Published: February 23, 2012
By GEORGIA GRAHAM

PLAYWRIGHT Alan Bennett has used a rare interview to explain why he joined the campaign to save Chalk Farm Library, warning that the lives of troubled children would be “emptier” without the service.

Speaking exclusively to the New Journal ahead of a talk he will give at Cecil Sharp House next month, Mr Bennett said families in Primrose Hill and beyond should be able to take their local library “for granted” – and not be in fear that it could close down.

The 77-year-old said on Tuesday: “I think that at this stage it doesn’t matter what children read or where they read it, whether it is in a book or on the computer, what matters are words.

“In The History Boys, Hector, who is the master, says it doesn’t matter what you read, you can read the Pigeon Fancier’s Gazette if you want, all that matters is that you are reading and that you are dealing with words, and that is what is important.

“You can trust the liveliness of a child’s mind to do the rest, but you need to start it off, to get it questioning.”

Mr Bennett said the area around Chalk Farm Library in Sharpleshall Street was wrongly assumed to be wealthy and full of children with hand-held computers, ignoring the mix of social housing and affluent streets in the neighbourhood.

“People do say children don’t need libraries because they have got a computer – that’s rubbish,” he said. “And it’s rubbish because they just don’t all have computers, poor children don’t have computers, and a lot of children who go to Chalk Farm Library will be poor.

“You are not supposed to say that these days, it is supposed to be bad taste to say that, but it is the case.

“The library is for every section of the community but it is the children who are the most vital it seems to me.”

Mr Bennett said he visited the library on a daily basis and last week saw a young girl getting her very first library card. She was there with her older brother who spoke no English and at the age of just nine she was in charge signing them both up and filling in the forms that should have guaranteed free access to books for the rest of their lives.

“She was embarking on a lifetime of reading and, without that library, she may not have done so,” said Mr Bennett said. “That’s why you can’t quantify what the library means, because it is so much in the future for children like that and children who wouldn’t have not merely the books, but a place to read.

“I remember going to the library with my mum and dad and my brother in Leeds. We used to go there every week and it was like going to the pictures, it was exactly the same.

“It was a family outing, it was somewhere that you went and something that you did and you didn’t think of it as cultural or even as improving or anything like that.”

Mr Bennett donated money to a group campaigning to protect Chalk Farm Library last year after Camden Council announced it would no longer pay to run it.

Instead, the Town Hall last week agreed to give a voluntary group set up by the Friends of Chalk Farm Library and the Primrose Hill Community Centre a six-year lease to operate the library. The group, which is also backed by  Dame Joan Bakewell, is still appealing for funds to make sure they can keep the library afloat in the coming years.

Mr Bennett said: “The library set you up for life as it were, and it wasn’t, and probably it isn’t now, a self-conscious activity, it is something that you should take for granted really. Libraries should be taken for granted – it is one of the things that marks us as civilised, as a civilised community.

“Children would have much less to occupy them without them. You can’t obviously draw a line from one to the other, but if when they are teenagers they go off the rails and nobody has taught them to read, and no one has got them in the way of reading, that will be part of what has gone wrong.

“People will say it is simplistic, but it is not simplistic at all. The more that is in a child’s head the less likely they are to go wrong.”

Mr Bennett has lived in Camden from almost the moment he stepped off the train from Leeds in 1964. Starting off in Chalcot Square, he later moved to Gloucester Crescent where he lived for 30 years, and he still lives in Primrose Hill.

Over that period, he said he has come to miss independent shops in the area. Fed up of rows of coffee shops in Regent’s Park Road he remembers a happier time of rummaging through junk shops and secondhand shops building up the furniture for his first flat – he still has the wooden kitchen table he bought 40 years ago for £12. These days, he said, young people can afford no more than identikit Ikea living rooms.

Celebrities, like coffee shops, are rather lost on Mr Bennett, although he does have a healthy rapport with the paparazzi photographers who hang out on the leafy streets throughout the summer months looking for famous faces.

“You go out on a morning now,” he said, “and you’ll see a group of, well, they look like ordinary motorbikes, these bikers, and they are the paparazzi and they say ‘good morning’ to you as if they are part of the neighbourhood which in a sense they are.

“I don’t think I register as being a celebrity and they certainly don’t take any notice of me. They are on the lookout for people who, if I saw them, I wouldn’t have any idea who they are. It’s a joke really.”

Recovering well from a recent hip replacement, Mr Bennett is determined his active lifestyle will be unaffected – and wants to get right back on his bicycle he uses to get around.

Cycling safety is a cause he has been passionate about for decades.

“The more bikes there are the better,” he added.

“Even if I do say so myself, I was one of the people who pioneered for the path through Regent’s Park and I think the more off-road cycle routes there are the better.

“The more protected cycle routes – protected not simply being a line painted on the road but a curb or something that actually shelters you from the traffic.

“It will come, but it will take people dying to come, and that’s what’s going to happen.

“Like that girl in King’s Cross. I don’t know how many people have got to die before they actually do something about it.”

• Save Primrose Hill Library, in association with Primrose Hill Books, are inviting residents to an evening with Alan Bennett at Cecil Sharp House next Thursday (March 1) at 7pm for 7.30pm.