ashes, in a village where you were Catholic or Protestant and Glasgow was a distant dream, Newarthill Library was my sanctuary. I am only a writer now because I was a reader then and very specifically there.
I couldn’t afford the 20p bus fare to nearby Motherwell, and the school library closed at 4.30pm and didn’t open at weekends or holidays, which is when boys with nothing to do are at their most brutal and my mum’s boyfriend most wanted me out of the house. Newarthill Library (pictured above and below) sheltered me, inspired me and saved me. Now we must save it.
It’s nothing special to look at, a grey single-storey block squatting across from the wee shop. Now it has some computers and a bright alphabet rug blooms on the floor where the BookBug group sits for story time. It still smells the same: stolen afternoons and stories and Pledge.