A life in letters: Work - School Librarian, Airdrie Academy

(Click here to read about my previous post with Scripture Union.)
On my first morning at Airdrie Academy, some time in June 1980, I met the headmaster who welcomed me and gave me the key to the library. I’d been told that it was housed in a bicycle shed, but I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The school’s main classroom block, built in the 1930s, was connected to the Assembly Hall and offices adjacent to the road by two covered corridors which embraced a piece of garden. There had been at the basement level of the main block, overlooking the grass and the sparsely-filled flower beds, a long, open recess, about eight feet deep supported by brick piers flush with the external wall of the building. This cavern, some thirty yards long, originally provided space for pupils to park their bikes, but at some point the piers had been filled in with glass panels, each with an opening window at the top. Half way along the room there was an entrance door, and there were fire exits at either end. And so the long, narrow space became home to the school library.

My responsibilities as School Librarian included welcoming English classes to the library  - pupils from the first three years had a regular period with me when, accompanied by their English teacher they would come to change their books. I was also responsible for selecting stock for the library, but the budget was very low – around £1000 each year. Although I had professional support from the Hamilton-based Principal Schools Librarian Margaret Sked, my line manager was the school’s Head Teacher, and it was he who allocated this budget, its paltriness a reflection of his low estimation of the value of the library to his pupils’ education. A third major task involved visiting the Education Resource Service HQ – the familiar building in Hamilton’s Auchingramont Road, where I attended meetings and training sessions with other school librarians, and borrowed resources to meet the specific needs of pupils or teachers at my school.

It is fair to say I didn’t fully understand what was expected of me as a school librarian. Margaret Sked and her team shared a progressive vision of the importance of libraries in education. Librarians should have a central rôle in their school’s learning environment, providing targeted resources to support pupils in their learning, organising resources in the school so that they could be accessed and used inter-departmentally, and working alongside children both to inspire them to read fiction and to help them develop their study skills.

To be fair, Airdrie Academy was not fertile ground for testing new concepts of the school library’s role. Other than Iain Morris, who headed up the English Department, most of my Principal Teacher colleagues at Airdrie were not in the habit either of using the library themselves or of encouraging their pupils to do so, and though I did consult them all as part of the selection process, inviting recommendations of titles for purchase, I did not succeed in stimulating any real ‘across the curriculum’ library use.

My main problem was a sense that the job I was doing was a task I had ended up in, not one I had positively chosen. At that point I lacked the professional confidence, emotional strength and personal commitment to this new vision of the school library to be able to tenaciously promote it in my dealings with the Head and other senior staff. I sensed something shrivelling within me as I heard my colleagues at the Hamilton meetings discussing curriculum change and parallel library developments. In my state of mind these sessions seemed dull and uninteresting, and I bought into what I now see as a lie, that this kind of librarianship simply wasn’t ‘me.’ Perhaps I felt threatened by what was expected of me, perhaps my disinterest was an unconscious defence mechanism.

Not having any real understanding of the role the library could potentially play, the school management’s expectation for me was that I would act as an on-site public librarian, rather than as a fellow-educationist. The best that can be said for me during me time at Airdrie is that I fulfilled this limited library management role to the best of my ability.

I had a lot of free time when classes weren’t visiting, and no senior pupils required my help, and I wasn’t sure how to employ this usefully. One achievement I was proud of was the cataloguing and annotating of the English Department’s collection of recordings of Educational Broadcasts, which I undertook on an ancient typewriter. I wasn’t entitled to the same holidays as teachers, and over my first summer at the school I did go to the office day after sunlit day – I remember sitting in the quietness with the door open on the tranquil garden reading teenage novels and writing articles for a Brethren periodical called the Harvester. But in subsequent summers, I went AWOL over the summer, and spent several weeks in Edinburgh researching for my own theses in the Manuscript Room at the National Library of Scotland.

In term time I spent a good bit of the time between class visits reading. On Friday afternoons, I recall scanning the latest issue of the short-lived news magazine Now!, and Hunter Davies’s ‘Father’s Day’ column in Punch in which he dissected family life at the Davies’s, with particular reference to his youngest daughter Flora. And I would wait with trepidation for the banging of the corridor door and the clatter of feet on the path outside to herald the arrival of the next class. When, ten minutes into the period, I was still on my own, I could safely conclude, with a sense of relief, that the teacher had decided not to bring the pupils down that day.

Aspects of the job I detested. In part this was due to the stress of dealing with class groups which gave rise to acute anxiety, but it was chiefly due to my almost complete inability to control the pupils. This wasn’t so much of a problem when classes were visiting the library, since there was always a teacher present, but at lunchtime and intervals I was on my own. I had received no training in working with groups of children, and my natural instinct was to be as supportive as possible, and to attempt to build relationships with them. But the kids did not have to be particularly perceptive to detect my weakness and lack of confidence and the result was mayhem.

