A few moments later Carol replied with a ton-load of emojis and the holy grail of The Right Honourable Ben Wythenshawe MP’s personal email address. I spent about an hour composing a suitable opener, all the while expecting little response, whatever Carol said, but was pleasantly surprised when he replied almost immediately saying that he’d been expecting to hear from me and suggesting some dates to meet up the following week.
As if to reinforce the point that I was having an excellent day, the surgical team arrived on the ward soon after, came straight to our bay, reviewed Layla’s wound site, the notes from the physio, and her most recent X-ray, and declared that she was making remarkable progress and would likely be discharged within the next forty-eight hours. We video-called Joe at work immediately to share the good news.
There was some discussion about where Layla wanted to be discharged to. I had just assumed she’d be coming straight home, perhaps staying for the remainder of the term to makea full recovery. Turns out this may have been wishful thinking on my part. For a start she needed to return to university for some of her in-person exams, but there was also the fact that the surgical team wanted her to come in for a follow-up at the clinic in a month’s time, so we came to a compromise that she’d recuperate at home for a few weeks and then come back to university for the exams and inevitable shenanigans of the post-exam period.
‘Otherwise we’ll be paying for two months of accommodation for nothing,’ she said, appealing to her father’s fiscally responsible side rather than her mother’s clingy risk-averse side, the side that wanted to keep her out of harm’s way for as long as possible.
The appeal worked, which is how I came to be packing my daughter’s clothes into yet another holdall while I waited for Joe to arrive in the car and drive me to the hospital to collect Layla and take her home. It’s not the way I would have chosen for the summer term to proceed: the stress of that initial journey, not knowing what was happening to our daughter, was truly awful. But we must be grateful for small blessings – the whole thing could have been so much worse. And at least we were in the country. Two of Layla’s friends from football are overseas students and one, Nadia, hasn’t seen her parents since October. She cheerfully told me that if it had been her with the broken ankle, it’s unlikely that her mother would have been able to visit at all, let alone see her before the surgery and visit daily during the post-operative week.
I said my goodbyes to those of Layla’s flatmates who were awake and left a note for the others outlining where I’d put the leftovers from the previous evening’s meal. It’s been interesting getting to know my daughter’s friends and peers this past week – an opportunity that most parents of students don’t get – and I knew it would help me during future months to know whoshe was talking about in a more tangible sense. But after six nights away I was missing my home comforts. I needed to get back to my life, and my library. I also very much needed to sleep on a decent mattress, be able to open my bedroom window beyond the regulation ten centimetres and have a shower in my own bathroom without jumping every time the communal toilet doors banged open. There’s a reason that youth hostels are for youths. By the time you get to your forties, shared living facilities very quickly lose their shine, particularly when you are sharing with nineteen-year-olds whose notion of clean sinks, toilets and kitchen surfaces differs hugely to your own.
It was time to go.
May
Chapter Forty
‘So the issue, Mrs Harper, is not that the council doesn’t want to spend money on the library. It’s just that there are so many public services competing for funding and the budget is really tight.’
‘Mainly due to the austerity measures that your government presided over for the past fourteen years,’ I said, not quite ready to give in to the undoubtedly charming Ben Wythenshawe, who seemed determined to wriggle out of this particular argument. To be fair to the man, he had agreed to a meeting at Steve and Carol’s probably thinking that it would be a nice little social gathering with friends. He likely wasn’t anticipating a belligerent, chippy woman berating him for decisions made by those higher in office than him many years earlier.
He tilted his head in a way that suggested acknowledgement of his party’s failings (although that may have been wishful thinking on my part). ‘No government finds it easy to balance the books where public services are concerned,’ he said. ‘And the current lot are struggling just as much as we did. There are huge pressures on the system. You only need to sit in on one of my surgeries to see the challenges people are facing. And the things that matter hugely to one group are not necessarily universal priorities. The number of letters I receive about potholes, late bin collections and dog-fouling – you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Sounds like a lot of my Facebook feed,’ I said, laughing.
‘It does!’ Carol said as she placed a tray of tea and biscuits on the sitting room table. ‘Felicity’s posts in particular. She sure hates those neighbours!!’ She handed around the plate of biscuits. ‘You haven’t had the pleasure of Felicity’s company, Ben, have you?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Sounds as though she’s best avoided.’
‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ said Carol, winking at me as she poured herself a cup of tea. I wondered whether she had made a conscious decision to move away from Felicity and Tiggy now that she had other friends from the Book and Bun Club who shared her interests. I hoped so. She seemed so much happier in herself recently. Gone was the edgy nervousness that made her so ‘extra’ as Layla would have said. Instead, each time I saw her at the library she had a growing air of quiet self-confidence.
‘The thing is, Ben,’ she said now, offering him a Hobnob, ‘we know you’ve got a lot on your plate. And we know that there isn’t enough money to go around. But the mistake people make is not realising how critical the library is in solving some of the wider social issues you’re having to deal with.’ She turned to me. ‘Tell him, Hattie. Tell him about Nathan, and Eileen, and the mums who don’t have SureStart anymore, and all those stories you’ve told me…’
So I did. I explained how the library met the needs of multiple marginalised communities. I told him about parents who attended the story-time sessions, the pensioners who came into the library to keep warm but ended up staying and reading and engaging with the world, the asylum seekers who needed help with documentation, and the school kids who needed somewhere quiet to revise. The Right Honourable Ben Wythenshawe listened attentively throughout this impassioned plea (some of which was lifted directly from David’s speech at the top of the City Hall steps last week) and when he was sure I’d finished talking he nodded thoughtfully.
‘I hear you,’ he said. ‘I really do. And I don’t disagree – with any of it. But how are we going to pay for it, Mrs Harper? Hmm? Are you proposing that we take money out of schools or hospitals or sanitation or city infrastructure?’ He rubbed thebridge of his nose and I felt a pang of sympathy. It couldn’t be easy making these kinds of decisions.
‘It strikes me,’ said Steve who had been sitting there quietly up to this point. ‘That in terms of business model, there are options here that might not have been considered.’ He turned to me. ‘Hattie, what you describe is much more than just a place where people go to borrow books. And I think that’s where the answer is – diversification. What services are currently being provided in that council building? Is there a way that we could link some of the other public service organisations and share resources?’
‘Could we look at relocating the council offices on the upper floors,’ I said to Ben, voicing a thought that had occurred to me a few weeks ago. ‘Maybe moving them to the industrial estate?’
‘Hmm,’ said Ben. ‘Doesn’t bring in any revenue though. I agree in principle we could move the administrative offices, but we would need private businesses to pay the rental on the vacated space.’
‘Banking services?’ I said, foraging around in a folder and brandishing a document I’d printed out a few days ago. ‘Here, they did this in Northamptonshire. Banking and postal services located in the same building as the public library. Or maybe a recruitment agency? Could link with the adult learning scheme we’re running. Or how about something as simple as a cafe or a bar? We could have author events, creative-writing workshops, book clubs – all with the option of going for a drink afterwards but under the same roof? I mean we’d obviously have to spruce the whole place up a bit… Make it more appealing. But if the council own the building and they could rent it out then maybe that would bring in enough revenue to fund the library costs?’
‘The building is in a bit of a state,’ said Ben. ‘And it’s not as if those units nearby are pulling in a lot of rental income. It’s just not a very pretty part of town.’
‘But it could be,’ I said indignantly. ‘The problem over the past few decades is that the council own it but can’t afford to maintain it. It’s a beautiful, historic building underneath the cladding and grime. We could sort out the façade, decorate the interior, maybe the roof would need a bit of work…’
‘That’s all going to require significant capital investment,’ said Ben. ‘Sorry, Mrs Harper.’ He noted my expression. ‘I’m just being realistic. We’d need corporate levels of funding.’
‘Like a private finance initiative?’ said Steve. ‘Could get complicated in terms of repayment.’ He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘But how about a private investor who was prepared to buy the building in its current state – an individual or organisation who could do it up and rent it out to the types of businesses Hattie has suggested?’
I grimaced. ‘Nice idea, and it would at least give the council some money in their pocket but whoever this private investor was, they’d probably hike up the rent for the library space which would make the service even more expensive to run, and therefore completely unaffordable.’
‘But how about…’ Steve persisted, clearly warming to this idea of a magical unicorn investor. ‘How about someone who let the upper floors out to private businesses but was also prepared to let the library use the ground floor for a peppercorn rent so that the funding allocated by the council to provide the service could be spent entirely on librarian salaries and books?’
‘Well, yeah,’ I said. ‘That sounds ideal. But who would be interested in doing that?’
