Where have all the Mobile Libraries gone? By Olivia Rana

When I was a child I can vividly remember the mobile library coming to my rural school in County Fermanagh. It arrived once a fortnight, bringing great excitement for bookworms like myself, and a welcome break from the tedium of schoolwork.

We would promptly line up outside the school gates and wait our turn as the librarian allowed only a certain number of children on at a time. I was six or seven years old and suddenly I found myself in this magical space, with stacks of books laid out on wooden shelves, and to my even greater delight, to find that I now had the freedom to choose books beyond those prescribed by the teacher.

I loved the quiet sense of sitting shoulder to shoulder with my friends, all of us on a different quest, all of us losing ourselves for a while. It seemed that in the hushed silence we were transported into a kind of time warp, whisked thousands of miles away to places like Narnia, a world of mythical beasts and talking animals, or to the shores of the Mississippi River with Huckleberry Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer.

That freedom to discover allowed me to access places and people far away from the realities of my childhood home, and provided me with new ways of seeing things.

Over months and years I burrowed my way through the shelves and took home anything that caught my eye. I loved how tangible the experience was, how I got to feel the books, flick through the pages, and then take them to the counter for it to have that all important stamp.

My mother did take us to the local public library on occasion, leaving us off, like many other parents, while she went about her grocery shopping. It was the equivalent of a childcare centre, and never lived up my ideals of the mobile library. The voices of noisy children ricocheted off the walls, and I was distracted by the rustle of newspapers, and too many people moving around the place. I was never able to lose myself within a book in the same way that I could in the mobile library.

Even now, when I go to the local library, I seek a quiet corner, something that resembles the cosy confines of the mobile, where I can have the luxury of solitude to indulge myself in a book, but then one of my children will find me and I’ll be cajoled into helping them to find a book, because they are too busy playing a game on the library computer or colouring in a masterpiece for the libraries latest competition. Again, there are too many distractions, and my heart sinks a little to know that the library is not to them what it was to me; a door into a million worlds.

Increasingly today for many of us, including our children, the library is nestled within a kindle, but even with millions of books at out fingertips our reading ability is in decline. A recent study by Renaissance UK identified a significant fall in reading ages, and found that many pupils sitting their GCSEs at age 16 have the reading ability of a 13-year-old or lower, meaning that they even struggled to understand the exam paper.

Even more worryingly Neilsen Book research found that since 2013 the number of toddlers being read to has fallen by a fifth. Reading is increasingly being treated as a task to be fitted in by busy families, and as a result reading for pleasure is under threat. Our young people are struggling to read challenging and age appropriate books, and subsequently this could have a significant impact on their future success.

With the decline in numbers using public libraries, children, particularly those of limited means, will never go beyond school-prescribed reading. Just like me back in 1982, children today need to be given the freedom to choose books for themselves, and they need to have the space and time to form a habit and love of reading, and where can they find that other than in a library? Ideally the sanctity of a mobile library.

But, where have all the mobile libraries gone? They are not entirely extinct, but over the last seven years mobile libraries have declined by nearly 50%, and those remaining no longer resemble the sanctuary of my youth. They are now equipped with onboard computers, targeting residential homes and silver surfers, and some have seen a second life, transformed into children’s playhouses, campervans for hipsters, and in one case in Belfast, transformed into a barbershop on wheels.

Admittedly I do have a kindle, and I like the way that it makes books so accessible to me, but I also have a stack of paperbacks on my bedside table, so I can touch, and flip through, and smell the scent of the pages. It brings me back to that sense of magic I had as a child, the excitement of searching and then finding a book that I loved.

I understand that like our churches, libraries have to find ways to draw the public in if they want to survive. Many of them now play host to plays, and lectures and double up as a coffee shop or a playgroup, but whilst that might succeed in getting more people over the threshold, I’m not sure that it will altogether encourage the reading of more books. As with the decline and subsequent makeover of the mobile library, our public libraries are losing that specialness, their role as a quiet place to simply escape into a book. Our young people will never get to have that feeling of complete escapism and enchantment that I experienced each time I visited the mobile library, and that I think is a huge loss.

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Olivia Rana has a Masters of Art in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. She has achieved success in several short story competitions, including the Mitchelstown International Short Story Competition, and the Bristol Short Story Award. She has had several short stories published both online and in magazine publications.

Her debut novel, Elastic Girl was self-published in November 2017. Set in India, Elastic Girl explores the issue of trafficking through the eyes of a young girl who is sold into the circus. Endorsed by Joanne Lumley, 15% of the profits from each book have been pledged towards the charity Child Rescue Nepal.

Rana’s second Novel, Black Beach, which is set in Iceland, is due for publication at the end of 2018. Both Elastic Girl and Rana’s second novel, Black Beach received an award through the Arts Council for Northern Ireland under their Support for Individual Artists Programme.

Olivia Rana lives in Belfast with her husband and two young children. She is a member of Women Aloud NI, a collective of female writers from across Northern Ireland and she teaches a novel-writing course at Queens University. Olivia is currently working on her third novel.

–Follow Olivia on Twitter https://twitter.com/Oliviarana2

About ELASTIC GIRL

‘Elastic Girl highlights the cruelties, indignities and injustice of child trafficking. An enlightening and gripping read.’ Joanna Lumley

Before Muthu Tikaram is born, her grandfather murders the family’s landlord, an act of violence that shapes Muthu’s life from the very beginning.

Too young to understand the repercussions of this act of brutality, Muthu knows only that her two older sisters are given special treatment while she is forced to sell rotis on the dusty roadside, dreaming of escape.

When the family find themselves destitute and living by the side of the railway station, Muthu is sold to The Great Raman Circus of Chennai. Her father convinces her that this is the only way to help free her family from poverty, and in her innocence Muthu imagines that with her extraordinary contortionist abilities she will become a star, just like all her Bollywood idols.

Muthu’s hopes for glamour and excitement are short lived, as she is transported into a world of misery and abuse. After several years of enslavement, she plans her escape with her friend Gloria, convinced that they can make it on their own in Mumbai, the City of Dreams. Will Muthu succeed in making her name as the Elastic Girl or will her dreams turn into a nightmare?

This poignant tale draws attention to the plight of child performers in India, and on the horrors of child trafficking, but as Muthu tries to make sense of her existence, readers will discover the true strength of the “Elastic Girl.”

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing