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I don’t know. Maybe I should just dump
the prefaces. The trouble is, though, some things
are hard to give up - smoking, for example,
and wine, and coffee, tray-bakes, and beards
- and also I suppose I believe there’s
some virtue in trying to explain, just as there
must be some virtue in recycling, and in growing
your own vegetables and keeping fit, even if
it’s hard sometimes to see the benefits.
I wrote all of my books for all of the usual
reasons: for the money, for the sheer fun of
it, to impress my friends and upset reviewers,
to pacify my wife and family, to push on a little
further towards the far distant horizon of truth
and beauty, and because it seems I’m pretty
much incapable of doing anything else. I used
to try to teach, years ago, but I was always
too easily distracted, too excitable and too
nervous, and under the penetrating gaze of my
students my carefully prepared lectures would
somehow disintegrate into wild, mumbled discourses
and apologies in which I would quickly give
up on the subject in hand and start free-associating
on a theme and, alas, stream-of-consciousness
is not much valued and appreciated as a teaching
method and shaggy-dog stories don’t count
as scholarly publications. Once, during a dreaded
Quality Assessment Exercise, I was filmed teaching
a class, and then I was made to watch the film
back and it was then, I think, that I realised
that my future did not lie in academia, that
my future was maybe in getting small cash payments
in return for providing amusing amateur video
footage for You’ve Been Framed-style
tv shows.
These days, if anyone ever asks me what I do
for a job - which they don’t, because
I live in a small town where people know to
mind their own business, but if they do then
usually I reply that I’m a journalist,
which just isn’t true, but which sounds
good, or that I look after my children, which
is true but which doesn’t sound so good
and which is usually enough to kill off any
further questions or conversation, particularly
with men of my own age or older, who have mostly
attained some kind of professional sheen and
accomplishment by now, who have been to war
maybe or made a lot of money, or both, or who
can build stuff, and who have suits for all
occasions and a pension plan, and who might
know the state of the FTSE, and the Nikkei,
and who have strong opinions on world issues
and football but who wouldn’t know one
end of a packet of frozen fish fingers from
the other, or what time the learner pool is
open on a weekday. The children are getting
older though, and they’re all at school
now and I reckon that after doing the regular
daily chores and errands I have at least three
daylight hours to myself to do with as I please,
which is a lot, and which probably makes me
at least a semi- or part-time professional in
my chosen field, whether I like it not. But
still I would never tell anyone that I was a
writer, not because it’s a secret, but
just because it sounds so daft – ‘Oooh’,
I can hear my family and my friends and the
great heavenly host of actual, real dead writers
chorusing, ‘He says he’s a writer’.
I write because I read, and I read because
I write, the two being pretty much inseparable
in my mind, like an ingraft, or something ingrowing,
like life and death, or verucas and swimming
pools, or the inevitability of bouts of vomiting
and diarrhoea in the reception year at school.
I don’t know which came first, the reading
or the writing, but I do know that I started
reading because of libraries. I did not grow
up in a house full of books: we had a family
dictionary, and my dad had a biography of Winston
Churchill, and a little Masonic pocket-book
with a leather cover and red lettering inside,
a book which we weren’t even supposed
to know existed, but which we did - he kept
it in his pyjama drawer next to the bed, which
pretty much amounts to public display in a family
home - and that was it, until I went to secondary
school and my parents bought a copy of the Children’s
Britannica from a door-to-door salesman, paid
for in instalments, to help me and my sister
with our homework. So it was not a bookish house,
but that’s hardly unusual and it’s
not as if I felt hard done by – when I
was growing up I didn’t know anybody who
had books in the house. Just about everyone
I knew, though, did have a library ticket, and
just like everybody used to belong to trade
unions and wear flat caps and do National Service
and smoke Player’s Weights and Navy Cut
and smack their children, and beer was drunk
in a pub from a glass with a handle, and you
did the Pools, and had a few Premium Bonds,
and there was no problem with anti-social behaviour,
and all the food was good and fresh and local,
and it was bliss in that dawn to be alive, well,
everyone I knew went to the library with their
library ticket once a week. At least, that’s
what I remember, not my own childhood at all
but a kind of composite red-brick and mahogany
Carnegie Library childhood, made up of my own
and other people’s memories and fantasies
and imaginations.
