Stuck for a story? Writers should try the library

A library is not just a place, it’s a state of mind. I knew this when I joined the service three years ago but I’d forgotten it. Like most people I know the library habit had been broken since the children no longer needed picture books by the dozen and distraction on long winter afternoons. Books were for buying and owning, not borrowing.

And, of course, there are memories which belong to my own childhood. There are no specifics, just a general feeling of security and silence with a matriarchal figure overseeing it all, policing the silence, stamping the books, sliding the slip into the corner-cut square manila envelope pasted onto the title page. Four books were allowed. Today it’s 40.

The 50 years or so between that childhood in the local library, and joining the “service” on a casual basis, were taken up by a career as a radio producer with a parallel life as a novelist. I took redundancy when the non-running trains finally made the daily commute intolerable, and promised myself that finally I’d live the life of a proper writer: a full-time keyboard jockey: eight hours a day at the typeface, brief break for a healthy lunch, and no alcohol until after 5pm. Needless to say, it didn’t work. The writing was lacklustre, the isolation was intolerable. I had nothing to share with my wife when she arrived back from work apart from the risible word count and a full report on the arrivals and departures of the neighbours, who I’d been monitoring from the front window while I pretended to write.

The library job – a couple of days a week – was the solution. I was back out in the world. It put the necessary pressure on my writing time to make it count, and suddenly I was confronted with hundreds of stories. Perhaps it was something to do with my career as a radio documentary producer, perhaps it was nosiness or a genuine interest in people, but many of the “customers” want to talk. For some it’s their only conversation of the week, for some you’re a confidant, a sympathetic ear, a source of information. The modern library is the village pump. Where else (apart from your GP’s surgery) can you wander into and find a willing ear, sympathy, warmth and free books?

I work mainly in the city centre library. When the doors are opened by security (“Opening the doors all you lovely people!”) at 10am, 40 or 50 people routinely rush in: students for the quiet study areas, parents pushing buggies heading for the children’s area, street sleepers for the toilets, trailed by the regulars toddling in with their plastic carriers of MC Beaton, Agatha Christie, the occasional literary heavyweight, or the latest cookbook by Mary Berry.

The great majority of those who use the facilities do so with respect. They treat the staff with politeness and some gratitude (almost as if they can’t quite believe the service still operates given the funding cuts – in this authority 35 per cent was cut from the budget last year). But a minority take up a disproportionate amount of the time of those who work there. “Facilities” look after the place and watch the customers on their battery of CCTVs. They know the drug users who come in to shoot up in the toilets, the sneak thieves looking for unattended phones or laptops, the street sleepers who come in to sleep (Street sleepers are welcome, but sleeping is not allowed). On the wall of their den are A4 print-outs from CCTV of troublesome customers appended with a brief description of their misdemeanour: “iPhone thief”, “Bookstore Thief” and, on the most recent, “spitting on the carpet”. The police arrive fairly regularly and escort those who have been collared off the premises.

As a writer, you can’t help but be drawn to the bizarre incidents. Take, for example, the woman who came in, fainted and was attended to by first aiders for half an hour. The fear was that she was seriously unwell, but she came round, thanked the staff and left. Nothing unusual there, until the following day’s postscript. Having reviewed the CCTV footage, facilities Trev reports that rather than fainting, the woman was seen to enter the library, look round and then lower herself carefully to the floor where she adopted the recovery position and waited to be attended to. She got what she came for – half an hour of care and support.

Among the regulars are the care home crew who arrive in a noisy crocodile each Wednesday and take up residence in the community area. They fill the place with surreal conversation, laughter and tears. I overheard one saying to another: “I laughed this morning.” “No!” “Yes, I laughed.” And then there is Startled Stewart who comes in sharking for good-looking men, Lurching Betty, who arrives solely to cause trouble, The Travelling Man who, as he’s taking out his weekly four books, offers some titbit from his life story – a friend of the getaway driver of the Great Train Robbers, a mixer with the criminals of the East End in the Fifties, and then, further back, colourful memories of stowing away on the top of London buses in the late Forties, travelling through the blitzed city and loving every moment of it. The Thin Man is currently banned from the community libraries for rather sinister reasons, but his ban does not extend to the central library. He knows me. I am unsettled by the odd transactions between us, but there is nothing the staff can do while he is allowed access to the premises.

The people I met, the stories I heard, were so extraordinary that I began to keep a journal. It was never intended for publication, but the stories grew into a book and a publisher found enough in them to publish it. I hope it does justice to the library and the people who use it not just for borrowing books, but for sanctuary.

Reading Allowed: True Stories and Curious Incidents from a Provincial Library by Chris Paling is published by Constable, £14.99