Decades before I wrote books, I was a child who wanted to own one. I wanted to write my name in it and put it on a nightstand next to my bed.
My three older brothers and I grew up on one of the new housing developments in Irvine New Town in the 1970s, and our parents were busy and distracted and struggling with life. There were football programmes in the house and school jotters we covered with remnants of wallpaper, but there were no books, and I used to fantasise – big dreams! – about being the sort of boy who might have a room of my own with a desk under the window.
One Christmas Day, we woke, in the customary way, about 5am and immediately tumbled down the stairs towards the living room, all four of us. We had a chair each and my mum would always lay out the presents there. I can still see it: four little Celtic strips, four sets of football boots, four selection boxes, set out on the chairs, with a white ball sitting in the middle of the room like a world of promise.
To help this year’s campaign, pleased donate at scottishbooktrust.com/donate
My brothers immediately stripped down and donned the nylon tops and shorts, while I, the youngest and bookiest, stood at the door and cried into the sleeve of my Paisley-pattern pyjamas. My mother cast a look at my father. ‘I told you, Gerry!’ she said to him, ‘he wouldn’t like it’. And with that she leaned down the back of the sofa and produced a Post Office Set and a book. I was immediately in my own paradise, which accompanied the boys’ version quite nicely.
Every year, Scottish Book Trust (an organisation I love) gifts tens of thousands of books to children all over the country. It’s one of the great appeals in Scotland and it allows the time of giving to become an everyday affair for families who are struggling, for children dependent on food banks or who are sick in hospital.
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The Trust changes lives and enhances imaginations all year round, but this effort – the raising of money to give books – is an action that solidifies the meaning of Christmas and uses great books to help us all imagine a better future for people in Scotland. Compassion is not just for Christmas, but we’d like to think that it gets a major boost in this season, and nothing, to my mind, enhances compassion like storytelling and empathising with people who aren’t yourself.
From Shetland to Dumfries, from Lochaber to Tranent, there are over 400 delivery points, making sure that everyone has access to books. I can’t stress this enough. I know from personal experience that we often take such access for granted. We forget that some people need help in order to be the reader they’d like to be. I take second place to nobody in my adoration of libraries, but visiting a library is not easy for everybody, some people aren’t able or aren’t ready for it, so the glory of the Appeal is that is understands this and doesn’t ask for people to show a passport to self-improvement.
The spirit of gifting, of Christmas, is to give with understanding and without question. People will find their own way to betterness, but in the meantime, here’s a hand, my trusty fiere, and here’s a book, brought to you by the generosity of people reading The Herald and supporting Scottish Book Trust.
I can’t think of a more giving gift. I know from personal experience how a book can change your life, and I’ve published ten of them now, all in the hope that somebody somewhere, including a child like I was, might be made more capable of being themselves, finding in a book the freedom of mind that we all deserve. Scottish Book Trust’s campaign is one of those beating hearts at the centre of a self-improving nation. I admire it more than I can say, knowing what it means to be helped not only in living up to your potential, but in locating it. Beyond our snowbound house in 1976, I met people who gave me books, who handed me a thousand lives so that I might learn to live my own.
To help this year’s campaign, pleased donate at scottishbooktrust.com/donate
The launch of this appeal marks an auspicious moment for Scottish Book Trust. It is the only European organisation this year to be honoured by the Library of Congress, in recognition of its book-gifting programmes.
This is Scotland at its best, international in profile, local in character, doing what it can to set the imagination free among its people. Please join us in this momentous year and give what you can. There might not be snow this Christmas, but for people in glens and villages and in streets we don’t always see, there will, thanks to you, be people with a book and a future of their own. To give a book to a person who needs one is not only to give a present, but to offer the everlasting present, a time that might never end when we helped one another to live better lives.
Andrew O’Hagan is a Scottish novelist who has three times been nominated for the Booker Prize. He is editor at large of the London Review of Books, an honorary professor at the University of Glasgow, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His new book On Friendship has just been published by Faber & Faber. He has donated his fee for this article to Scottish Book Trust.
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