Banned From The Library ....

It’s more than likely that I’ve written about this unhappy episode previously because even after all this time, reaching back into the dim past it emerges readily as a rather nasty skirmish and one you would not be liable to forget easily.  To make matters worse we had certainly not behaved as badly before and we were more than old enough to know better.   We definitely didn’t intend to become banned from the library for six weeks and to be honest it came as rather a shock.  

It wasn’t like us at all.  On the whole Molly and I were dependably well behaved children because, as my mother was fond of pointing out, we knew Right from Wrong.  Our behaviour that day was most decidedly Wrong.  On the other hand there was definitely something energising about engaging in belligerent and confronting conduct that emulates those classmates – usually boys – whose day to day behaviour was reliably abysmal thus regularly earning them admiration and respect from the rest of us.   I knew that the only reason I was known as Good was because I was frightened of what would happen if I wasn’t.   I suppose I was rather easily intimidated but I don’t think that applied to Molly and I never thought of her in that way.  Being a Leader rather than a Follower she had something of a reputation to keep up which at times must have been tiresome.   I was generally a Follower wishing I had enough spirit to become a Leader.

Northfleet Library was situated at that time in a rather impressive Victorian house at number one London Road.   The Children’s Library was in the old kitchen quarters and closed at five o’clock in winter and somewhat later in summer and it was then that the Children’s Librarian locked up and either went home or simply went upstairs to work for another hour or two in the Adult Library.   The Children’s Librarians back then were Miss Ivy Semark who was liked by everyone and Miss Doreen with the forgotten surname who didn’t like children at all and was universally disliked.   The Head Librarian was Miss Webster who rarely if ever appeared downstairs among the junior shelves and if she ever glanced at us at all it was always with icy disapproval.  

The library had become very important to Molly and me and contemplating life without it would have ensured a certain degree of horror.  But of course we didn’t contemplate life without it and because it was a mere ten minute walk from York Road we visited it after school twice weekly.   In those less enlightened days we were called Junior Borrowers were only allowed to take out one fiction book at each visit bolstered by two non-fiction.   This did not seem quite fair to us at the time because we had little desire to know more about physics, aeronautics or how to play Chess and in fact little on the copious non-fiction shelves attracted us unless it was authored by Enid Blyton.    That was not quite as unlikely as it sounds because she was in the habit of writing liberally on Nature Study and from time to time retold tales from both the Old and New Testaments.

Miss Blyton remained our author of choice over a number of years and if we were unable to briskly denude Northfleet Junior Library of every available as yet unread title at each visit we turned our attention to Pamela Brown, Lorna Hill, Monica Edwards or Noel Streatfield.   Failing that reliably popular bunch of children’s writers we might occasionally dip into Richmal Crompton or Malcolm Saville.   We did not venture towards Tolkien and had no real desire to widen our horizons too drastically so when Miss Ivy Semark after attending a Saturday Seminar in Maidstone enthusiastically suggested to us that we might really enjoy Eve Garnett’s Family From One End Street we were quite shocked because we definitely did not want to read anything that reminded us too much of our own monotonous and needy working class lives.   Looking back it seems astonishing how easily we accepted those tales of middle class children some equipped with Nannies and Cooks and holidays in Cornwall who were nothing like us at all, how effortlessly we accepted the values that lay between the pages.

You would quite rightly consider that being as emotionally dependent upon the Northfleet Junior Library as we clearly were, we would have had more sense than to misbehave so significantly, but we were clearly not imbued with a great deal of common sense.   On that particular Friday afternoon we for some reason or other decided to make the life of Miss Doreen of the forgotten surname as difficult as possible as we ran in and out of the old kitchen and scullery, up and around the area, laughing hysterically and ensuring that she found it impossible to lock up.   Eventually, tiring of the game and becoming excitedly exhausted we headed for home congratulating each other on how surprised she had been and saying things like:   I bet she didn’t expect that! – and:  She’ll have to think twice when she next sees us!  

We did have just a sneaking moment of doubt a few days later when we went together to return The Swish of the Curtain and Ballet Shoes together with The Life of Mozart and The Bumper Blyton Woodland Book.   We entered the Junior Library as quietly as possible and might even have bid Miss Ivy Semark a good afternoon because we were very glad to note that it was not her colleague at the desk.     For an agonising moment or two she said nothing before looking directly at us and asking us to follow her up to Miss Webster’s office.  We did so, after exchanging horrified glances.   

