A life in letters: Work - Trainee Librarian

(See here for my previous experience of work - at Law Hospital's General Store)

Carluke Library

My next experience of work began one afternoon in the early summer of 1973 when, having just left Glasgow University with an MA degree, I reported for duty to Carluke Library. I’d been offered a post as a ‘trainee librarian’ following an interview with Willie Scobbie, the head of Lanark County Libraries  –  it was in fact  more of a friendly chat than an interview, for Willie, a leading figure in the Airdrie community, was known to my parents and I suspect the job was mine before I’d opened my mouth.

A new library building had been opened in Carluke some years earlier. Hailed by some as an architectural landmark on account of its hyperbolic parabaloidal roof (rumoured to be the first in the UK) its revolutionary design presented problems to those who had to spend their days there – walled in vast curtains of glass, the building became grossly over-warm on sunny days. There had also been problems with the materials used to construct the roof – after serious defects were detected in the early 1970s, the contents of the library were hastily decanted to a cavernous empty premises along the street. It was just beside the entrance to the town’s old cemetery, and had previously been occupied by the venerable firm of Grahams, joiners, upholsterers and undertakers. Library business was conducted from there until a steel frame could be put in erected just inside the glass walls of the new building to support the great hyperbolic parabaloid.

And so I found myself just after lunchtime that June day being welcomed by the librarian, Freda Miller in the small office just off the pavement where in the past you had gone in your grief to arrange loved ones’ funerals. I also met Noreen Duddy, the library assistant responsible for services to children. I eyed her with some apprehension – it was Noreen who, some years before, had admonished me on finding in books I had returned to the library on my mother’s behalf the Christian tracts from the Victory Tract Club which she had secreted between random pages. But Noreen smiled warmly.

As the sunlight shafted through tall opaque windows, Freda introduced me to basic librarycraft. She showed me the ‘issue’, the wooden trays full of people’s library tickets – small cardboard pockets - each holding a book card recording the volumes which had been borrowed and filed in author or subject order behind a marker indicating the date due.  Information technology had just begun the long revolution in library practices, and its digital fingers had not yet penetrated to the depths of south Lanarkshire.

Then I was set to work shelving returned books, serving customers, helping them find what they were looking for, and then stamping the items they wished to borrow with the date they were due back. I remember thinking, very pretentiously, that if I were to write an autobiography – it was around this time that James Herriot was enchanting readers with his tales of life as a Yorkshire vet and inspiring folk in other jobs to try captivating the public with stories from their professional life - I would call it Stamping away the days of my years, a title which certainly did not give due weight to the professionalism involved in librarianship.

I found my way round the maze of back rooms in Graham’s rambling premises, some of them shadowy and cold.  Occasionally when you were shelving books in the stillness of evening you’d be startled by unexpected creaks from the fabric of the old building, and you’d wonder apprehensively if this were the room where the coffins had been stored.

At the end of my first shift, I walked home elated. A few weeks later, in Yorkshire with my parents on holiday, I looked through the plate-glass front window of the library in Pickering, and saw the arrangement of the stock and the issue and date stamps and rubber ink-pads, and I thought to myself ‘I could just go in there and start working.’ I suppose in the midst of all the insecurities of that last holiday with my parents I was clutching to the fact that I at least I had an embryonic professional identity.

Sometime over the summer, the necessary remedial work having been completed, the library moved back under the hyperbolic parabaloidal roof. Sometime that autumn, Freda was appointed to another post. Her replacement was a cheerful woman called Libby Bell on whose team I remained until early spring 1974 learning more about the arcana of librarianship – the Dewey Decimal system, the mysteries of national bibliography, the principles of book selection - and, through the customers we served, about the endlessly varied richness of human nature.

