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Lucy Mangan Explains Why We Must Save School Libraries

At school, Lucy Mangan found endless books and a space in which to read them – but will tomorrow’s children be so lucky?

Lucy Mangan
by Lucy Mangan
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Three schools – primary, secondary and sixth form college – and three libraries, in increasing order of splendour mark my pedagogic progress.

At my primary school the library was half a classroom set aside for the purpose. Sharp-edged metal shelves lined three walls, forming a horseshoe round a rectangular piece of thin polyester matting.

Technically, it couldn’t have been more cheerless. To a bookworm, though, the content made it a heaven and a haven.

On the shelves was what I suspect a more critical observer would have judged a motley collection of volumes. To me it was an esoteric treasure trove.

Amidst countless tatty books – but still, books! – about cars, nursing, rabbits Brer and Peter, and (increasingly strangely the more I think about it) a hardback edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I quickly came to have my favourites.

Amongst a run of Antelope books on the farthest wall was Adventuring with Brindle, by Rosemary Garland, a simply riveting tale of a boy who runs away with his Great Dane when he fears his mother is going to get rid of her.

I took it out so often I was eventually banned from doing so. I wept. Fifteen years ago I found a secondhand copy of it online. It was stupidly expensive, but I bought it. You can’t put a price on justice.

A harsh lesson

But if that first library introduced me to the pleasures and perils of losing my heart, the second one stomped all over it. At first all was fine, careless rapture.

I doted on John Branfield’s Sugar Mouse, The Lily Pickle Band Book by Gwen Grant, a book on running (I’m always interested in theory) and a book on hairstyles that Sally (my first flesh and blood friend, who was stacking up rather well against her fictional competition) and I used to visit at least once a week, open at a certain page and collapse, helpless with laughter, at the picture there of a woman with hair at least eight times the size of her head. (It was 1986.)

And, above all, there was Peter’s Room, by Antonia Forest. I was – still am – passionately devoted to her Marlowe school stories – but this, set in the holidays, was even better.

I consumed it, I worshipped it, I tried to copy it out at home so that I could have my own edition – and then one day, it was gone. There had been a cull and it had disappeared from my life forever. I soldiered on, but school was never quite the same after that.

In the sixth form library, I discovered first world war poetry and a boy who liked Brecht. And when a sale was announced of books this school was culling, I moved swiftly and secured Forest’s The Marlows and the Traitor. It was some small retroactive measure of redress.

The individual details of ‘my’ libraries are fun to recall, but it is what they had in common with each other and with all libraries that makes them matter.

They gave me sanctuary from the hurly-burly of school, which would frequently evolve into bullying as the years went on and people became less tolerant of oddities like me. It gave me access to books I would never otherwise have come across.

All the books I most loved, from Adventuring with Brindle to Peter’s Room were unavailable in the shops – either out of print or simply not stocked (I don’t remember seeing any Antelope books on sale – were they only ever supplied to schools? Surely not?). The library was a portal to an older, alternative world.

Closing doors?

And outside the solipsistic universe of my childhood, of course, libraries would have been functioning differently and even more vitally for others.

I was a lucky child from a happy home whose parents believed in the importance of books and reading and had the money to support my benign addiction. For others, the school library would have been their only portal to the world of literature.

That such portals are being forced shut by a parade of short-sighted (or actively malevolent – delete according to taste) government policies is unforgivable.

To have 1980s state school provision now look like glory days is an unwelcome point to reach in life. But this too shall pass. I read that in a book somewhere. Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, by Lucy Mangan, is published by Vintage

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