As part of our South African Library Week (SALW) celebration, Cape Town Partnership communications manager, Maxine Case shares her fondest memories of fortnightly trips with her mom and older sister to their local library.
I loved public libraries when I was a child. One of my standout memories is of the loud classical music crashing down from the upper reaches of Wynberg Library when I was little more than a toddler and first visiting the library with my mother and older sister, Bonita, who are both avid readers. Now, I realise that the music couldn’t have been that loud, but that’s what I remember. The startling and soothing music that awed me and turned the cavernous space into a cathedral.
A few years later, and I’d just started primary school. By this time, I was already reading Bonita’s books, much to her disgust. To avoid fights over books, my mother scheduled trips to Janet Bourhill Library every fortnight. This worked well for a time. But we were allowed to take out three books only at a time, and sometimes there were books that Bonita just had to take out, and I was a pushover. So often, I’d allow Bonita to take out books on my card too – with the promise that I could read them once she was done. Except, even then, I was a faster reader than my older sister and quite willing to offer spoilers on books she was still reading. Books that made our second-tier of must haves, we secreted under shelves or behind other books, but of course, shelves were checked and cleared, so that solution didn’t last long. During weeks when our mother was too busy to fit in library visits, Bonita and I would walk to the library ourselves and were probably the best patrons of that small library off Rosmead Avenue – nearly TK kilometres from our home in Lansdowne.
Lansdowne Library also looms largely in my memory. It was nearer, but the librarians needed convincing that I was old enough to take out the books I preferred: compendiums on crime – “true life dramas” – and natural disasters. During this time, I was fascinated by the unsolved murders attributed to Jack the Ripper, the iceberg that sunk the Titanic and other gruesome and fascinating stories of lives cut short too soon. And that’s before I finally convinced the librarians in the adult section to allow me to take out books from there. I was eight or nine.
: Cape Town Partnership Maxine Case
