Home is one of those migrant words that changes meaning over the course of a life. As a child of two cultures, I was aware from an early age that I had two homes: one in England and one in France, each with its separate family, traditions, food and language. That meant I was never completely at home in any single place, but it also meant that my comfort zone could occupy multiple territories. Home was the people who loved me, and how they left their mark on the world: through gardening, cooking and music – but most of all, through stories.
Stories are how we stay in touch with home, my mother used to tell me. Stories of our family in France; of people and places I only knew through her stories. People and places could be lost, but through stories could always be found again.
Later, when I discovered books, I realised that home could be Narnia, or Gormenghast, or AA Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. Growing up as a bookish child, my natural home was the library: there I explored other worlds, other lives. There I could not only be myself, but anyone else I wanted to be.
I first joined Barnsley library on my seventh birthday. It was a dusty suite of rather forbidding, dark-panelled rooms at the top of a series of staircases in a municipal building: the first, marble; the second, stone; the third a humble, unvarnished wood. A single librarian stood guard, and when I first arrived to stare in awe at the cathedral of books – the avenues of bookshelves; the archways, the long, dark passages – she sternly indicated a single shelf of children’s books by the entrance. She said that this was the children’s section – here, where she could keep an eye on me – and that I had to wait another five years to access the rest of the library.
I read all the books on the shelf in three months. I came in every Saturday. While my parents went to the market, I would sit in the library and read, and gaze longingly at the forbidden bookshelves. Eventually, the librarian agreed to bend the rules for me. She allowed me to borrow one book a month from the adult section, as long as she felt it was suitable. Thus I spent my Saturday mornings speed-reading all the books I knew wouldn’t be judged suitable, before finally choosing the one book I thought would pass the librarian’s scrutiny to take home.
As time passed, so did her conviction that I was up to no good, and I would spend hours exploring the library, hidden away among the shelves. No one else ever seemed to be there. It was almost a secret place. I had my favourite reading spot, at the back of the mythology and folklore section (where all my favourite books were kept, and no one else ventured). Even the strict librarian seemed less disapproving. One day I came in to find that she had brought a beanbag into my den, so that I wouldn’t have to sit on the floor. I was home. I read everything from HA Guerber to Robert Graves, some of it deeply unsuitable, all of it unsupervised and marvellous.
One Saturday in December it snowed, and my parents failed to pick me up at the usual time from the library. The car had broken down in the snow and there was no way to collect me, or (in the absence of mobile phones) to get in touch with the library. I was only nine years old. Home was an hour’s walk away. Lunchtime came, and the librarian brought me a sandwich, and told me to keep waiting. Night fell. Outside the air was filled with snow and streetlights. Clearly, I was destined to spend the night in the library. The thought was immensely exciting. I made myself a little den, using books and the beanbag. Half an hour later, a policeman arrived to take me home in a squad car: my parents, still stranded in the snow, had alerted the authorities. I tried to explain to the officer that I was already home, but he didn’t understand.
Soon after that, the library closed, and moved to a new, concrete building in the town centre. It was much larger than the old library had been, and very much more practical. But my heart remains in the dusty old shelves of that first library, in which I found my natural home, my fictional worlds, and my people.
Joanne Harris is the author of Chocolat and Broken Light
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