My Secret Library Was A Bathroom

One flashlight. One mattress. Hundreds of borrowed books.

Photo by Anuja Tilj on Unsplash

Our bathroom had a bathtub, a washbasin, and, for a few years, a secret.

A roll-away mattress.

It wasn’t supposed to be there. I hid it there.

Most nights followed the same routine. My parents would tell me it was time to sleep. I’d put my book away, say goodnight and wait. Once the house had gone quiet, I’d pick up my flashlight, my library book and quietly disappear into the bathroom. It wasn’t because I was trying to get away with something. My father was an incredibly light sleeper. Reading in my bedroom meant a strip of light under the door that would almost certainly wake him. The bathroom was the only room where the light stayed where it belonged. So it became my reading room.

Looking back, it makes me smile. A bathtub. A flashlight. A borrowed library book. A mattress tucked beside the wall. At ten years old, I’d accidentally built myself a tiny library that only opened after everyone else had gone to bed.

My parents never objected to the reading. If anything, they seemed delighted that I loved books. Their disagreement with me had nothing to do with novels and everything to do with sleep. They wanted a well-rested daughter. I wanted one more chapter. Neither of us was entirely unreasonable.

Every week, I’d come home from school carrying another library book. I don’t remember choosing them with much strategy. Sometimes it was the cover. Sometimes the title. Sometimes it was simply the one that hadn’t already been borrowed. The strange thing is that I remember almost none of those books now. What I remember is how they made me feel.

Outside those pages, I spent a surprising amount of my childhood talking about whatever everyone else wanted to talk about. At school, I learned the subjects that made conversations easier. At family gatherings, I answered the questions people asked and listened politely to the stories they wanted to tell. I wasn’t unhappy. I just don’t remember many places where my curiosity got to lead.

Books never seemed to mind where my attention wandered. If one paragraph fascinated me, it waited. If I wanted to reread the same page because I wasn’t ready to leave it yet, nobody hurried me along. If something made me wonder about a place I’d never seen or a life I’d never imagined, there was nowhere else I was expected to be.

I don’t think I realised it then, but that bathroom had quietly become something much bigger than the place where I stayed up too late reading. It had become the first place that belonged entirely to my own thoughts.

Years later, people sometimes asked where my love of books came from. I never really knew how to answer. Neither of my parents were readers. Books weren’t the centre of our home. Nobody was recommending novels over dinner or discussing favourite authors. And yet, somehow, books found me.

For a long time, I thought that was the story. Now I think the story is something else. My parents didn’t teach me to love books. They simply never stood in the way once I did. Looking back, I realise what an extraordinary gift that was. Not because they raised a reader. But because they made room for a daughter who turned out to be different from them.

Sometimes I still think about that little bathroom. The bathtub. The flashlight. The mattress that definitely wasn’t supposed to be there. For years, I thought it was my secret. Now I suspect my parents probably knew exactly where I disappeared after bedtime.

They were simply kind enough to let me finish one more chapter.