The library: a labour of love in Denia

Years ago, we used to go to Spain quite regularly and often stayed for a few months near the town of Denia. It's a lovely Mediterranean town, just down the coast from Valencia and up the coast from Alicante. We used to stay in a villa a couple of miles from the centre of town, near the beach.

Two or three times a week, I would catch a rickety bus and go into town with my straw basket to get provisions and to browse the market and shops. Before I caught the bus back, I would often sit down for a drink or a coffee and watch the action on the busy main street.

Denia's main street

My favourite stop on most of my trips was at The English Library. It was up a side street just off the main street and up one flight of stairs. It was a medium-size room with floor-to-ceiling shelves all around. The shelves were filled with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of paper-backs.

The library was a labour of love for a couple of English expatriate women. They had lived there for some time and somehow, had begun collecting the books that travellers left behind. When they found themselves overwhelmed with books, they decided to open the library. Most of their clients were expatriates too but there were some people, like us, who were shorter-term and there were some who were just passing through – travellers dropping off books and picking up others as they travelled on.

We paid a certain amount to join – about 100 pesetas – and then paid a small amount to borrow a book. It was worth every peseta and we completely understood that they needed, at least, to cover their expenses. In retrospect, I hope they did better than that.

I used to borrow several books every visit and when I look back, I realize that I owe so much of my status as a well-read person to that unconventional little library on a side street in Denia.

I was not above some great recreational reading – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler. I loved – and still love – Eric Ambler. I read John le Carré (I discovered at the library that he had a house outside Denia also, perhaps a little more elaborate than ours).

I did love George Smiley.

But I also read literature: W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh (my first experience with Brideshead Revisited), E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicholson, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell.

The library had mostly British writers but I read some Americans: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller.

This is only a partial list. I hasten to add that I didn't like some of these books. I don't regret having read them; obviously, they're part of who I am as much as the books that came later that changed the way I look at the world.

We went back to Denia several times and always went back to the library. They were still there and they remembered us. I often think of them and feel so grateful that they were there.

I had intended to share some of the books I'm reading right now but my time is up. That list will be for another day.