When I unlocked the library, a few children came in quietly to work and to select books, but most stormed past me, intent on creating havoc, and I knew they’d soon be climbing out the windows, or opening the fire doors to allow their mates in. I did have a small team of pupils whom I had enlisted as library helpers and some of them did their best to assist me by marking books in and out, and re-shelving returned items. But some of my other volunteers were not particularly well-chosen, and if anything contributed to my problems, and yet I lacked the confidence in my authority to manage them properly. I tried to control entry to the library by assigning a named card to each pupil and insisting on this being produced before a child was allowed in. But this strategy failed as I didn’t know all the pupils by names, and once inside children would pass their cards through the windows to others outside.

Though deeply ashamed of my problems, I discussed them fairly openly with colleagues – to whom what was happening must in any case have been obvious. For a while Iain Morris sent one of his staff down for half an hour at lunchtimes to stand watch over the library door on my behalf, but needless to say this was not popular with his team, and eventually I kept the library closed when pupils were not in class.

Of course, the children quickly gave me a nickname. Detecting a faint similarity in appearance between me and the bespectacled, intellectual quiz-master Bamber Gascoigne, they dubbed me ‘Bamber.’ Now I recognise that this could have been regarded as something of a compliment, but ‘Haw Bamber wee man!’  chanted by some mocking youth could be extremely irritating as was the incantation, sometimes nerve-jarringly sotto voce as I walked along the school corridors, sometimes bellowed with an accompaniment of fists drumming on the library tables ‘Bam – bam – ba – rambam. Bam – bam – ba – rambam.’  I absorbed this daily because I thought it was my fault, and I was obliged to accept it.

As I walked across to the House Block for lunch in one of the canteens, I was aware of defiance and mockery in some of the pupils around me (or was it my imagination?) I’d see the Special Needs teacher, who had long-standing discipline problems lurking near his classroom door, his face worry-haunted, his tense fingers white and nail-bitten. Was I seeing my destiny?  Once in the safety of the House Block, I’d dive into the staff toilet, close a cubical door behind me, and breathe deeply to calm myself before venturing into the hubbub of the canteen.

I struggled with a sense of deep failure. I remember once, shortly before a holiday, locking the library door one afternoon and tidying up the shelves which were invariably in a state of chaos following the lunch-time invasion: in truth I spent most of the time dipping into promising-looking books. I concentrated on a long unit of shelving which ran down the centre of the library at one point, leaving a narrow corridor on either side. I worked on the on the shelves furthest from the window. From outside, all that could be seen of me was my ankles and feet below the level of the bottom shelf. Each time I heard the corridor door banging, signalling that someone was walking through the garden, I sat down on the chair I had placed conveniently behind me, and put me feet on a shelf so that no-one would see I was there.

There were some positive aspects to my time at Airdrie Academy. I tried to get involved in out-of-school activities, accompanying a quiz team to participate in inter-school events, and helping at the school gala at the local swimming pool. For this, I needed trainers and was so naïve and inexperienced that in the sports shop I pointed at tennis shoes instead, only to be ashamed as my inappropriate footwear attracted scornful glances by the pool-side. 

What preserved me from utter despondency during my years at the Academy was the companionship and support of the English department staff who valued what I did for them and for their pupils despite my difficulties. I made my home at breaks in the English department, where I had full coffee-drinking rights, and joined them for end-of-term meals. I remember during the Falklands conflict in 1982, sitting at lunchtimes in Iain Morris’ classroom, mesmerised by coverage from the South Atlantic. I also had good, positive relationships with a number of the pupils, including Alan Ferguson who invited me to pay my first visit to Airdrie Baptist Church.

But my main source of encouragement was the school’s Christian Union group, run by a team of eight or ten staff, and attended regularly by around forty pupils. The leaders of the CU welcomed me warmly when I arrived at the school, and I helped organise the regular meetings and special events including parents’ evenings and the occasional visits to local churches at which pupils took part in singing or speaking, and at which I preached on at least one occasion. Along with a colleague in the English department, I organised a regular morning prayer meeting for staff and pupils. I found simply being involved in all this uplifting. Without the friendship of the staff connected with the Christian Union my time at Airdrie Academy would have been very bleak indeed.

In January 1983 I moved with some relief to my new post as Primary Schools’ Library Adviser at the Education Resource Service in Hamilton: presumably the Head Teacher at Airdrie Academy had given me a satisfactory reference. Perhaps, apart from my difficulties in maintaining discipline, I had done everything the school expected of me in a positive and undaunted way. Looking back with the deeper awareness acquired in later years of the contribution to learning which a good school librarian can make, I can see how much more I could have done had I been fully engaged. But given my daily battle with anxiety and depression it was, perhaps, a small miracle that I achieved as much as I did.
(Click here to read about my next job, as Primary Librarian.)