Miss Webster’s office was just like that of Miss Dennis at Colyer Road Girls’ School – that’s what Molly told me as we walked home twenty minutes later in a very subdued silence.  She was in her first year at Colyer Road and had already been hauled before the headmistress for what was called a Uniform Breach which meant you were wearing something forbidden.   Molly said that in her case it had been the wrong colour gym slip and that it wasn’t her fault because her mother had simply made a mistake and the navy blue one was to be returned to the Uniform Shop and exchanged for forest green.   Miss Dennis had been reasonably kind at that stage apparently but her kindness dwindled when the exchange did not happen quite as rapidly as she had expected.   I was not familiar with headmistresses and their offices because I was still in my last year at St Botolph’s where the headmaster was the greatly dreaded Mr Cooke and only badly behaved boys ever got sent to report themselves to him where, no matter what misdemeanours had occurred they were routinely screamed at and caned.   The entire female population of the school was far too terrified of Mr Cooke to risk any hint of conduct he would not completely approve of.   In fact he terrified Pearl Banfield so much that she routinely took Friday afternoons off because that’s when he was most likely to take us for Arithmetic which he called Mathematics.    

Although Miss Webster was not likely to emulate any of Mr Cooke’s unpleasant traits she did demonstrate something of the manner and bearing of a Headmistress and it was this that made us shrivel before her that particular afternoon and wish we could disappear into the swirls of the faded Axminster we stared down into.   She told us that our behaviour had been disgraceful, contemptible, shocking and she was still debating as to whether it should be reported to our schools at which point I began to cry, desperately wondering if Mr Cooke ever caned girls.   However, after due consideration of the fact that it was to her knowledge our first transgression, she was prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt and a second chance.   We were instead going to be banned from the library – for six weeks! When you are ten years old six weeks is a very long time indeed.   When you are a book lover and you have few books available at home it looms before you as endless.   Back then schools were not in the habit of allowing pupils to borrow reading matter and we did not have the kind of parents who would agree to add something suitable to the weekly shopping list.   Molly’s mother did buy comics for her and her brother George each week – Beano, Dandy and Film Fun but mine maintained that she totally disapproved of comics.   I was never sure if she was not just exhibiting a meanness of spirit.

I’m not sure if I ever revealed to my parents that I had been banned from the library but probably I didn’t because I would always rather avoid any kind of confrontation that might involve a degree of honesty.   It’s more than possible that neither of them noticed I had largely given up reading for six weeks.   It was the Eleven Plus year so I might conceivably have announced that I was going to concentrate on passing the exam.  I was well aware that this would appeal to my father who was extremely keen that I should attend the grammar school if at all possible.    He would have been delighted to think I intended to focus on gaining entry to it to the exclusion of even Enid Blyton.   Later that year we heard that to my surprise – and certainly to his, that I had failed.    Molly said I should be grateful because there was an awful lot of homework involved in attending the grammar school and those who were unlucky enough to find themselves there definitely had far less time for reading.

The Spread of Invasive Ideas

 

Carmela is thinking of closing down her Facebook account – well that’s what she says at least.  You can’t always believe it when people say things like that can you although you might also think it might be a good idea.  

It had been a long time since the four of us met `in the flesh’ so to speak – Carmela, Judith, Marilyn and me and Zoom is never quite the same.  It’s largely because of Judith that we try to spend at least a proportion of our time discussing topics that are what she terms `meaningful’.   She used to like lengthy debate about private education years ago when she was still sure her children would benefit from it.  In more recent years she has concluded that one of them at least would have fallen through the cracks no matter where he went and she’s more than glad she abandoned the nonsensical idea of home schooling that at one stage she toyed with simply because I was dedicated to it myself at the time.

We were at The Paddington again, largely because a lot of places are not reliably open in January when, Covid or no Covid not to mention most unlikely shark warnings, Aucklanders seem forced to the beach to partake in mediocre takeaways regardless of evening humidity and a distinct lack of facilities for washing greasy fingers.   Judith observed that we could mock if we wanted to but there had been definite warnings of sharks at Muriwai and that caused Marilyn to point out that Muriwai was quite a distance from Judges Bay and even further from Mission Bay which seemed to be the January picnic place of choice when striking out from Parnell. 

The possible closure of Carmela’s Facebook account is mostly because of an unpleasant argument she recently found herself embroiled in with someone who seemed determined to tear her and her ideas, good or bad, apart.   Judith thought that withdrawing from the Facebook platform altogether was rather overdramatic and that there were always going to be those who lurked behind keyboards with nothing better to do than attack others in order to demonstrate their own virtue.   She reminded us of the discussion we had months ago about Witch Finders and said we should bear in mind that had Facebook been available in the seventeenth century it would have made Matthew Hopkins’ work a great deal easier.  In fact, she said, he would have barely needed to move around the country at all, merely wait in his office for Teams of Trusty Trolls to reveal the miscreants to him!  

