58. Between Mark Twain and Zadie Smith: My 1958-1960 Gap Years (2)

Mark Twain

This blog is one of a number about the two years I spent between leaving school in the summer of 1958 and going to university in the autumn of 1960 [see 55. 1958-1960: My Gap Years].

In 1958 we were living at 16 Kingswood Avenue, Queen's Park, London NW6. Being a bookish lad my first gap year job was as a library assistant with Willesden Public Libraries, first in the Queen’s Park branch library in Salusbury Road* and then at the Kensal Rise branch in College Road NW10. Both were within walking distance of home or a bus to Kensal Rise if the weather was bad. I earned the princely sum to me of £5 10 shillings and tuppence a week of which I gave Mum £2 for my board.

In the first few months of 1959 I kept a diary. I am not sure precisely when I moved from the Queen's Park library to the library in Kensal Rise but the transition clearly took place before the new year.

*Queen's Park Library is now in Harrow Road W10.

 

Kensal Rise Library, College Road, NW10

Kensal Rise Library was opened  on October 13th 1900 by Mark Twain. At the opening ceremony he presented the Chairman of the Library Committee with five of his books and a signed photograph. In his last public address before returning to America, he said how much he had enjoyed the compliments paid to him and added a story about his name, a name 'of which I am rather fond.'

A little girl wrote to me from New Zealand in a letter I received yesterday, stating that her father said my proper name was not Mark Twain but Samuel Clemens, but that she knew better, because Clemens was the name of the man who sold the patent medicine, and his name was not Mark. She was sure it was Mark Twain, because Mark is in the Bible and Twain is in the bible.

I was very glad to get that expression of confidence in my origin, and as I now know my name to be a scriptural one, I am not without hopes of making it worthy.

Mark Twain at opening ceremony of Kensal Park Library, October 1900

 

When I was working at the Kensal Park Library I tried to describe in my diary some of the staff there, my earliest attempts to capture the character of people I met. The first person I put the pen and ink to was the Head Librarian, Miss Sparrow:  

Miss Sparrow is a tall scraggy woman in her late fifties or early sixties. She has prominent teeth, a slightly receding chin and a smile that has been matured for the pleasure of her library customers. She is eccentric, fond of childish bets with the Senior Assistant and likely to “flap” if she feels she is overworked. When speaking to one she pushes herself up and down on her toes, looks beyond one and talks as though there were an audience to listen to her. Her hair is a mixture of mousy brown and mousy grey. She is good-natured, has been in the library for god knows how long and will be pensioned off at 65. She is never on time, always in a hurry, a little absent-minded, and she dresses as though there were war-economy restrictions in force. She believes in reincarnation. [Saturday January 3rd]

Evelyn is really very amusing. She is short and stocky with a mass of hair which looks everlastingly uncombed. Her eyes and nose suggest her partiality for rum. She has a deaf-aid which she is very good natured and open about but like many deaf people she uses it as an excuse, she hears what she wishes to hear and closes her mind to anything she does not wish to hear. Evelyn has the embarrassing habit of 'telling others off', or merely asking awkward questions, so that everyone else in the room can hear. She is intelligent and likes to act the revolutionary by professing a sort of Communism and decrying everything established  purely out of a sense of fun rather than from any deep convictions. She has a sense of humour and a very hearty laugh and does not claim to understand matters which she does not understand. She is a great teller-of-tales. [Friday January 16th]

Jean's last day. Jean is short and slender. Her head appears large due mainly to a mass of black hair which flows from a fringe at the front to her shoulders at the back. She has a strikingly long nose which has an almost imperceptible bridge. She is gay and very good tempered and only takes offence at extreme provocation. Jean comes from a large family and is obviously keen, although only 17, to start a home of her own and escape from her unhappy family entanglements. She has been engaged twice and will marry Tony De'Ath [son of Deputy Librarian] next Saturday. I doubt whether it will be a successful marriage (pessimist!), but Jean is a very faithful type and its failure would not be her fault. [Saturday January 24th; these were the days of Teddy Boy gangs with flick knives and Jean had the side of her face slashed in Ladbroke Grove on her way home one evening.]

