These are some pictures of the outside of what was Salisbury Library. I can't remember when it moved to its current location. I remember it being a very shiny new place compared to the old one, but being very sad that the library I had visited so many times with my father was to be no more. If I shut my eyes I can picture the interior even now - the turquoise fake leathery (must have been an acrylic as I remember on hot days my legs sticking to them) seventies chairs in the children's section, along with the dark wooden troughs for the books. I remember the light and the smell of polish on the parquet floor. It's there that I remember books by Eric Carle stuffed under my arm, or dropped as they were usually too big to carry! My father would be in the rows of the grown up books. There was a place a bit away where there was huge rows of huge books. They weren't of course... they were just normal sized picture books and novels and magazines but to me as a small child they seemed gigantic. He would always be in the same place, always pick books on two themes - photography and the two world wars. At home I would look through them. See the bodies, the twisted fallen soldiers and in absolute contrast, the glamour pictures of women in the photography books that erred on the side of a bit of soft porn. He would tell me of Tommies and the trenches and sometimes tell me of Wilfred Owen. We would watch Armistice day together and stand at the silence and talk of England and owning your own piece of land. This wasn't a man that had been widely educated, just a cobblers son that had left school when he was 14. It all stuck, seeped into my subconscious and enriched me.
Pictures of the library and my beloved father.
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| Vanessa Stone and Ted Stone |
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