Society, Community and Helping Others

Story · all 20 words

The Library on Fletcher Road

The library on Fletcher Road was a single-storey building from 1968 with a flat roof that leaked, and in 2011 the council announced it would close in the spring.

I had lived four streets away for six years and had been inside it twice.

I want to be honest about that, because the story people tell afterwards is always that they loved the place. I did not. I had a job and a young child and I bought books online like everybody else, and if you had asked me in January whether that building mattered I would have said something vague and moved on. I was not selfish exactly. I was busy, which is the respectable version.

What changed my mind was a woman called Dot, who was seventy-eight and who stopped me outside the shop with a clipboard and a petition, and who did not ask me to sign it. She asked me whether I knew what the building was used for on Tuesdays.

I did not.

On Tuesdays it was a warm room from ten until two, with tea, for anybody who came. On Wednesdays it was a job club, run by a charity with one part-time worker. Two men who were homeless used the reading room every single day for the heat and were never once asked to leave, which was a decision somebody had made deliberately and never written down anywhere.

And it was the only building within a mile with a public toilet, a socket you could charge a phone in, and a person behind a desk who would help you fill in a form.

None of that appears in a report about book lending figures.

So I signed, and then I made the mistake of going to one meeting, which is how you get involved in anything – never a decision, always one meeting.

The campaign ran for fourteen months. About nine of us did most of it and perhaps two hundred people would take part in something at some point. We collected nine thousand signatures in a town of thirty-one thousand. We protested outside the council offices twice, in the rain, which achieved nothing except a photograph that turned out to matter later.

We did fundraising that I found genuinely humiliating – a quiz night, a stall, a man who donated a bicycle – and I have never been so wrong about anything, because people were absurdly generous and the stall took four hundred pounds in an afternoon.

Two councillors supported us from the beginning and one of them lost her seat partly because of it.

We won, in the end, and I want to be careful about that word. The library did not stay open as a library. It reopened after nineteen months as a community building with reduced hours, staffed mainly by volunteers, with a small council grant and a lease we have to renew every three years. Dot did not see it reopen. She died in the February before.

It has a food bank now, on Thursdays, which nobody in 2011 imagined would be necessary and which is now the busiest thing in the building.

What the campaign taught me was not about poverty in the way I expected. It was about loneliness. The Tuesday room was never really about tea. Some people had not spoken aloud to another human being since the previous Tuesday, and the building was the only place they could go where nobody was selling them anything and nobody asked why they had come.

The inequality I had not understood is this: nothing closes in the wealthy part of town, because those residents write letters that get answered. That is not discrimination anybody has to organise. It happens by itself, quietly, in the direction of whoever complains most effectively.

I still volunteer there on alternate Thursdays. Fourteen years.

People talk about wanting to give back, usually at some future point when things are calmer. Things are never calmer. And two hours a fortnight does make a difference, but not the difference I expected – mostly it has changed who I know, which turns out to be the actual point of a town.