Twelve Thousand Days Read online

  Éilís Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin. She was educated at University College Dublin and has a BA in English and a PhD in Irish Folklore. She worked for many years as a librarian and archivist in the National Library of Ireland and has taught on the MA for Creative Writing at University College Dublin and for the Faber Writing Academy. The author of more than twenty books, including six collections of short stories, several novels, children’s books, plays and many scholarly articles and literary reviews, her work includes The Dancers Dancing, The Shelter of Neighbours and Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow. She has been the recipient of many literary awards, among them the Stewart Parker award for Drama, three Bisto awards for her children’s books, several Oireachtas awards for novels in Irish, the PEN Award for Outstanding contribution to Irish Literature, and a Hennessy Hall of Fame Award. Her novel, The Dancers Dancing (Blackstaff, 1999; new edition 2007), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. One of Ireland’s most important short story writers, Ní Dhuibhne’s stories have appeared in many anthologies and have been widely translated. She is a member of Aosdána and President of the Folklore of Ireland Society.

  Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

  Twelve Thousand Days

  A Memoir of Love and Loss

  First published in 2018 by Blackstaff Press

  an imprint of Colourpoint Creative Ltd

  Colourpoint House

  Jubilee Business Park

  21 Jubilee Road

  Newtownards BT23 4YH

  With the assistance of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland

  © Text and photographs, including cover photograph, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, 2018, except where otherwise indicated.

  Cover design: Two Associates

  All rights reserved

  Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has asserted her right under the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  Epigraph: Philip Larkin, ‘Days’, from The Whitsun Weddings (Faber, 1964), reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Limited.

  Extract, Day 3: Philip Larkin, from ‘Annus Mirabilis’, from High Windows (Faber, 1974), reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Limited.

  Extract, Afterword: Penelope Lively, from Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time (Penguin, 2013), reproduced by kind permission of David Higham Associates.

  Produced by Blackstaff Press

  A cip catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

  EPUB ISBN 978 1 78073 222 0

  MOBI ISBN 978 1 78073 223 7

  www.blackstaffpress.com

  For my grandchildren, Freja, Sadhbh and Niko

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  Day 1: Arctic explorers

  Day 11,985: Autumn sonata

  Before Our Day: Behind the scenes at the National Library

  Day 11,989: The end of the rainbow

  Before Our Day: Summer in Dunquin

  Before Our Day: ‘The forgotten fiancée’

  Day 2: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment’

  Day 11,991: Halloween

  Day 3: ‘Yesterday’

  Day 11,992: All Saints’ Day

  Day 4: Babette’s Feast

  Day 11,993: D-Day

  Sunday, Day 11,994: Nordic walk

  Monday, Day 11,995: ‘See ye that ook?’

  Day 26: Breaking the spell

  Tuesday, Day 11,996: ‘The Children of Lir’

  Day 60: Copenhagen

  Wednesday, Day 11,997: Trying to escape

  The Thousandth Day

  Thursday, Day 11,998: ‘The Battle of Ventry’

  The Last of April

  Friday, Day 11,999: ‘The Sod of Death’

  A Day of Our Life

  Saturday, Day 12,000: Thin ice

  PART TWO

  Afterword

  Dreams

  ‘Our father goes early to bed, for he is an old man’

  Hidden Pictures from the Middle Ages

  Acknowledgements

  Days

  What are days for?

  Days are where we live.

  They come, they wake us

  Time and time over.

  They are to be happy in:

  Where can we live but days?

  Ah, solving that question

  Brings the priest and the doctor

  In their long coats

  Running over the fields.

  Philip Larkin

  PART ONE

  DAY 1

  Arctic explorers

  ‘You are an Arctic explorer!’

  Twelve thousand days ago.

  Bo had a wide range of colourful expressions in the form of proverbs and quotations. They spanned several languages. Most of the expressions were traditional, but they were augmented by adages and metaphors of his own invention. He had his favourites: ‘Much squealing and little wool, as the woman said when they killed the pig.’ ‘Every little helps, as the wren said when she pissed in the sea.’ Or, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Like a person’s language or accent, these sayings were part of his personality; they constituted an element of his voice. No matter how often I heard these phrases, they retained their shine, and added life and colour to bland sentences. And they stuck in the memory when much else was forgotten.

