Another Country: A Season in Archaeology

Citation

James, S. (1999), "Another Country: A Season in Archaeology", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 2, pp. 95-113. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.2.95.15

What makes up a librarian? Surely it must be the whole man or woman. We are none of us so compartmentalised that we can separate our library and non‐library experience. Background, upbringing, education, and other experiences, all go to shape the person and the career. For one generation that “other experiences” comprised serving in a war. War service could mean anything from commanding an army or a battleship, through flying a plane, being one of the PBI or a vast range of other services, all of which made up the armed services and the war effort. For David Gerard it meant ground service in the RAF with cameras and photography. Coincidentally from another interest I am well aware of the importance of this work, although it was not the most obviously glamorous. Readers of David Gerard’s contributions to our pages will expect the eye for detail and the trenchant, ironic comment which follows our hero from Blackpool to Palestine, from North Africa, to Italy and back to Liverpool. This is an account of what happened and what he did, but also and more particularly it is an account of sudden growing up in pressurised conditions. It must have been the same for millions of his contemporaries, but the intense memories of such experiences in late adolescence sharpen the memory. It could have happened yesterday, the recall seems so complete and so clear. And no doubt it all helped to shape the subsequent librarian, the same person as the whole man of David Gerard.

His Library memoirs have been published in Shrieking Silence (Gerard, 1988) and Primrose Path (Gerard, 1991). Then there was a coda when, at the end of his Library career, he embarked on an archaeology course. That is recounted in an earlier volume which has been awaiting our review for some time. This is a narrative account, but with three of his poems and transcripts of interviews with archaeologists Peter Clack and Rosemary Clamp. Here, the oral history techniques from David Gerard’s Library work at Aberystwyth transfer to a new area. The poems and the oral history have all become part of David Gerard and his work; this volume falls rather between an account of archaeology as David Gerard found and left it, and a further examination or revelation of the whole man. This is less intense than the, paradoxically later, volume on an earlier period of his life, but taken together it at least approaches a complete picture of a man who as a librarian is well known through his work, his teaching and his writing.