This is quite touching. If I had my time over, I'd be a librarian.
Part of the magic of a library, as I was reminded over and over again in the days I spent at Battle during winter and spring, is its capaciousness as social infrastructure. It is very important, Giles said to me that Thursday, that there is âsomewhere where everybody can comeâ. In its disparity of needs and personalities and ages sharing a common space, its tolerance and resilience, the modern library has the potential to feel, as it did on that wintry morning of the quiz, like nothing so much as a big and rackety family.
The trouble comes when libraries â and the underpaid, overstretched people who work in them â start to become sole providers for all these things: when years of cost-cutting mean that the state has effectively reneged on all but the most unavoidable of its responsibilities to the troubled, the poor, the educationally challenged, the lonely, the physically unwell, the lost or the homeless. âWe risk becoming a social care safety net,â said Nick Poole, the outgoing CEO of the library association Cilip, and âour staff are not clinical staffâ.
[âŠ]
Do you ever feel intimidated? I asked Giles one day. âYeah â occasionally,â she said. Libraries have a largely female workforce. There is a policy at Central that no one should work alone, but female staff can still feel vulnerable. In his eye-opening 2017 memoir about working at a regional library, Reading Allowed, Chris Paling told the story of a reader, âthe Thin Manâ, who took to stalking a female library assistant home.
That Saturday, lunchtime was a challenge. Staff had 15 minutes, but Curran was struggling to give everyone a break while making sure no one was on a desk alone. âIt hurts the head,â he said. Eventually he solved it by getting less than five minutes himself â which he used to make Giles a cup of tea. They passed each other in front of visas and Curran gave Giles a shoulder bump. Giles rolled her eyes, tolerantly, at me. She had a cold she could not shake, but had gone into work anyway. âI wish people knew,â Giles had said to me one day about Battle, âjust how much effort we put in. I think we would like it to mean more to people.â Itâs a point that comes up among library staff again and again.