A Mother’s Gift.
A Mother’s Day reflection on books, memory, and the quiet ways love expands a life
On Wednesdays — or whenever the mobile library came — my mother took my brother and me around the corner where a grey van full of books waited. We treated it with the seriousness of people who had somewhere important to be.
An industrial grey van, it lumbered into our housing estate on the Dublin Road without ceremony, its sides emblazoned with the scarlet lettering of the North Eastern Education and Library Board.
To me, it was an Aladdin’s cave of unexpected treasures. It was possibility on wheels.
And my mother knew it.
Long before I understood words like feminism or social mobility or intellectual curiosity, I understood this: my mother believed there was a world beyond our housing estate, and she expected her children to reach it. She knew they deserved it.
Books were everywhere in our house, but not in an intellectual, curated way. They arrived like provisions: comics, annuals, volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, leather bound classics slowly accumulating over time — the kind of quiet domestic archaeology most families don’t notice until much later.
And always, there was my mother.
She never asked what we were reading, only that we were reading — which, as I understand now, is not nothing. It was an unspoken principle in our house, as natural as the kettle always on or school in the morning. Reading was not a hobby. It was a condition of living there.
She was also one of the first mothers on the Dublin Road to drive a car. My father taught her, as he taught so many other people, and it gave her a kind of independence that simply became part of how she moved through the world, quietly distinctive.
I have a photograph of her reading a map in the back seat, taken just a couple of years ago. She didn’t know I had taken it. There she is – still navigating.
My father is driving, as though it’s the 1970s again. It’s uncharacteristically sunny, so we’re headed to Bundoran.
I remember how far away it once felt – all sea air and distance and the sense that the world had opened out beyond anything we could quite measure.
I loved our trips to seaside towns and the feeling that there was something beyond the edge of the island, even if I didn’t yet know what that was.
It was from this navigational vantage point that my mother — our first teacher — took pride in all aspects of our education, from sewing labels on our uniforms to “backing” our books. New textbooks came home to be covered every September, and I think she saw it as a small way to participate in the mechanics of the formal education she herself had never been given. It was also something quieter and more instinctive — a way of protecting the books themselves, as if they were already precious before they had been proven so.
I can see her in my mind’s eye, at our kitchen table, late one September evening after our first day back at school. One at a time, she places each of our new books carefully on the middle of a sheet of brown parcel paper. With a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she has it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front.
There was nothing casual about it. It was care made visible.
Once, because she was ill and in the hospital, I took it upon myself to back my new history textbook. It never occurred to me to ask my father to help. It was my mother’s job, and like so many things, she had made it look easy. Clumsy and unsure, I could not fit the brown paper neatly under the book’s spine at both ends, no matter how I tried, so eventually I gave up and went to school with my book unbacked.
I was subjected to a memorably sarcastic tirade from a teacher who made me stand up in front of the class while he berated me, told me I was useless, and added that he did not want to hear about my mother being in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. In that moment, she may as well have been on the other side of the world. Fifty years later, I can still feel the sting of embarrassment on my face.
I never forgave him.
And yet, even that moment stayed with me less as anger than as a kind of lesson about how care can be misunderstood when it isn’t seen for what it is.
Years later, I read an interview with Seamus Heaney. When he was asked if he ever told his father that he loved him, he explained,
I don’t remember. That kind of language would have been much suspect. We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.
That stayed with me.
Because it sounded exactly like my mother’s world.
Love there was not announced. It was done. It was shown. It was in the covering of books, the careful handling of things that mattered, the quiet insistence that protection itself was a form of care.
The mobile library, by contrast, made everything lighter.
My brother and I climbed the steps into that grey van with the seriousness of miniature explorers. Inside, the grey carpet underfoot, flattened by years of small feet; the impossibly large steering wheel at the front; the smell of damp coats; and then the books — everywhere. They festooned the van from floor to ceiling, held in place with a kind of careful optimism, as if they trusted us not to let them fall.
The “library man” himself was, in my memory, somewhere between an early Doctor Who and a man who had simply found his ideal job and refused to leave it. My brother disagrees. He remembers him as a cool cat with wire-rimmed round glasses who might have fronted a folk-rock band if he had chosen a different life.
He was also just one of the supporting cast of men who moved through our childhoods with quiet authority — the coal man, the bin man, the bread man, the milk man, the Braid mineral man, the insurance man, and, of course, the ice-cream man. Each arrived with their own rhythm, their own function, their own small piece of the world made visible.
The library man, however, also had a female assistant. Her task was to hand out books with a smile. You can imagine the disappointment of my childhood friend when he reached up to her with five pence, expecting an ice-cream cone in return.