Mr. Forster is very staid and conservative. He is pro-monarchy, anti-socialist, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, all without knowing why. He has been brought up in an "upper middle class" family (his father is Town Clerk) and gone to a "good" school (U.C.S.) yet does not seem to have acquired an acute sense of appreciation of literature or of the course of study he proposes to follow - Law. He is very keen on boy-scouts and is somewhat boy-scoutish himself. He is very tall, dresses rather shabbily - due to his clothes being too short for him, and has dark-rimmed glasses. He spends much time cracking funny remarks and telling funny stories. He is naïve, accepts things as they are and does not see any need for improvement. He is one of the "never-had-it-so-goods". [Friday January 31st]

Charlie was off ill today. He collapsed after getting up in the morning and the doctor found that he had a slipped disc. Charlie is the cleaner; he is small with a head which is almost devoid of hair. The most prominent thing about his face is his nose which does not seem to start until it has travelled along a bridge of about one and a half inches; it then blossoms out into a round-hooked nose - by comparison the rest of his face is small. Charlie is typical of the easy-going underpaid working-man; jovial, knowledgeable within his own limited sphere; thinks what he ought to think and goes down the 'Bridge every Saturday when Q.P.R are at home. He is very lovable and easy to get on with; there are no barriers between Charlie and the people he comes into contact with - that is no barriers from his side. I visited Charlie this afternoon with his money; he is very much changed. He was upset at having to break a record of 13 years without time off because of sickness; he was worried about how we would get on without him; how he was going to get his money - he will be off for at least a fortnight -; illness is something beyond his experience; he was obviously suffering and greatly changed by the suffering - but scarcely ennobled by it. The room seemed musty and unpleasant and was dim in the growing afternoon fog. It was almost possible to see someone decaying in it in a state comparable to some of Dickens' deaths. [Friday February 6th]

Mr. Forster's heartiness becomes at times almost unbearable; the 6'3" baggy-panted Boy Scout. I believe in cultivating a certain amount of irresponsibility but there are limits to everything and I do believe in working occasionally. On the other hand Mr. Managhan does enough to make up for the shortcomings of Forster and myself. It seems possible that one can love a job like library work - Mr. Managhan does and is obviously suited to taking it up as a career. He is a "good Catholic" - to quote his own words. I do not think his good Catholic convictions are anything more than a stubborn indoctrination. The Catholics deny anyone the right to work things out for themselves; they do not, like the Communists, tolerate "deviationism" or "revisionism". [Thursday February 12th]

 

I mentioned Koestler's new book "The Sleepwalkers" to Evelyn today - having read the remarks on the dust jacket. The book is a history of the conflict between religion and science and it seems comes out rather in favour of religion. Evelyn asked whether it really mattered; she seems very resigned to life carrying on as it is in spite of the fact she believes it could be so much better. Evelyn's great virtue is tolerance; intolerance is Managhan's great vice. I must read Koestler's book; it should modify my views somewhat. I was arguing with Managhan again today about Roman Catholocism; we never seem to get anywhere although today I felt I had the better of it. It is fruitless arguing with him but it is a useful intellectual exercise for me. He has great hopes it seems that I will become a Catholic.

 

 

Willesden Borough Council was abolished in 1965 becoming part of the London Borough of Brent. In 2010 the Brent Council proposed the closure of a number of its branch libraries, the proposal to close the Kensal Park Library in particular becoming a matter of on-going controversy. A campaign to save the library was set up, supported by various writers and celebrities including Alan Bennett, Zadie Smith and the Pet Shop Boys. [The latest update from this campaign is dated May 12th 2013 and the next meeting is at 7.30pm on Tuesday 21st May - see http://www.savekensalparklibrary.org/].

Picture by Kingsley Davis, www.savekensalriselibrary.org

 
Zadie Smith has been particularly prominent in this campaign. Much of her fiction, from her first novel White Teeth in 2000 to her latest NW in 2012 draws from her life in the Willesden area. She used to study in the Kensal Rise library as a young woman. In NW she describes the drift in the relationship between two of the characters, Leah and her old school (and best) friend the upwardly mobile Natalie:

Congenital autodidact, always wanting to know. It must have been that break. The break made the difference. She became Natalie Blake in that brief pause between sixteen and eighteen. Educated herself on the floor of Kensal Rise Library while Leah smoked weed all the live-long day.

I wrote in my diary that I couldn’t think of anything worse than a boring life’s job of 9 to 5 days and, at the end of February, finished work with the library service.

I then obtained a new pair of glasses, joined the Youth Hostel Association, bought a sleeping bag and kitted up to go and work in Yorkshire and then youth hostelling. At the end of March I hitch-hiked from London to Scargill in the Yorkshire Dales. I worked there for a week on a large estate helping to trim fir trees and stripping the old paint off some greenhouses that were being tarted up. Then I spent five days walking in the dales and staying at youth hostels. In those days the hostels would not accept you unless you were clearly on a walking or cycling tour. Nor could you hang around in the hostel during the day since they closed at 10am and reopened at 5 or 6 in the evening, which was a pain in the ass if it was a rainy day, not unusual in that part of England, or any part of England!

From Yorkshire I hitchhiked up to Edinburgh and stayed with my Aunty Chrissie, Uncle Peter and cousin Moira. Then hitched back home with a stop off along the way at an old school friend’s (Michael Skinner) in Nuneaton, Nottinghamshire.

My next job was on the night shift in an ice cream factory.