Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

That image of the soldiers on the railway tracks is still on the screen of my computer. I click off it and look up some pictures of Inverness War Memorial instead. Red sandstone, I’d forgotten how very red. I never knew before, either, that this Memorial was unveiled in winter, 1922, in front of a crowd of five thousand. Imagine the riverbanks, the crowd. I’m pretty sure I never knew either till now, and it’s a shock to, that one in every seven men from Inverness who fought in the First World War died, or that the Scottish Highlands had the highest casualty rate, per capita, of the whole of Europe. Then from God knows where my father says:

and do you remember, girl, when we drove around all that Sunday for the project you were doing at university, and you needed to record people speaking for it, but no one would stop and speak to you?

Yes! I say. Ha ha! It was for a linguistics class. I’d wanted to test out something I’d been told all through my growing up, that the people in and around Inverness spoke the best English. I’d made him ferry me round the town and all the villages between Ardersier and Beauly, trying to stop random people and get them to speak sentences into a tape recorder so I could measure the pureness of their vowels. For a start it was a Sunday, so there was no one much out and about. But you know why it’s called the best English , one of the three passers-by who did stop when I asked said into the microphone . It’s because of the Jacobite wars with the English, because in the late 1700s when they banned the Gaelic — which was all anybody spoke here — and they moved the troops into Fort George and Fort Augustus and the soldiers intermarried with all the local girls, then the English that got spoken was a Gaelic-inflected English.

Inflected, my father says now as if he’s turning the word over in his mouth.

War-inflected.

That’s it. I have a clever idea.

I go to the shelf and take down my Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Its spine is broken and pages 187–208 are falling out of it.

I take a blank page and a pencil. I flick through the book and I make a list of everything I’ve happened to underline in it over the years.

Consciousness: in that rich earth: for the last time: a jolting lump: feet that trod him down: the eyeless dead: posturing giants: an officer came blundering: gasping and bawling: you make us shells: very real: silent: salient: nervous: snow-dazed: sun-dozed: became a lump of stench, a clot of meat: blood-shod: gas shells dropping softly behind: ecstasy of fumbling: you too: children: the holy glimmers of goodbyes: waiting for dark: voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn: a god in kilts: God through mud: I have perceived much beauty: hell: hell: alleys cobbled with their brothers: the philosophy: I’m blind: pennies on my eyes: piteous recognition: the pity war distilled: I try not to remember these things now: people in whose voice real feeling rings: end of the world: less chanced than you for life: oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice: many crowns of thorns: emptied of God-ancestralled essences: the great sunk silences: roots in the black blood: titan: power: in thirteen days I’ll probably be dead: memories that make only a single memory: I hear you still: soldiers who sing these days.

I read it. A man of mud and sadness rises like a great wave. He is like a great cloud much bigger than the earth, like an animation from a Ministry of Information film, amateur, jerky, terrifying. He is made of spores, bones, stone, feet still in their boots, dead horses, steel. He speaks with all the gone voices. He is a roaring silence. There are slices of railway track sticking out of his thighs and wrists.

I’m in tears. Christ.

The men in that picture were shooting people so close to them that they could have reached forward and touched them without even moving their feet, and the dust simply rose in the air as the people got shot.

My father jogs my elbow.

Come on, girl, he says.

He sings the song as loud as he can in his Gracie Fields falsetto.

Sticking out my chest, hopin’ for the best.

He waits for me to sing.

War is stupid , I sing again.

He nods.

Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye , he sings. Cheerio, here I go, on my way.

He waves. I wave.

Say it in broken English , I sing back.

Kensal Rise Library, built by public subscription on a site donated by All Souls College, Oxford, was ceremoniously opened by Mark Twain in the year 1900.

It was closed by Brent Council in 2011 and sold to a property developer called Platinum Revolver.

Public pressure to save and protect the library has been so strong over the past four years that the property restorers now working on the site converting the space into flats (Uplift Property, whose marketing hook is ‘homes to make you happy’) have been forced to produce redevelopment blueprints which include both designated public space and designated library space.

This is what Pat Hunter told me:

Libraries have been a focal point in my life and work for seventy-five years. In my childhood (born 1932) one could only be enrolled at the library at seven years of age. In 1939 I did so with a sense of great awe and excitement. In 1949, at seventeen years, I went from sixth-form grammar school to work and train as a librarian, and finally retired in 1996 after forty years’ service. In all those years I saw the value of and need for libraries to all the population.

The importance of libraries was recognized by the Public Libraries Act 1850 and affirmed by the Public Libraries and Museums Act 1964. In all the media mention of cuts to services in libraries I heard no reference to these Acts or any other statutory requirement for the provision of libraries — nor have they been rescinded.

Because libraries have always been a part of any civilization they are not negotiable. They are part of our inheritance.

I had been having difficulty breathing so I went to the doctor. He couldn’t find anything wrong. My respiratory function tests came out clear and strong. My heart was fine, my blood was fine. My colour was fine.

Tell me again, about the breathing, he said.

It starts slight, then gets sorer and sorer, I said. It’s sore at the very top of my breath then sore at the very bottom of my breath. It feels like I’ve been winded. It’s very unpredictable. I never know when it’ll come or when it’s going to go.

The doctor looked again at his computer screen. He clicked his tongue.

And life generally? he asked. How’s life?

Fine, I said.

Nothing out of the ordinary? he said.

No, I said, not really, well, my dad died and my siblings went mad and we’ve all stopped speaking to each other and my ex-partner is suing me for half the value of everything I own and I got made redundant and about a month ago my next-door neighbour bought a drum kit, but other than that, just, you know, the usual.

The doctor printed something out and signed it then handed it to me.

Take these, he said. Come back in a few weeks if life hasn’t improved.

I went to Superdrug and they gave me a little box. In it was a blisterpack, three months’ worth of antidepressant. I read the piece of paper that came with the blisterpack. It said that one of the side-effects was that these antidepressants would make you depressed. I left the pills unopened on the shelf in the bathroom. The pain came and went. When it came I sat very still, if I could, and tried not to think of anything. But it’s hard not to think of anything. I often ended up thinking of something.