IF YOU think that books are sacred, as I do, then this place was a Temple, where a cough echoed like an atomic explosion and you stepped, quiet as a cat on velvet, down the polished parquet floors.

Ssshhh!

Whisper it now, in remembrance of days gone by – this was Birkenhead Central Library and you could smell the learning in the still of the air.

That smell was subtle but unmistakable, and I can recall it again, as I think of entering the grand building – up six steps and past the two pillars, as splendid as anything in ancient Greece; then through the timber door and across the mosaics by the majestic marble stairway.

And beyond that you could hear the only permitted sound – the thud of books being date- stamped by staff at the desk. One side was for returning books and the other for taking out new ones. A card would be slipped into a pouch on the inner cover of each book. Failure to return it by the appointed date resulted in a fine – a penny a day, I think.

If you had rubber soles on your shoes, they squeaked and it seemed like a thousand eyes were drilling into you from readers, simmering behind horn-rimmed glasses of the utmost severity. They were here to worship words – millions of them stacked high in bound volumes on the unyielding shelves.

There were others who came for warmth – old people who sat at the table reading the Daily Worker, the Times, the Daily Sketch and, of course, the Daily Post. And they, too, were quiet – but the deepest hush of all was found in the reference section, where spiders sighed.

I often came to the library with my late mother, who perused the fiction section along the walls, while I read of Wild West heroes on the American history shelf, near the news table.

Strangers said there wasn’t much culture in Birkenhead even then – until we pointed at our great white library and they gazed in wonder. For it shimmered like a building in New York and people arrived there on blue buses, watching the local boys who played football on its lawn behind the railings until they were chased away.

The old Birkenhead Corporation built the library on Borough Road in 1934. It was opened by George V, whose commemorative bronze head disappeared mysteriously in the 1970s, only to turn up in an antique shop in North Wales.

Now it is safe at the Wirral Museum, in the old Town Hall in Hamilton Square – but is it? Yesterday, I read with mounting sorrow that the museum, along with the library, are to be closed in a budgetary exercise, which also involves 11 other libraries, Guinea Gap Baths, the Grange Road West Sports Centre and the Pacific Road Theatre.

Only 13 years ago, a stained glass window was unveiled at the Central Library, in memory of Wilfred Owen, the Great War poet, who spent seven years of his childhood in Birkenhead.

So the council is selling these buildings, which have been part of our lives. And what are they to give us instead?

“One brand new, state-of-the-art central reference library, probably at the Europa Pools site,” said a council spokesman. “In addition, there will be 11 libraries at the other multi- purpose complexes.”

These are not the words we worshipped. These words chill the soul. Thank God, they have at least kept Birkenhead’s charming Williamson Art Gallery, now celebrating its 80th anniversary.

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