Unlike Mr Softee, there was no music, no advertising, no promise beyond what was already inside it. It simply waited — patient, industrial, quietly miraculous — as if it knew stories did not need decoration to be found.
At one end sat the counter behind which the library man presided with his assistant. There was also a strict “For Office Use Only” area — a cockpit of index cards and filing systems governed entirely without computers, as if order required belief more than technology.
My brother remembers all of this in forensic detail. I remember it like entering a different weather system.
And my mother loved that part too.
She came into the mobile library with us and chose books of her own. She didn’t stand outside it, supervising childhood from a safe distance. She moved through it properly, selecting her own books, considering them, adding them to ours as if this were not a parenting task but a shared arrangement.
She often ordered books for my brother too, speaking with the library man, remembering what he had liked, suggesting new things as though reading was something you could quietly curate over time. Then she would wait while books were retrieved from a special stash behind the counter, as if this system had always existed just for us.
Other than her, I remember the occasional grown-up leaning over the Agatha Christie shelf, or asking for Jaws to be set aside for the following week or maybe East of Eden, as though literature functioned on a kind of informal reservation system.
But it was generally understood — at least by us — that the mobile library belonged to the children of the Dublin Road. With its never-ending supply of books, we were never lonely.
My best friends were Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and the girls of St Clare’s and Malory Towers. Written in the late 1940s, Blyton is now often criticised for class and gender stereotypes. Yes, she did all of that. But I can’t imagine my childhood without her books — page-turners that offered escape, certainty, and adventure to a working-class girl in 1970s Northern Ireland. Secret passages, midnight feasts, lashings of ginger beer — a parallel universe that felt real because it arrived so reliably.
My brother read Enid Blyton’s books too. He began with the adventures of children who ran away from home to join Mr Galliano’s Circus. He tells me he often fantasized about hiding in the mobile library and waiting for it to careen out of the Dublin Road estate, a safe distance from our house, before pouncing on the unsuspecting library man with his plans for life as “a literary stowaway on the road.”
My wee brother, the Jack Kerouac of Antrim Primary School, who knew even then that this was but a delightful reverie, and that our beloved library was likely bound for a prosaic council carpark, where it would sit behind a padlocked gate with nothing more romantic on the horizon than Artie Warwick’s petrol station, wee Hughie’s pub or perhaps the laundry of the Masserene Hospital.
He ran away in the pages of all of the Asterix the Gaul books, most of the Adventures of Tin Tin, a collection of Hitchock inspired adventures, and The Three Investigators, one of whom bore the splendid name, Jupiter “Jupe” Jones. He also read The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and reached the inevitable conclusion that Nancy’s sleuthing skills were superior. He even admits to reading the entire non-boy Malory Towers series. Such was the allure of Enid Blyton.
We also got comics every week – an impressive variety delivered through the letterbox by a lanky paper boy, Hugh “Pick” McGarry. For my brother, there was The Beano and The Dandy, with Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, and Beryl the Peril. For me, there was firstTwinkle, “the picture paper especially for little girls.” Then Bunty, Judy, Mandy, and later Diana and Jackie. Jackie offered instructions for a life none of us had yet begun — how to dress, how to behave, how to “win his heart,” and the pin-ups of pop stars, usually one of the three Davids — Bowie, Essex, or Cassidy.
My mother did not correct any of this.
She simply made space for it.
Years later, I would hear Gloria Steinem describe in an interview with Oprah Winfrey how women learn early to navigate approval as a kind of survival skill — how they are taught, often without anyone ever saying it aloud, to make themselves acceptable in order to move safely through the world. At the time, she was making her mark on the other side of the Atlantic, very far removed from the lives of the women of the Dublin Road:
I had learned in Toledo, growing up, how to get a man to fall in love with me. Now, this is an important survival skill and we should recognise it…
I don’t know if in 1971 my mother or the other women on the Dublin Road knew anything about Gloria Steinem, or whether her books would ever have reached the mobile library, but I would wager they knew exactly what she was talking about.
I think about that now, and I think about my mother.
Because what she gave us was something else entirely.
She did not teach us to make ourselves smaller or more careful or more acceptable.
She simply made space.
For choosing and wanting and for bringing home armfuls of books and not being asked to justify them.
She was not theorising anything. She was just getting on with it, as mothers tend to do while the rest of the world is busy explaining things.
In hindsight, I can see how quietly radical this was.
And perhaps that is why I became who I am – not because I was taught to love books, but because one woman kept taking her two children to a mobile library and letting them bring the world home.
Even now, I can still see her in there with us, perusing the books, waiting while we made our choices.
“Get whatever you want, pet.”
And I think now this was her gift — not something named, not something announced — just the sense that the world was wide, and nothing in it was beyond us.
Happy Mother’s Day.
