Every Tuesday for eleven years, the doors have opened because of one person.

At ten minutes to ten every Tuesday, Winifred Abernethy walks the four hundred metres from her terraced house on Coldharbour Street to the branch library on the corner of Mill Road, carrying a bag of biscuits, a flask and a ring of keys the size of a saucer. She unlocks the side door, switches on the strip lights one bank at a time, waters the spider plant on the returns desk and turns the sign in the window from Closed to Open. She has done this, with very few exceptions, every week for eleven years.

The Mill Road branch, a red-brick building from 1911 with a reading room under a high glass lantern, was one of five small libraries in the east of Calder earmarked for closure when the council cut its library budget. Residents campaigned, the council compromised, and the branch survived on one condition: it would open only on days when volunteers could staff it. For most of the week it stays shut. On Tuesdays it opens, because Abernethy does not miss a Tuesday.

From borrower to keyholder

She is 79 now and was a borrower here long before she was a volunteer. She first came in as a girl in the 1950s, she says, for the pony books, and came back with her own children and then her grandchildren. She worked for thirty years as a clerk in a shipping office in Port Selwyn and retired the year before the cuts were announced. When the campaign group asked for volunteers, she put her name down and went on a two-day training course run by the council’s library service.

“I had no intention of doing it for eleven years,” Winifred Abernethy said, sitting in the reading room with a mug of tea. “I thought I would do it until they found someone proper. Then I realised I was the someone proper. You cannot shut a library because you fancy a lie-in.”

In that time she has, by her own reckoning, missed four Tuesdays: two for a hip operation, one for her granddaughter’s wedding and one when snow made the pavements impassable. On each occasion she arranged a stand-in from the small rota of occasional volunteers who help on other days. The library has never failed to open on a Tuesday because of her.

What happens on a Tuesday

The work is more varied than people imagine. She issues and returns books on the council’s system, which she learned to use at the age of 68, and reserves titles from the central library. She helps people fill in benefit forms and job applications on the two public computers, prints boarding passes, explains how to renew a bus pass online and, on more than one occasion, has phoned for an ambulance. Between ten and twelve the library hosts a rhyme time for toddlers, run by a young mother she recruited. In the afternoon it is mostly older readers and students who come for the quiet.

Ishaan Mehra, 17, is one of them. He revises for his exams in the reading room most Tuesdays because, he says, the house is too crowded. “She knows everyone’s name,” he said. “She knows what you are reading and tells you what to read next. Last year she gave me a book about bridges because I said I wanted to be an engineer. It was a good book.”

The council’s head of libraries, Diane Sowerby, said Abernethy was “in a category of her own”, and that the authority was reviewing how it supports volunteer-run branches. Visitor numbers at Mill Road have risen by about a quarter in two years, partly because of the toddler sessions, and the council is considering opening it on a second weekday with paid staff if the budget allows.

Who comes next

Abernethy is cheerfully unsentimental about the future. She has no plans to stop, but she is aware that the branch depends rather too much on one pair of knees. She has started training a successor, a retired postman named Gerald who lives round the corner and has taken to arriving on Tuesdays at eleven, “to learn the ropes”.

Before she locks up at four, she straightens the chairs in the reading room, checks the toilets, switches off the lights in the same order she turned them on and writes the day’s visitor count in a hardback notebook she has kept since her first shift. Last Tuesday it was 61. She closes the book, puts it in the desk drawer and turns the sign back round. “See you next week,” she says, to nobody in particular.