Though there was a rumour that his grandad had been Benito Mussolini’s food taster, Andrew was a proud Scot. In his retirement, he took up volunteering part-time, at Innerpeffray, Scotland’s first free-lending library (established in 1680). Andrew loved to brag gently to foreign visitors that Scotland was the first literate nation in Europe, thanks to the Presbyterian Church which believed that it was the duty of every Christian to study the bible. And, to do that, the peasantry had to learn to read. Not that there were lots of foreign visitors, because Innerpeffray Library was off the beaten track, at the end of a no-through road in rural Perthshire. Summer Thursday afternoons were the exception – that was when a coachload of Dutch tourists would appear every week.

When he’d first started volunteering at Innerpeffray, Andrew had found this regular Thursday influx of (largely elderly) Dutch folk a bit odd. He’d once asked Eunice Drummond about it; she’d been volunteering there for many years. Eunice shrugged and said they’d been coming to Innerpeffray all the time that she’d been at the library. She thought that each group would’ve been staying the night at the Crieff Hydro Hotel, some miles across country. Or maybe they were on their way to the hotel…? She wasn’t sure.

How the Dutch had got to Innerpeffray wasn’t really a matter of acute interest to Andrew. He rather enjoyed an audience, and this Dutch audience understood English very well, even when spoken with his Glasgow accent. He would ask them to picture the strangeness of the idea, in the seventeenth century, that one should allow casual callers of all classes to turn up at the library and then go away again with a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets under their arm, books back then being a luxury item. And, having pricked his audience’s interest, he’d show them one of the old Borrowers’ Registers, which recorded not just the book borrowed, and the name and address of the borrower, but also the borrower’s occupation. They could see farm servants, weavers, quarriers, road menders and the like, borrowing works of philosophy, history, literature and theology, to carry miles back to their wee cottages to read by the dim light of their cruisie lamps.

On this occasion, most of his audience had eventually drifted away from The Borrowers’ Register and gone over to where Andrew’s colleague, Ronnie, was displaying the library’s set of Mercator’s Atlases. Ronnie had an atlas open at a page mapping seventeenth-century Holland, and was inviting visitors to locate their homes. Andrew’s attention was drawn instead to a Dutch couple peering into the glass case containing the library’s copy of Hollingshed’s Chronicles, a history of Britain first published in the sixteenth century. The book was open at the page illustrating Macbeth’s meeting with The Three Witches, a scene which Shakespeare was later to borrow and make famous.

The couple were elderly but vivacious, even vivid. Andrew was on his way over to them, to offer them a bit of background on Hollingshed and his Chronicles, when the woman let out a chiming peal of laughter. It stopped Andrew dead in his tracks.

Although the woman had her back to him, he recognised her by the laugh instantly, from fifty-odd years ago. It was Mila’s laugh. His mind went back to a tousled tent on The Lido in Venice, and the ever-green mystic meeting there of lips and legs. For a moment or two, he watched the two of them by the display cabinet, leaning into each other and whispering, in the time-honoured tradition of library conversations. It was plain to see that they were a happy couple, enjoying each other and their holiday in Scotland. Whereas his time with Mila in Venice, all those years ago, had not ended well.

Deliberately, Andrew turned instead to a small Dutch group who were puzzling over the library’s copy of the 1602 ‘Treacle Bible,’ so called because Jeremiah 8.22 reads ‘Is there not treacle in Gilead?’

Later, after the coach party had departed, to the Crieff Hydro or elsewhere, and the library closed down, Andrew climbed into the car for the short drive home. He was smiling. He and Dorothy were planning a sunny evening meal in the back garden, just the two of them. He was looking forward to it.

Michael Bloor

*This story was developed from an essay on Innerpeffray Library, and the books therein (‘A Favourite Place: Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest free lending library, established 1680’), published in Literally Stories October 28th, 2023.