Memoryshare

On Friday July 24th, 1987 Sheffield Central Libraries were turned into the seaside, under the slogan 'Libraries Are So Bracing.'

There were donkeys in Surrey Street. Musicians made real music in the Music Library. There were 'What the Butler Saw' machines in the Reference Library, puppets and ice cream in the Children's Library and Dilly the musical pierrot on a beach.

There were also Deputy Lord Mayors, t shirts, a jazz band, kiss-me-quick hats, a ghost train in the library cellars, Madam Zelda, sticks of rock, a bandstand, busloads of Sheffield holiday-makers, radio, TV, the papers, and Tony Capstick singing about Punch and Judy.

I got the day off work, and we all had a lovely time.

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It was a huge celebration of a small novel of mine called The Beano that had just been published by Faber, all about a Sheffield brewery workers’ trip to Scarborough in July 1914.

The Beano first appeared in Grimsby three years earlier as a play with Red Ladder Theatre Company.

Its opening night in Grimsby was two days after my dad died, and it had a song of his in it, and lots of his Scarborough memories from long ago.

Norman Mills sang the song again on the day the Library was magicked into Scarborough, and that seemed very right.

I kept on writing and rewriting The Beano long after Red Ladder ended its four month tour.

I went back to Scarborough for years with these lovely long ago brewery people who only had this one day a year when they could dare to think things could be different.

The Beano became a BBC play, an opera in Bristol, a stage play in Derby, a musical, nearly a film, a recitation, almost a CD. And the Faber novel that Sheffield Libraries celebrated on that bracing Friday in the Library.

And there was a sequel to that too. The Beano had a baby. Clare Jenkins and her pals went round the library shelves all day on July 24th 1987, collecting people’s stories of their own works outings and later produced the wonderful Bumper Book of Beanos about working Sheffield people at play.

The Chief Librarian spoke to the milling crowds of holiday-makers about how important writers are.

I was allowed to sit in a deckchair reading aloud in the very middle of the library. I watched my own book get its plastic cover and its extra page for stamping the date on, and then being put on the shelves with all the other books ever written, free for ever like them.

We tea-danced in the classical music library and drank wine by the Outsize Books.

My mum cried because she was so sad, and happy. Me too.

My Goronwy, Eleanor and Megan were all so young then, and we were all just about to go for a week’s big holiday in Scarborough ourselves, to spend and swim and hopscotch and bury each other, in the sandy footprints of my brewery workers, playing happy families down the Spa and along to the Harbour and off on the open-tops to Peasholm.

We didn't know, any more than the 1914 brewery workers did, how little time was left. But if that bracing July day wasn't to be the best day of all our lives, it did to be going on with.

:: Rony Robinson is a Sheffield-born writer and broadcaster. He has presented for BBC Radio Sheffield for some years. He writes songs, novels, drama, and poetry. His radio work has won one bronze and two silver Sony awards.