I ventured, once we’d decided to share pizzas, that we didn’t need to go back in time as far as Matthew Hopkins and that two of the four of us were old enough to half remember the Reds under Beds hysteria of the 1950s though at the time we were unlikely to have had much comprehension of the ensuing alarm that was caused.  The exaggerated obsessive fear of the presence and harmful influence of Communist sympathisers gaining a foothold in society convinced a great many Americans that they would certainly be Better Dead than Red.   The entire terror was largely the brainchild of Senator Joseph McCarthy who seemed to be able to easily persuade his fellow countrymen that the Reds would force the population to watch endless Russian propaganda movies and ensure that restaurants be made to remove hamburgers and steaks from their menus and replace them with black bread, potato soup and stuffed cabbage. 

Rather worse than menu changes were the accusations against government officials and a number of notable authors and actors that they were secret Communist sympathisers which ensured they were humiliated, blacklisted and lost jobs.   Carmela nodded sagely and said if that was even half accurate JK Rowling and Laurence Fox would certainly recognise the syndrome. On the other hand the future of performance Shakespeare had been enhanced by Sam Wanamaker’s decision to abandon the United States and flee to the UK and proved to be a blessing for the British once he immersed himself in the rebuilding of the Globe Theatre.    Marilyn was entirely unaware that Wanamaker had ever been a Communist in the first place and even if he had been, was it really of such major significance she wanted to know?    Had he really been so terribly dangerous?   Was he not simply perhaps caught up in the mania of a 1950s witch hunt?  Carmela told me later that she only knew herself because she watched his daughter Zoe’s journey tracing family history on one of those late night Sky channels via Who Do You Think You Are.

We were about to order a second bottle of House Chardonnay because the pizzas had barely been touched with all the talk of Reds and we therefore set about the important business of eating.    After a few minutes Judith asked how it was we ever got caught up in these ideas in the first place because looking back with a certain degree of logic, it would appear that with the best will in the world the dogma that supported the stance of the day against both witch hunts and  Communism seemed fragile and flimsy from where we stood now.   

Marilyn agreed and pointed out that we are these days far too sensible to see burning witches as anything other than the persecution of women of a certain age who lived alone and were fond of cats though you had to also take into consideration the herbal remedies for everyday ailments they were keen on.   Far more of us would put our faith in modern medicine these days.    However, examining the hysteria in retrospect was in many ways embarrassing and maybe the basis of it all had been that they could not control their vicious tongues and all that was needed was some counselling.   However, at the time she had to agree that it would not have been prudent to be too critical about duckings and burnings and possibly better by far to largely ignore the end results of the syndrome and advise going in for a dog rather than a cat when a household pet was being considered.   It was never terribly wise to express undue public criticism with regard to the manias that spread through society from time to time.

Wanamaker and his like, she felt, should have thought carefully before renewing membership of the Communist Party although on the face of it what were those much dreaded Reds actually guilty of as a group?   Sharing possessions too freely?   Too much enthusiasm for Collective farms?  Being supportive to each other regarding wage rises?  It was hard to see the inherent day to day dangers of throwing your lot in with them.

Even so, Carmela reminded us, it wouldn’t have been entirely straightforward to avoid what my mother always called `being tarred with the same brush’ no matter how diligently you kept your head down and avoided anything to do with spies – she for one certainly wouldn’t have felt it safe naming her only daughter Lara back then.   

All of us agreed that the obsessions that develop every now and again within society grow from strength to strength with a speed that is astonishing to behold.   After all, who would have thought a a decade ago that the mere mention of the Toy that Dare Not Speak its Name would cause such a toxic Facebook attack for Carmela so rapidly, simply because she mentioned her fondness for knitting versions of it for the local Church fete?   And who would have possibly believed back when we were all busy burning our bras that Germaine Greer, then the heroine of the moment for so many of us who had actually bothered to read The Female Eunuch, could possibly fall from grace?   How on earth did that happen?  Regardless of how or why, Carmela is of the opinion that it’s better to be safe than sorry in early 2022 and simply not mention her at all – airbrush her from memory in fact.     Judith wanted to know if that attitude wasn’t quite gutless and we all rather shiftily agreed that it was.  Nevertheless, for peace of mind it was probably better to go in for a modicum of gutlessness rather than fan the flames of incitement for no good reason because it was clear that there were plenty of horrifyingly Woke Warriors for Justice poised ready to cast huge stones. 

The pizzas had been largely demolished when Judith tentatively mentioned the Nazi regime and how the general population of the 1930s seemed to be oblivious as to what might or might not be happening to their Jewish neighbours.  How many of those ordinary citizens were as committed to the activities of Kristallnacht as we are now led to believe?  It’s certainly a stretch of the imagination to accept that they were universally dedicated to acres of broken glass.   Judith felt that it was more likely that the majority of Ordinary People might simply have felt it was easier to pretend not to notice what was happening even though the wholesale aggression towards those on the wrong side of the event was not deserved.  Anyway who in their right mind would have been all that keen on stepping forward to remonstrate with the glass breakers?   After all few of us could be relied upon these days to firmly state our innermost thoughts on incendiary topics such as transgender sportswomen – and we had just airbrushed Germaine from memory with admirable alacrity!