Thinking about my earlier life
recently – triggered by reading someone else's memoirs – I realised that I could
remember the great freedom of mind and expansiveness of spirit that mobile,
local and public libraries brought into an otherwise routine and limited life. Routine
and limited for various obvious reasons – we lived in the country at a time
when working folk couldn’t afford cars, TV was OK but not the pervasive and
persuasive time waster it is now, being in the country there weren’t many
options for after school activity. Well, anyway, I’ve always been a reader –
from Corn Flake packets to Reader’s Digest, newspapers, and at every stage and phase of life, books.
From primary 5 ( I was 9 or 10) I
remember the large leather suitcase with LIBRARY stamped on it, which was
brought round the classes on a trolley each Friday afternoon for us to choose a
book and return the one borrowed last week. That's where I first read Kidnapped,
The Invisible Man and Children of the New Forest. Then there was the local
library at East
Kilbride
in the
early 60's when it was a new new town, and the library a new glass sided shiny
building. That's where I developed a never lost interest in biography, stories
that were real because the people were real, and in stories about animals, and
in which animals are the narrators – so Watership
Downdidn’t require the mental re-adjustment others felt they had to make.
Then there were the Carluke and Lanark Public Libraries, which supported my reprehensible
Western phase. I must have read dozens of not very politically correct
stories of stereo-typed goodies and baddies – that was before I graduated to
Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley adventures, Evelyn Anthony espionage, a
long phase of Douglas Reeman (naval war), Hammond Innes and even a few of Neville
Shute.
But in those libraries I also began
to read history, which along with biography I think accounts for my lifelong
interest in the history of ideas and the people who have them! My current love
for history, who we were before we became who we are, came into being against the best efforts of the gentlest most
boring teacher I ever had to immunise all pupils against ever catching any long term infection or enthusaism for history. Her nickname was Texas, on account of her slow drawl, in which she
enunciated word for word and with sing-song, lilting pathos, her handwritten
notes from a blue jotter, concerning the various demeanours and misdemeanours
of the key players in the Scottish Reformation and the various fates they met.
At 13 years old, I couldn’t have cared less about the young, innocently foolish,
(or even culpably stupid) Mary Queen of Scots, though I was a bit more
sympathetic to the verbally violent theological hard man John Knox.
It took me several years, a conversion
experience and a life-changing call to ministry to get me inside a history book again with
serious intent. Having left school with nil points as far as qualifications
were concerned, and sure God was calling me to be a minister I had to get some
Highers. One of them was History, another English and a third French. The first two have remained lifelong enthusiasms. French I can still read well enough but have all but lost spoken French. More later………
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