My home-town library was not in fact made of
red brick and mahogany, it was made of plasterboard,
woodchip, and breeze blocks, and it was the
size of a classroom: in fact it was a classroom.
It was in what used to be called a ‘demountable’,
a mobile classroom, in the grounds of my old
school back home in Essex, behind the Budworth
Hall and next to the car park. We used to go
once a week to pick our books and the library
used the old Browne issue system – you’d
take your book to the desk and the librarian
would remove the little ticket from the front
pouch stuck inside the front cover and place
it in the reader’s little orangey pouch,
which were kept in alphabetical order in long
wooden trays. There were no computers, no photocopiers,
no free carrier bags, and you weren’t
allowed to move up from the children’s
section to the adult’s until you were
twelve years old, by which time you could recite
all of the Just William books by heart and would
kill for a good John Le Carré or a Frederick
Forsyth.
That library has long since been knocked down,
along with the school, to make way for luxury
townhouse apartments and a Tesco Metro, but
I don’t think a week has gone by during
the past thirty years when I haven’t made
it to a library somewhere, somehow. I have been
on holiday a few times, of course, but even
then I tend to choose destinations with a good
public library system: Iceland I quite like
the sound of, and Sweden I imagine would be
pretty good also. Last year we took the family
to Donegal on holiday and it rained so much
we ended up having a picnic lunch sheltering
outside Bundoran library, which has ample car-parking
space and good disabled access, and to mark
the occasion we bought novelty Céad Míle
Fáilte book marks for the children. A
few years ago, on my one and only trip to New
York, I ran out of money and had no credit cards
or traveller’s cheques and so spent most
of the rest of the holiday in New York Public
Library, walking for miles every day to and
from because I couldn’t afford the subway
fares, and surviving on a ration of plain boiled
bagels and coffee: it was probably the best
holiday I’ve ever had.
Libraries are places where you go to invent
and reinvent yourself, or maybe just to use
the toilet, if they have toilet facilities,
and to find out how other people have reinvented
themselves, and what they’ve written on
the walls, and the desks, and in the books;
they’re a wonderful hiding place, but
also a way back out into the world. All of my
books have been written at home, or in garden-centre
cafes, on trains, in buses, or in the car while
waiting to pick up the children from school,
but they’ve all started off in libraries,
and in other books. I have a vague memory that
when I wrote the first sentence of my book The
Mobile Library, for example, I was responding
to having just finished reading Ulysses,
a book which I have been checking out of various
libraries for a quarter of a century, along
with Moby-Dick and biographies of dead famous
people which I read and then immediately forget
having read. But I could be wrong; I may just
have made it up, and I’m in the car right
now waiting for the school bell to ring, listening
to the mighty Hugo Duncan playing country music
on BBC Radio Ulster (‘Remember, your Uncle
Hugo loves you!’), and brushing tray-bake
crumbs from my beard, my little pile of library
books next to me on the front passenger seat,
so I’m afraid I don’t have any of
my old notes or scraps of A4 – what you
might laughingly call my manuscripts –
to hand to be able to check.
The whole point of a library is that you don’t
have to buy the books you read. You don’t
have to undergo the agony of going into bookshops,
those brightly-lit half-houses of the soul,
and shelling out your hard-earned cash for something
that in all likelihood is only going to be fit
for the fire, and which you’re never going
to read much past the first couple of chapters.
The great truth and beauty of a public library
is that you don’t own the books: they,
briefly, own you. There’s probably a moral
there, but if I pointed it out my editor, or
my wife, or my agent would tell me not to talk
such a lot of stuff and nonsense and just to
get on and tell the story. So. You know now
where I get my ideas; and no, honestly, the
characters are not me; the places are imaginary;
and if you happen to be borrowing any of my
books from a library, please consider other
readers and don’t write in the margins
or fold down the corners or use bacon rashers
as book marks; go and buy your own copy; available
soon in a remainder bookshop near you.
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