25 Our miniature library

Valid or not, there were as many dissenting voices raised at the possibility of losing our phonebox as there where when it arrived 69 years earlier. Now that we were no longer using it, the red phonebox on the village green had somehow acquired ‘iconic’ status. Nobody wanted to see it go. Nevertheless, the writing was on the wall - quite literally so in the case of our phonebox - until Jean and Hayden stepped up to the mark. When they offered to ‘adopt’ the phonebox, BT readily agreed. The phone itself disappeared, and Hayden fitted the back wall with wooden shelving, floor to ceiling, and Jean volunteered to fill the shelves of the Whimsey Lending Library with books.

Jean knows what locals like to read. Until the service was axed, she had driven the mobile library from village to village, bringing the written word to the natives. Sometimes it seemed like literary evangelism, sometimes missionary work. After all, there are farmers in the flatlands whose reading is confined to the application forms for set-aside grants and the cooking instructions on the back of a ‘Boil-in-the-bag Cod in a Chedder cheese-style Sauce’ TV dinner for one. After a hard day’s work harvesting root vegetables, they’re unlikely to curl up by the fireside with a Booker prizewinner. “I read a book once”, Les confided to Jean, when she’d parked the mobile library next to Wolds End Farm, “and, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t impressed.”

Jean’s readers were keen on fatuous adventure yarns, usually featuring killer bees, for some reason. And romantic fiction: an uncomplicated world where men are men, and women are airline stewardesses. Conveyor-belt books: nothing to tax the brain after twelve hours inhaling sileage. The romantic action used to stop at the bedroom door, with three little dots of discretion... Readers could fill in the more salacious details for themselves, depending on their own tastes, experience and sexual proclivities. But these blockbuster authors have no such qualms. Confronted by a locked bedroom door, their first instinct is to batter it down and burrow voyeuristically beneath that double duvet of desire. Some of Joan’s more elderly customers may have raised their eyebrows and suggested that the book they’d just finished had been a bit on the steamy side - before asking, in a demure whisper, if she had any more like them.

There wasn’t much call, around Whimsey, for science fiction, or avant-garde poetry, or impenetrable stories that boast of their ‘exciting and experimental use of language’ (which generally means there’s no punctuation). Jean tried - God knows she tried - to introduce her readers to the classics, but it was a thankless task. Weaning them off Jeffrey Archer was a start. It was the smallest of victories, though, like getting cannibals to eat with a knife and fork.

The rationale behind the Whimsey Lending Library is simplicity itself: locals bring a book to the library, and take another book out. Jean visits her immobile library a couple of times a week, to wash the windows, ensure all the books are in shelved in alphabetical order and do a cull of Jeffrey Archer books. We may have lost our payphone, but, hey, we still have standards.