Libraries ‘R’ Us
Libraries ‘R’ Us
Libraries ‘R’ Us
It’s National Libraries Day.
My father was County Librarian for Staffordshire and I was brought up in a house full of books.
I showed little interest in his work or his past, and all I know is that I was raised in the happiest household you could imagine, allowed to be who I wanted to be. He had fought as one of Monty’s Desert Rats, and very occasionally alluded to it, but in the self-absorption of childhood and adolescence I never thought to find out more.
He didn’t go to university and I never asked him why. He moved from North Wales to Stafford, and I took it as inevitable, never trying to find out more about his background, his motivation, his dreams, his ambitions.
Six weeks before our wedding in 1989 he suffered a severe stroke. It utterly debilitated him. He proved determined to get well enough to be there, though his language never returned.
At the wedding, he stood, a frail shadow of the man he had been, shook the hands of guests, smiled, and then wept through my wedding speech. He died a few months later.
I never asked him enough about who he was.
Yet his legacy to me was profound. I can’t go anywhere without a book. Books and stories define me. Reading and talking about reading are what we do as a family. Holidays are full of reading. Stories shape us and ideas come to me most directly when written in a book. I suspect I’ll never have a Kindle, even though I’m now at the stage where I have to smuggle new books into the house because the bookshelves are groaning. I like books and, predictably, Anthony Browne’s ‘I Like Books’ was the first text I read to my children. It’s still upstairs alongside the perishing Furby.
My father - though I never referred to him as that; he was always ‘Dad’ - gave me books and brought me literature. Those visits to Stratford from my early years ignited my passion for Shakespeare, and I remember the teenage embarrassment of telling him to stop joining in with Portia’s ‘quality of mercy’ speech.
His humour, his light-touch approach to managing staff, his sense that family mattered above all else - these are all things I hope I have inherited.
So here, on National Libraries Day, from a desk piled with books, beneath a bedroom strewn with books, I think of him and realise, perhaps for the first time, quite how much I owe to Sidney Barton.
Sidney Barton: it’s a name that belongs to a different era. His values, however, don’t.
Geoff Barton
Saturday 9 February 2013
3pm
Saturday, 9 February 2013