A TALE OF TWO LIBRARIES

I hope readers will bear with me in the little Bristolian tale I am about to tell, for the experience of spending much of my childhood in a library has shaped me, made me the person I am, influenced what I brought to Sicily and still affects my life here:

In 1950s Bristol, UK., my parents ran a newsagent's shop. "Nothing unusual in that", you may say and you would be right. But at the back of our shop was an oblong room with shelves all around and this was "Eggleton's Library". People subscribed to borrow books from it and could browse there for as long as they liked; to many, I believe, it was a haven from the cold, grey, still rationed post-war world outside. Dad, who knew all about books, would order them from far and wide for his customers and they appreciated his knowledge. But the star and doyenne of "Eggleton's Library" was my Great Aunt Mabel [always known as "auntie"] who lived with us. Totally self-educated, she had travelled and been a missionary in Africa and her wide reading would shame many Oxbridge graduates today. Auntie would sit there in what I suppose was a Victorian clerk's black gown, and all the borrowings and returns were recorded in her meticulous hand. So there, dear reader, began "Welshcakes Limoncello Eggleton's" love of books and ever since I have felt safe in a room filled with them. When I go into other houses, whether I am in the sitting room, study, bedroom or kitchen , if there are no books I start wondering, "Where are they?" and I feel uncomfortable. I know I have some Bristolian readers here,here and here and there may be others [sometimes the site meter gives only "UK"]; do any of them remember, or know anyone who remembers "Eggleton's Library" at 110 Stapleton Road?

All this is a preamble to telling you that when I examined the paper in some of Dad's "Tarzan" books [not my kind of reading anyhow though they didn't have the connotations in the 1940s and 50s that they would have today] I realised that it was too damaged and decayed to bring to a hot country. So, with regret, those books had to go but I kept 2 of the labels [above]. I have framed them and they were a source of interest to my Sicilian guests last Thursday. Thus it is that I have a daily reminder of that little library in Bristol, so long ago, in my own well-stocked library in Modica, Sicily. [Some of my Sicilian women friends don't say anything but are probably apppalled at the dust-attracting possibilities of having more than 5,000 books around. I don't care: next to Simi, my books are my most important possessions - and my excuse is that a linguist automatically collects more of them!]

Well, it occurred to me that you might like to see my cookery library. So here is part of it, in the kitchen. I have the books arranged by country / region , rather than author, and the "general" cookery books continue around the corner and into the hallway. In the left-hand bookcase, the top shelf consists of books on French cuisine and my treasured Larousse Gastronomique might well be my "desert island" book choice. Nearly all the rest of that bookcase [which was one of Dad's] until you get to the middle of the bottom shelf, is filled with books on Italian cookery, for this must be the richest country in the world in culinary traditions. I took a separate photo of my Sicilian section, which begins with Mary Taylor Simeti's Sicilian Food, which I believe to be the most authoritative tome on the subject in any language. Next to it you may be able to make out her Bitter Almonds [written with Maria Grammatico] the extraordinary tale of a young girl brought up by the nuns, from whom she learnt the art of Sicilian pastry-cooking. And then there is the excellent Victoria Granof's Sweet Sicily, another wonderful read on this aspect of the island's cuisine . Of course, I am adding to this section all the time and I will soon need Mr G... the carpenter to come and put up more shelves [somewhere!]

The last photo shows my own precious recipe books: they contain many recipes that I have collected from friends here over the years, plus cut-out recipes, all annotated with the magazine title and the date [perhaps I was in the wrong career as a teacher!] and recipes written in my mother's hand. Italian women learn early exactly how much pasta and how much water they need to cook it in for each meal, and, as Granof rightly points out, many of them do not like trying out new recipes as they cook the same traditional food, in the same way, day in, day out. They do not need to look anything up because they will have learned the methods orally from their grandmothers and mothers. But how many young British women, I wonder, will have recipes passed on to them by their mothers these days? Is mine the last generation to enjoy this heritage? I do hope not. What do you think?

When I am in need of comfort I look around my library and remind myself that Mr Eggleton would have been very happy to know that his daughter thanks him, from Sicily, for the love of literature he instilled in her and that Mrs Eggleton would have been delighted that some of her recipes have travelled so far!