biginabox

1960s

The library was an important bit of the childhood Saturday in the industrial Welsh past, at one time. Along with the Odeon  in the morning, then rissole and chips at the Savoy, then Frost’s comic and toy stall on the market, and Hodges’ model shop in Market Street with its spitfires,  and model aeroplane ‘dope’. The incredibly opulent sports shop in Stepney Street with its arrows, fishing rods, footballs and shotguns with their gleaming walnut stocks. And its high wooden racks and display cases and counters. Apart from being a train driver or fireman or spy or fighter pilot or outside half for Wales, or Davy Crockett, being a shop assistant among such wonders would have been one dream career.

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For a particular kind of Llanelli teenage bargain-book-hunter, there was the ‘Refugee Aid’ bookshop in Llanelly House, the decaying C18th architectural masterpiece at the heart of the old town. This book cave stank so much of mildew you could almost see the spores drifting through the air like pipe smoke in a pirate tavern, and the two little old ladies knitting among a pile of damp cardboard boxes might have been its blousy barmaids. They might also have been sitting in a psychedelic haze, if modern research into book-dust is to be believed.
Which particular refugees we were aiding by buying one book for every three we stole, we never knew.
There were strange and expensive books there which must have come from defunct country house libraries and middle class Great Depression bankruptcies. The story of the book was as much in its appearance and smell as in the words. Great rusting tomes of Carlyle’s pernicious and unreadable essays, church editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress, with brass corners and Sunday school lesson plans in a special appendix. History was very near in those books even if the original homes of the books were beyond my experience. But so were copies of the mad, banned Beat poets and Williams Burroughs from god knows what trendy Llanelli avant-garde cellarites. Here was another Llanelli I knew just as little about.

The imposing stone battlements of the town library opposite were quite different.

Since I was little, my father had taken me with him to replenish his weekly ration of Zane Gray westerns, and I’d got used to the place. And rather liked its grown up waxy meaty smell of stout leather municipal bindings and polished wood shelves. I liked the high toplit ceiling with its pigeons and, when I was only 8, the fact that I could go in to a huge stone building, and take away expensive books, and that the adults around weren’t trying to stop me, but were actually at my beck and call.
But most of all, I liked the grown-up feeling of imitating my father. That is what most instilled a lasting interest in books, not being read to or inspired by enlightened teachers. There weren’t many books in the house apart from the usual religious texts and a few self-help books and technical volumes from my father’s Depression Era attempts at self-improvement. He had no literary interest as such. I suspect the Zane Grays were a side-effect of his military service in Europe. Escapist fiction to dispel boredom and numb the senses to the horrors he never spoke of.
Any parent hoping to encourage their children to read books should read books themselves. Or at least, appear to. They should appeal by association with the love and comfort of home and family – not tests of intelligence in the sterile factory of the schoolroom.
I remember my father getting up to answer the back door, with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, book in the other, a chunky middle finger keeping his page. Because of publicly funded literacy, books simply seeped into our everyday domestic landscape. Like the coal delivered every week to fuel the fire my father read by.

I definitely liked the record library when I was older, and heard things courtesy of the Llanelli ratepayer, with a dash of teenage random dumb luck choice, which I might never have heard otherwise, and which have served me very well down the years. Likewise the books. And all partly made possible by the subscriptions of people who worked so hard they seldom had time or energy to read a book themselves, and who would probably not live to see much return on their investment.