Catching Up With Cole Moreton for Libraries Week

Can I tell you a story? Once upon a time there was a snotty little kid living in the East End of London who couldn’t play football like all his mates because he had a wheezy chest, but he could name every player in every team in the league. That was because he had discovered a magical room where all the secrets of the world were kept.

It was on the corner of Forest Road and Wood Street, in a part of Walthamstow that wasn’t anywhere as leafy as it sounds. Here the boy found out all about the history of the game, looked at pictures of the great goals and learned to love the bright, exciting yellow of Brazil before he had even seen them play. That was going to help him when the bullies came calling in the playground, he was sure.

But he didn’t just find out stuff in the magical room, he also went on wild adventures: sailing the High Seas with pirates, shooting for the Moon with Neil Armstrong and creeping around in the dark with a torch in a scary old house with the Secret Seven, looking for clues to catch a villain.

You’ve guessed, of course, that the boy was me and the adventures all took place in my head while I was sitting in the library reading whatever caught my eye. You could do that then and it was amazing. You still can, but this was in the days before the internet when knowledge was power and if you wanted to know something you had to look it up in a book. Getting hold of the books was otherwise impossible if you couldn’t afford to buy them. We had a few, but not many. I loved The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse with its terrifying scenes down a mine, but there was only so many times I could read it before the pages fell apart.

In any case, nobody we knew could ever dream of having enough money to buy all the books in that library; but they were all absolutely free to read. So when I wanted to know everything there was to know about football in order to have a passing chance of not getting beaten up, I went to the library. When I saw Thor in a Marvel comic and wanted to find the original Norse myths and legends, I went to the library. I can still see the faded cover of that book and smell its pages. Reading about Thor and Loki sparked up a fascination with myths, legends and foundational stories that survives to this day.

I really did love the Secret Seven too and thought I could be one of them (not realising until many years later, when I had kids of my own and played the audio books, that if you had a working class accent in an Enid Blyton story you were most likely the villain!) They were an introduction to mysteries and thrillers.

When my teacher told me as a young teenager that it was possible to have a life beyond Walthamstow and suggested I read George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, I went to the library. (I used to meet my first girlfriend there because we had nowhere else to go, but that’s another story …) Without the library, I wouldn’t have been able to read all those books. Without those books I wouldn’t have understood the world half as well or had the urge to become a writer and explore it more. There are little traces of all of them in the DNA of what I do now, including my debut novel The Light Keeper.

The library was a magic portal to other worlds and in the end it reshaped my own world. And all around me at the time were kids having their minds blown or just having somewhere quiet and relatively calm to do their homework, when home was too much like hard work. So when it comes to celebrating libraries, I want to join the queue. They do need celebrating and defending and saving because what is happening to them is scandalous. Nearly 500 libraries have closed since 2010, councils have had to cut the number of librarians and of course the number of book loans has fallen drastically.

The American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie said: “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” But now the spring is being allowed to run dangerously dry.

Yes, I know all the knowledge of the world is available online these days, at the touch of a fingertip, but what if you can’t afford the iPad or iPhone to touch with that finger, or any kind of computer at all?

For some people, the library is the only place they can get online and get ideas, communicate with friends or apply for jobs. Without that, they are excluded from modern life. Libraries are a lifeline for the lonely, somewhere to go to be with other people without having to pay for it and maybe strike up a conversation.

Ebooks also cost money, and quite rightly, but now more than ever there has to be a way for people to have access to ideas and stories that lift their eyes above and beyond.

Libraries have changed dramatically and become centres for community and ideas, and where there has been the money to do that properly they are hugely popular. The old library where I found the magic room is being demolished, but only so Waltham Forest Council can build a better, more modern one down the road with a cafe and dedicated children’s area. Good for them. They’ve got their priorities right, even in a time of cuts when other councils have just let their libraries go.

There may be fewer actual printed books in the new place when it opens but the principle will still be the same: that anyone can come and look at words and pictures, think about ideas, have their imagination captured and fly away in their mind, whoever they are, for free. There will still be clusters of children doing their homework, or pretending to while making eyes at each other; and probably a snotty kid in the corner reading up on the Premier League out of self defence.

Maybe one day he or she will write a book of their own and be asked to write a blog about libraries and they’ll wonder how to start. Then they’ll think back to what they learned and settle on a question as old as humanity itself. “Can I tell you a story?” The answer, in the library at least, will always be yes.