Do you love libraries?

I certainly do, and I can't remember a time when libraries were not a big part of my life.

This Saturday, 5 February is Save our Libraries Day. and there are lots of things you can do to show your support, even if you only have a few minutes to spare. I will be doing my bit online, because I won't be able to visit my local library in person on Saturday. This is because I have to be at work.

Luckily for me, though, work involves spending the day in a building where there is a wonderful library (shameless plug - if you are visiting The National Archives in person, don't forget the check out the Library, it's probably bigger than you thought).

One of my earliest memories involves a library, and not just any library, it was the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. I must have been about four years old when my dad took me there, and I must have already been  used to going to our local Langside Library and borrowing books. I know this because my memory of the Mitchell is a) being really impressed at seeing so many books and b) yelling the place down with disappointment when I found out that I couldn't borrow any of them! This was the old marble hall part of the library, quite possibly the staircase, where there is a really good echo

We moved to Wootton Wawen, Warwickshire when I was 7, and lived in Wootton Hall - there is a picture of it in an earlier post. Mum and I wanted to find out about the history of this amazing building, so we went to Henley-in-Arden Library nearby and found a book on the history of the village, which told us that our flat used to be the Bishop's Rooms. I may write about that sometime.

The following year we moved to Gillingham in Kent, and I spent a lot of time in Gillingham Library, first of all in the Children's Library, a wonderful traditional high-ceilinged room with murals of scenes from 'Wind in the Willows' where a clock in one of the pictures was a real working clock. I graduated to the adult library, and also enjoyed the temporary exhibitions in the library, but I particularly loved the reference library upstairs. I may be the only person to have bunked off school to spend more time in the library!

As a student I was first introduced to the Library of Congress classification system used in the University of Warwick Library, but the university and its library were still pretty new back then, so when I had a serous research project to do, I used the fabulous Birmingham Central Library. This was where I first experience the thrill of doing original research for myself, and there is nothing quite like it (hands up who agrees with me on that!).

I took a long break from education, and did the motherhood thing too. And what did I do when I discovered that Firstborn was on the way? I went to Hendon Library and borrowed some baby books of course! When we moved a few miles to a bigger house I joined Harrow Libraries, borrowing books and  vinyl records - remember them? I attended evening classes in more than one branch library, and when I took up family history I used the Local Studies collection in the Civic Centre Reference Library.

Once the family history thing had really kicked in, I helped my local family history put on an exhibition in the library, and carried on with evening classes in libraries in Harrow and elsewhere, only this time I was teaching them. I don't teach any more, but I do a lot of talks to family history societies and other groups, who often meet in...libraries!

Now I live in lovely, leafy Buckinghamshire, within walking distance of Chesham Library, and my library card gives me access to all kinds of wonderful online sources, as well as the books, DVDs and other facilities in the library itself. So far, Chesham Library is not under threat, but others in the county are, and the Friends of Stony Stratford Library, at the other end of the county mounted a brilliant campaign, which got massive media coverage. The author, Philip Pullman made an eloquent defence of Oxfordshire libraries at a meeting on 20 January at Oxford Town Hall, which is worth reading in full.

I can't imagine how my life would have been without all the libraries I have known and loved. The way I have used them over the years has changed, but they are still essential to me. I am very pleased to say that both Firstborn and his younger brother have turned out to be avid readers (and they both write well, too), and my lifelong library addiction must have had some influence there. My elderly mother, who passed on the habit to me, still makes regular trips to her local branch library, which is within walking distance of her house, even though she needs her walking stick to get there these days.

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy and History - Home

Cartside Street, Glasgow

When I was 16, we moved house. Nothing remarkable in that, but it was the eighth time we had moved since I was a baby. So when I read this week's challenge - Describe the house in which you grew up. Was it big or small? What made it unique? Is it still there today? - I wondered how it would felt to grow up in just one house. My seven previous moves were when I was aged 1, 6, 7 (twice), 8 (twice) and 11.  I spent the longest time in the second of them (Cartside Street, left), when I was tiny, and don't remember much, and the eighth, when I was more a teenager than a child.

Between them, my childhood homes represent quite a wide range of British housing; the first four places where I lived were flats, not houses, and they ranged in size from what would now be called a 'studio flat' (ie, a room), to  a three-bedroomed house with a garden. The flats were all on different floors, and one of them was even on two floors. The gardens attached to the houses ranged from tiny to one that was so long you couldn't see the far end from the kitchen window. The oldest of them was built in 1687, and the newest dates from the 1950s. Coincidentally, this was also the last one, where we moved when I was 16, and where my mother still lives. Geographically they range from Glasgow, where I was born, proceeding all the way south to Gillingham in Kent, via Warwickshire. My Glasgow homes were in the suburbs, in Warwickshire we lived in a small village, while Gillingham is one of the Medway Towns, urban, but not a big city.

So my memories of growing up are scattered between all of these home. I can even remember the first one, where I was born, because we that was my grandparents' home, and we moved back there for a while, so my first and third homes were one and the same. I have random 'growing up' memories attached to all of them; looking out of our top-floor window in Cartside Street at the cricket field opposite (yes, cricket in Glasgow, incredible but true), the kitchen with two enormous sinks and an old-fashioned boiler when we moved back in with my grandmother. Moving to rural Warwickshire for a year was such a contrast, and that's when I 'caught' history - living in historic houses, how could I not? I wrote about this in a previous post about Moving House from Glebe House to Wootton Hall, both in the village of Wootton Wawen. We were only in our tiny flat in Glebe House for a short time, but I will never forget it. It didn't exactly have a garden, but it had a whole wood behind it where I could play. I can still smell the pine cones. Wootton Hall was a much grander house, and we had a bigger flat there, where I loved the fact that the window-ledge next to my bed was so big that I could lie on it, although it wasn't very comfortable.

I hated leaving Warwickshire after only a year, to move to Kent, but I didn't have much choice, being only 8 years old, but I grew to like it. Our first house there was only temporary, but it was a house, not a flat. It was a classic 'two-up, two-down', or if you are an estate agent trying to sell one 'artisan cottage'. Or for a followed of British TV soaps, a Coronation Street house. These houses were often built without bathrooms, and many now have had ground-floor bathrooms added on. This one wasn't quite there yet; At least we had an indoor toilet, but it led directly from the kitchen. There was a bath, too, and that was actually IN the kitchen, with a green gingham curtain on a wire that you pulled across for privacy! The next house was another British classic, the 1930's 3-bedroomed semi-detached, with pebble-dashed walls, bay windows, front and back gardens and a wrought-iron gate at he front. There were French windows leading to the back garden, which was narrow, but very, very long. About half-way up was an old chicken shed that made a great den, if you didn't mind the smell, and a walnut tree with a swing. The tree was good for climbing, and there were some fruit trees and bushes. Right at the very end was an old wartime Anderson shelter, another good den. Even a dedicated indoor type like me spent lots of time outside with a garden like that.

We moved to our next house when I was 11, and just before my brother was born. It was a nice house, one of the really well-built council houses of the late 1940s, with good-sized rooms. It even had built-in kitchen cupboards, and a convenient alcove in the hall for my brother's pram. I had a lovely big bedroom, with pretty wallpaper, which I proceeded to cover with pictures, mainly of pop stars (Mummy and Daddy's little girl was growing up!). But there was one thing I pinned up that was a centre-page pullout from the Radio Times. Remember the classic TV adaptation of the Forsyte Saga, the 1967 black-and-white version, that is? Well, my Radio Times pin-up was the illustrated Forsyte family tree. The shape of things to come?