  Perhaps you could describe a person who cared enough about conversation to enliven it with sparkling formulae as an oral poet? Everyone needs formulae, and most people possess them, wittingly or not, but Bo had selected his arsenal of handy phrases with care – possibly because he was speaking one foreign language or another for most of his life, rather than his native Swedish. He told me once that when you are beginning to speak a new language it’s useful to learn some colourful idioms that can be used in lots of different contexts. For instance, ‘Just så ligger det till’ in Swedish, as an alternative to ‘I agree’ or – the usual resort of the learner – ‘Ja’. It means you don’t have to think and translate laboriously all the time in the early crucial stages of learning; it gives you confidence, and may impress native speakers.

  I wasn’t an Arctic explorer, and had no intention of ever being one. I was scared of dogs, and, according to Bo, huskies can be especially vicious, even if you escape the attention of the polar bears. But I was a person who believed, when I was young, that I would much rather travel than stay at home and had been an armchair explorer from childhood. ‘Explorer’ is a nice word, an uplifting word, a word anyone would like to have used in a description of themselves. The kind of word that might crop up, if you were lucky, in your obituary.

  The day he said that, Bo was in his office in college, at a little grey Formica-topped table in the corner by the door. There was an important mahogany table sitting like a dark lake in the middle of the room, with glass bookcases of impressive-looking volumes behind it, but he had set up this satellite for himself, and mostly worked at the ordinary kitchen table in the corner, crouching over it.

  Not that Bo looked ordinary at all. Or humble. This was the thing about him. Although he could be reserved and considered himself shy, he projected energy and confidence. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with long arms, long legs and long musician’s fingers. Profoundly blue eyes and a big aquiline nose – Roman, or maybe Norman is a more flattering and more accurate description. Full lips and a wide, frequent smile. His teeth were uneven and streaked with brown stains because he had smoked incessantly for twenty-odd years but that didn’t stop him smiling. Coffee-coloured hair fell in a thick, untidy fringe over his forehead – he was forever pushing it back, or even, absent-mindedly, combing it back with a little plastic tortoiseshell comb that shared his breast pocket with a selection of pens and pencils. Always a
pencil since he would die rather than mark a book with ink but you must always be ready and prepared to mark something interesting or useful in the book you’re reading. He wore glasses, the big black-framed glasses of the seventies, and, usually, a Donegal tweed jacket – what in those days was called a sports coat.

  But today he had taken off the jacket.

  It was warm.

  It was the start of summer.

  It was May.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I was going not to the Arctic but to Denmark. A place nobody went to. A place everyone thought was boring – although opinion swerved into a U-turn as soon as Copenhagen was mentioned. Denmark sounded flat, square and dull. Bacon and butter and the Common Market. Copenhagen bubbled with fairy-tale promise, Hollywood romance. Elegant steeples, green and yellow houseboats on toytown canals. The song has a lot to do with it. And ‘The Little Mermaid’. Danny Kaye and Hans Christian Andersen. And the sweet lyrical tune of the name itself, in its English version: Cop-en-hag-en. Meaning merchants’ port, which gets you back to the Common Market and bacon and butter.

  I had applied for a scholarship to this plain-sounding country with the magical capital. Decades before study years abroad became commonplace, Bo recommended his graduate students broaden their horizons, that they become explorers and wanderers, as he had been himself. He stuck up posters about scholarships on the noticeboard in the hall of his department in college and told students they should avail of the opportunities. Fill in the forms! Apply! Half his life was spent writing references. And the students responded; almost all of them went somewhere. The majority applied to Norway or Finland. They were the interesting-sounding places. The names had a ring to them. Grieg and Sibelius. They knew about Antti Aarne, the great Finnish folklorist, and maybe Asbjørnsen and Moe, who collected Norwegian stories. They had seen a play by Ibsen in the Focus Theatre. Fjords and lakes, ice and snow. Yes, naturally everyone wanted to go to Finland or Norway.