I vividly remember the elderly female borrower who went off with a book, commenting sagely that you could always be safe with a lady writer. Having seen the author’s name, I questioned inwardly whether the borrower would in fact be totally comfortable with what she had chosen. The next day, stony-faced, she marched into the library, dumped the book (now wrapped in brown paper) vehemently on the counter, and hissed ‘That woman is no lady.’

I was touched that, when Christmas came, Libby gave each of the staff a Christmas present – mine was a colourful plastic receptacle for pens and pencils incorporating a perpetual calendar.

Mobile Library

In March 1974 I was assigned to a mobile library. No longer was my workplace just a short walk across town  – I’d to bus it to Hamilton each day in the late morning, and walk to the County Library Headquarters in Auchingramont Road where the driver Fred Reynolds would be waiting for me in  his corporate grey vehicle.  Each of the Lanark County Mobile Libraries had a staff of two – the librarian (or in my case trainee librarian), and the driver who also helped serve the public: the former was nominally in charge.  But like most of his colleagues Fred had seen several librarians come and go, and quite obviously regarded himself as the main man. He was a taciturn and rather daunting colleague, and his attention to detail verged on the obsessive.

Three days a week – Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays we worked from lunchtime until the early evening, covering an area bisected by the A8 Glasgow/Edinburgh corridor. This included the towns of Harthill and Salsburgh which seemed to me in my state of mind to be shrouded in perpetually dismal cloud.  On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we’d travel south into a more rural tract of Lanarkshire and visit small communities such as Ashgill and Tillietudlem where we stopped beside the Castle which Sir Walter Scott’s book had made famous.

For the first time I was responsible for a budget and for selecting stock – I’d attend the weekly mobile librarians’ ‘key copy’ meeting – looking with my colleagues at collections of new books sent on approval by our suppliers - and mark those titles I wished to purchase. Fred did not always appreciate my choices – and with good reason, for he knew our readers and their requirements much better than I ever did. I remember once ordering a copy of a biography of Leonid Brezhnev When it arrived, Fred turned it over in his hands, and announced with frosty scorn ‘No-one will ever read this!’ We put it on the shelf, but I do believe he was right. The general rule from Fred’s point of view seemed to be that you couldn’t go wrong with romances, crime and westerns. These were read avidly – many borrowers used to put their initials inside the back cover of each book to indicate that they had read it. Which was fine until, greatly to their consternation, we acquired another copy of the same title.

I remember long shifts on the mobile when we’d be standing in some side-street in the dull, flickering battery-powered lights as the oil heater fought a losing battle with the advancing chill. I can only recall one of our regular borrowers, an elderly lady who requested E. L. Shumacher’s mould-shattering treatise Small is beautiful. And I remember one mobile stop on Wednesday afternoons, in a bleak lay-by near the M74 where once there had been houses which were no longer standing. We sat by the roadside and no-one came to make use of our service – ever. For all his meticulous commitment, Fred seemed quite comfortable with this waste of our time, and it never occurred to me to try to change our route in response to circumstances long-changed circumstances.

Fred was a fan of Radio Clyde, the Glasgow-based station and my recollection of these weeks on the road is indelibly soundtracked by pop songs. Abba’s Waterloo was riding high in the charts – I first heard it one afternoon on the way to Hamilton as the bus sped down the hill from Motherwell Cross past Dalziel High School; I’ll forever associate a  street in Allanton where we stopped at tea-time on Monday nights with Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes; one singer was Down in the strawberry patch with Sally, although as far as I could gather what they were doing there was left to the imagination, while another had just ‘called to say how much I love you.’

I don’t have a particularly close relationship with Fred. Insecure myself, I lacked the confidence to relax in his presence. And so I hated the time I spent with him. A major concern was my anxiety when toilets weren’t immediately available, and there were no convenient trees to slip unobtrusively behind. This anxiety made me need to go more often, even though I would dehydrate myself in an attempt to prevent this. My days became increasingly worry-filled. Eventually, I found I simply couldn’t face going in to work, and someone, presumably the long-suffering Willie Scobbie arranged for me to work at the Auchingramont Road HQ until something else could be found for me. I really appreciated his grace and support in my gaucheness and immaturity – but on the other hand it has to be said I was given very little help in transitioning to work on the road.

