Barbara Beaumont
Barbara talks about working at Boots

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I worked at Boots Library which was absolutely terrible. I hated it and I was still wearing ankle socks because I was only 15 and I was really made fun of by the girls because they were all really smartly made up and I wasn't like that. I was very young for my age.

Boots Library was frequented by the ladies. Most women didn't work then, middle class or even not so middle class; men did the work, women stayed at home and did all that work, a lot of work. But the ladies who came to Boots Library were more your middle class, Hook Heath type of people and they would go to Pullinger’s for coffee, just across the road, coffee and cakes and with waitresses with white aprons and black frocks. Then they would come across to the library and what I had to do, as one of the library assistants, was to recommend books for them.

Hardly any of them went down the shelves, pulled them out and had a look for themselves. They said things like, ‘Well I want a nice romantic novel, ’I want a family story’ or ‘I want this,’ and so I would go down and I had to become quite aware of the books, which I didn't mind, because I like books. I've always liked to read but, in the end, I became a bit fed up with all this and I used to pull out the books and sometimes just make up a story. I used to say, ‘This is blah blah blah,’ and ‘That sounds interesting,’ they'd say and they'd take it off. I didn't get any complaints but that made life a bit more interesting.