My sister bought me a most unusual Christmas present. It was six months’ membership of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Literary and Philosophical Society, the ‘Lit and Phil’ as it is colloquially, and affectionately, known. I’d never heard of it. The first time I looked for it, I couldn’t find it. The membership card said ‘Westgate Road’ but the signposts were erratic to say the least. One pointed east and one west, but all I found in between them was a hat shop and an up-market barber’s.
On my next visit, last week, I was more successful. I had been looking at the wrong side of the station, and I had forgotten that Westgate Road stretches right down to the old parcels office, now no more, where I started my career as a louche sixteen-year-old all those years ago.
The Lit and Phil is housed in a fairly nondescript Georgian building to the east of John Dobson’s beautiful station porte-cochere. It is a building that is surprisingly easy to miss, but inside, its riches were as jewels in the dust. The main library, an ‘L’ shaped room, the long ‘L’ being lit by three magnificent circular roof lights, was simply groaning with books of all shapes and sizes. A circular wrought-iron staircase led to a gallery; the books were literally stacked from floor to ceiling. I found out later that the library has 160,000 books, and the Lit & Phil is the largest independent library outside of London. I had no idea, despite having lived not five miles from it for the first 33 years of my life. At an oval table at the back of the library, several elderly people were animatedly discussing what turned out to be a treatise on the Suez crisis. In the other room, a bank of student types were tapping away at laptop computers, presumably carrying out academic research or playing on-line bingo.
I went through the library, down a stair, and entered the ‘Silence and Reference Room’ on the floor below. The walls of the room were stacked high with ancient and obscure books, many dropping to pieces. The whole room was gently peeling, gently expiring. I could have walked into 1893, not 2013. However, it was a welcome haven of peace and quiet. An old dodderer sat at a table in the centre of the room. He was clad in a siren suit and a baseball cap and was deeply entrenched in a book on the history of the Ottoman Empire. He had skin like a pteranodon. It looked like he hadn’t moved since the day before. I expected that when he got up, if he was ever able to get up, he would cover the table with a mixture of dust and dandruff.
I picked out a book at random, one that was a bit more robust, for I recalled the scene from ‘The Time Machine’ film when Rod Taylor found the library of the Eloi, years in the future, where books crumbled to dust when he touched them. I sat at one of the tiny oaken tables that were perched in the middle of each set of shelves and started to read. I felt utterly at peace in the monk-like silence. The book I chose to peruse was called ‘A Lady’s Walks in the South of France in 1863’ by a woman called Mary Eyre. It would take great courage for a woman to walk unaccompanied around there now, let alone in 1863.
It was intriguing to read her account. She wrote, apparently without irony: ‘I flatter myself that, though English, I am unprejudiced.’ She was also short of readies, for she remarked: ‘My extremely slender means compelled me to travel humbly.’ Her main purpose in her journey was to see whether the South of France was cheaper to live in than England. 150 years later, in these times of enforced austerity in the United Kingdom, it probably is. She took ‘for her companion, a mischievous but faithful Scotch terrier,’ named ‘Keeper’ to be her ‘guard and confidante’ on her ‘long solitary walks.’ I should have thought she needed a Beauceron around there, at least. I read page after page of her rambles through vineyards and fields, past little gites and hamlets, churches, farms and water-pumps. My word, it was boring. Bill Bryson has nothing to fear. The only funny bit was when she ceased to be an unprejudiced Englishwoman. This was over the Frenchies’ methods of washing underwear. She wrote: ‘They wash everything ‘au ruisseau,’ in the cold water of the brook, using wood ashes instead of soap.’ You could almost see her head tilting back and her nose going up in the air.
Regrettably, I had to cut short my visit and catch a train north, but I vowed that it wouldn’t be my last visit to that wondrous place. I am still keen to learn what happened to the Ottoman Empire, if I can prise the tome from the hands of the elderly hack.
