To the library
The Chorlton Library, founded by a gift from Andrew Carnegie in 1914(!)
Summer 2016: I attended the wedding of a Singaporean friend in Manchester, and took the opportunity (after the festivities were over) for a brisk walk round Chorlton-cum-Hardy, which had once been my neighbourhood too. Fifteen years before, Mom and I had followed Dad on what we still remember in the family as a grand adventure: a year in a city we knew nothing about, barring its football club(s) and red-brick visage. As Dad spent long days on his research at the University, I went to school at Oswald Road Primary, just a stone’s throw from our place, where a handful of nerdy Year 5s (most of them from abroad too, if I remember this right) took me under their wing. And in the afternoons and on vacation days—of which there were many—Mom would take me to Chorlton Library, right next to the school, where she could leave me among the shelves for an hour of quiet.
It was a momentous year. Barely a month after our arrival, we watched a plane fly into the World Trade Centre on TV. Dad and Mom must have realised then that the world around us had changed; at six (going on seven), I was only dimly aware. But the year left its imprint in other ways. At school, I learned about the Iceni warrior-queen Boudicca (a photograph survives of me proudly displaying my portrait of her) and was loaned my first Horrible Histories book (of the First World War, no less) by one of the Y5s, a kind boy called Nathan. I began to write: early poems about my classmates and the stories we spun during recess, that have mercifully been lost to time. And in those glorious hours in the Chorlton Library, I found worlds peopled by lovelorn knights, and loyal dwarves, and bandits with hearts of gold.
Looking back, it’s clear that the library gave us refuge in more ways than one. Alone in a faraway city, it was where we could go for an oasis of calm (and occasionally, community: one kite-making workshop stands out in my recollection). For Mom especially, the long hours sans school or work couldn’t have been easy; the library, with its generous central heating, provided both solace and distraction. It was only much later that I discovered that Chorlton’s library—a listed building whose Edwardian dome is visible from far down the suburban street—was funded by Andrew Carnegie in 1914, one of more than 2,500 free, public libraries built by the Scottish-American philanthropist (whose father, in his time, had helped set up the Tradesman’s Subscription Library). Neither would never have guessed that nearly a century later a mother and son, miles away from home, would benefit from their largesse. But perhaps that was the point.
Some writers whom I discovered in Manchester, like C.S. Lewis, would remain firmly in my life from then on, especially when I arrived on his cobbled streets in Oxford years later. But libraries, of course, have also remained an important part of my life. From the Queenstown and Tampines libraries where I grew up (the latter, sadly, now housed in a mall), to the National Library building where I’m typing these words*, there’s always been something special to me about a space where people can read (almost) anything they want, for free. It’s as if the largesse of all our history and knowledge have been made freely available, which is as they should be. But—dare I say this?—the library is about more than books, too. Anyone who’s spent an hour’s quiet (asleep or awake!) in this most calm and beautiful of truly public spaces will know what I mean. There are few places that come closer to paradise.
* Yes, my laptop broke last weekend, so I’m writing this on one of the internet terminals at the Central Library. Thanks, NLB!