Auchingramont Road

The Headquarters building – where I worked for a couple of weeks - was to become very familiar to me in later years. Spending my days in a warm, comfortable environment with toilets just along the corridor was a blessed therapy, particularly when I stood at an upper window each day and watched the mobiles driving off from the car-park to visit their first customers of the day, knowing I didn’t have to go with them.

HQ was a converted bank building, with a large, three-floor extension at the back, the floors linked by an elderly industrial lift used for transporting book-packed trollies. The little-visited top storey was bursting with shelf after shelf of old stock, the air heavy with the musty smell of decaying paper and old library book-bindings. Up there, it was utterly quiet, and if you were so disposed you could hide away among the stacks for most of the day without your absence being noted.

Shotts and Newmains

At the end of the two weeks’ I was asked to serve as acting librarian at the libraries of two relatively-close communities – Newmains and Shotts – which was fine, except that I could really have used some basic instructions in out to manager people. My mother kindly lent me her second-hand Ford Anglia to enable me to reach these sites easily as they weren’t on a direct ‘bus route from home.

Shotts Library was in an old building on a corner of the road leading into this former mining community. The library itself was at street level, but the ground sloped steeply back from the road, and you reached the library staff-room and office by descending a staircase into the basement which was lit by a rear-facing window. I remember going down the stairs for the first time, following the member of staff who was showing me round – it struck me how tall this young woman was. But on subsequent visits as I became more confident of my ability to do the job, I noticed she seemed to have grown smaller, until I realised she was just of average height.

The other library I was responsible for was at Newmains, in a modern building close to the town centre. Here as at Shotts the staff were friendly, we worked well together, and I enjoyed my weeks at the two libraries, coping adequately with occasional crises, such as the fainting pensioner in Shotts library, to whom I gave a lift home, and the breaking of a window in the middle of the night at the same library – the police phoned me at home. The two firms with contracts for boarding up broken windows were Hurry Brothers and City Glaziers – I always imagined them in a race to get to the damaged premises first.

I remember coming across John Sutherland’s 1974 study Thackeray at Work in Newmains Library, and was fascinated by its insights into the processes of literary composition and publishing, which kindled my interest in the history of publishing. The other book I remember seeing in Newmains was Julie Andrews’s The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles.

One situation, however, I did not handle so well. Late one afternoon, Mr Walker, who was Willie Scobbie’s deputy phoned me at Newmains asking me to do the evening shift at nearby Newarthill Library. Now this should not have been a problem at all – it would merely have meant delaying my return home, and grabbing a sandwich for tea. However, I’d heard that there were occasional problems at Newarthill with teenagers making life difficult for library staff, and I was very anxious at the prospect of working there. ‘I’m not going,’ I told the boss without, I think, helping him understand my reasons. Despite his attempts to get me to change my mind, I refused and eventually he rang off, a very unhappy man.

Shaken by this episode, I drove home at the end of my shift, and howled my eyes out in front of my parents (and our friendly painter Jim Prentice, who was working at the house when I reached home.) I think this took place on a Friday night, and I had planned to phone Willie Scobbie on the Monday morning to explain what had happened. But before I could make contact with him, he came on the line. He was far kinder to me than I was entitled to expect. ‘I believe the man upstairs has been giving you some grief?’ he said.

One sunny Friday evening in July I locked up Newmains Library, apprehensive, yet full of anticipation about what lay ahead. The next morning I would be heading north to join the St Andrews Scripture Union Mission Team for the first time. And just a few weeks after that, I said goodbye to the staff at my two libraries, and enrolled at Strathclyde University for the Postgraduate Diploma Course in Librarianship.
(Click here for details of my next role, as Librarian at Carluke)