A helpful person

(The brief was to write a true story about something that happened to the writer when they were much younger than they are now)

A Helpful Person

When I finished my degree course at Bangor in 1974 I did not have a firm idea as to the career I wanted to follow. Librarianship was something that I was drawn towards, but I did not want to commit myself by going straight to library school as soon as I got my degree.

I took advantage of a scheme that was available for people in my position, which offered a year as a paid pre-qualification assistant at a university library. I therefore soon found myself at one of the largest and most prestigious such libraries in the country, namely that of the University of London.

The library occupies a large proportion of the Senate House, a 1930s Art Deco skyscraper building close to Russell Square and the British Museum. The building also contains the central administrative offices of the University, which is highly relevant to the story that follows.

My placement as a “student assistant librarian” involved spending time in a number of different departments so that I could get a good idea of the various things that a university library did. One such department was the main Reference reading room, in which the chief task was pointing students and staff towards the resources needed for answering specific questions. I have always enjoyed this aspect of library work, involving as it does a certain amount of detective activity in finding information derived from all sorts of places.

During quiet times in the Reference section I was asked to tackle the various puzzles that came our way in the post, often from overseas students and academics. The worldwide reputation of the University made it a target for all sorts of enquiry, some of which took the form of letters expecting us to write half of a student’s PhD thesis for them!

Some of the letters were due to the existence of a publishing firm that called itself the University of London Press, despite not having any formal connection with the University.  It was not a difficult matter to find out if the query related to something published by this company or by the University’s actual publishing arm, which was called something completely different! Incidentally, the ULP was eventually bought by the University of London, so this problem no longer arises.

I remember on one occasion finding a letter addressed to the “State University of London” that should have gone to the State University of Leiden in the Netherlands!

I must have been quite good at this particular job, because the librarians asked me to carry on doing it for an hour a day after I was supposed to have moved on to another department. That was why I found myself, one fine morning, sitting at a desk in the Reading Room with a bank of phones in front of me and a pile of queries to sort out.

One of these related to the fact that the University was – at that time – one of the organisations that set school exams at GCE O- and A-level. My own school qualification certificates were almost all issued by London University. The query was from someone who wanted to buy a set of past papers in a particular subject.

I therefore picked up the phone to call the Publications Department, which lurked somewhere else in that vast building, and so began an extraordinary episode of telephonic pass the parcel.

The first person I called was quite sure that they could not help, but – if I waited a moment – they would put me through to someone who could. That was OK by me, but the second person was also apparently not the one I wanted, and neither was the third.

The fourth person reckoned that this was a matter for the School Exams Department, so off I went again. The same happened in this department as in the previous one, with my call being passed around like a hand grenade with the pin already removed.

Eventually I spoke to someone who had every sympathy with my dilemma, although she did not have the answer I needed.

“Mind you”, she said, “When I get a question I can’t answer I usually try someone who nearly always comes up trumps. Wait a second and I’ll put you through.”

I waited a second. Another phone on my desk started ringing. I picked it up. “Hello”, I said.

I was talking to myself.

© John Welford