  Sweden was third choice.

  Nobody even bothered to apply to Denmark.

  That wasn’t why I picked it, although it would have been a sensible reason. Just like everyone else, I would have selected Norway, because of the fjords, and following that, Finland – the name sounds like the tinkle of silver bells, like mountain water dancing down a green hillside. Oh, Finlandia! I chose Denmark because it was the only place left when I decided to apply, just after my boyfriend, Oliver, broke off our engagement, and told me I was an opinionated feminist and that he was in love with somebody else – half the women in Belfield, it seemed. By the time he got around to telling me all this, the deadlines for Finland and Norway and Sweden had passed.

  Today the letter had come informing me that my application had been successful. So I was going to give up my job in the National Library and go to Denmark for a year.

  Bo wondered if I could get leave of absence from the library.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  It didn’t seem important. When you are twenty-four, a year has no end. You know it can extend to infinity.

  I had been working in the library for almost a year. That had felt like a century. It was quite long enough. To Bo, as to most people, being an Assistant Keeper in the National Library of Ireland sounded like a good job for a scholarly and bookish person. Everyone just adored the library: the charming portico supported by fat columns of Portland stone, sheltering from the rain with the readers and librarians who gathered on the steps to smoke and chat. The splendid reading room with its baize-trimmed oak desks and pretty green lamps! And surely to spend your day among all those lovely old books must be so inspiring and uplifting.

  Not really.

  I had no intention of going back once I made my escape. My ambition was to finish my PhD and get an academic job, teaching and doing research. An interesting job. I had been offered an interesting job in the university in Oran two years ago, when I finished my MPhil, but I had turned it down, on account of Oliver. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. Instead, I took a job in the Civil Service, which was the last thing I wanted. Now I regretted the decision. Obviously: the relationship with Oliver was over, and the opportunity to go to Algeria was long gone.

  Like all doctoral students, I loved my subject, I loved research and analysis. As much as I needed air and food, I longed for a job that was engaging, challenging. The main thing the work in the National Library challenged in that first year there was my patience.

  ‘Well, well,’ Bo looked at me quizzically with his steady probing eyes. ‘You are very young. There will be other trains to catch.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Such as? Which station do those trains they stop at? Where are they bound? Not the station called Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin, destination Fulfilment and Happiness in Your Work.

  Bo never advised a career in folklore, although he was supervising my PhD in that subject. Like most professors of interesting but impractical subjects in the humanities then, and perhaps now, he avoided the topic of careers and didn’t spend much time worrying about the future job prospects of his students. His devotion was to research, his and theirs, to scholarship per se. He loved the subject passionately, believed that there was no task on earth more important than the collection, preservation, and study of Irish folklore. And he succeeded in transmitting this ardour, this passion for learning and research, to almost all his students. As to earning a living, their servants, Luck and Opportunity and Optimism, would have to look after that for them. They’d served Bo well, as it happened. He’d followed his dream, relentlessly, without thought of gain or self-interest, and he had succeeded in earning a living, in getting a good job – he was one of the youngest professors in UCD when he got his chair. Nobody forced the students to go on studying although nobody discouraged them either. How could they? The motives for taking on doctoral students in those days were pure; back then, as far as I know, the departments didn’t even get brownie points in the form of credits as a reward for having PhD students, as they do now. On the contrary, they probably earned the envy of their colleagues, which was far from harmless, the universities being staffed almost entirely by clever, pompous, and viciously competitive men, at least 50 per cent of whom were as actively engaged in long-term feuds as poisonous if not as physical as those exercising the Mafia or gangs of drug dealers. But, even so, it was impossible not to feel just a little pride in the fact that many students wanted to go on to doctoral level, under one’s supervision. Wasn’t it just mildly flattering that one had been such an inspirational teacher that so many got hooked? Almost all! Yes. Almost all Bo’s students went on to do MAs and quite a high proportion of them didn’t stop at that. On they went to the tenth degree, to do doctorates, even though the prospects of ever getting a job in the subject – Folklore, Ethnology – were as close to nil as made no difference. We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams! They studied and researched and did not look to the future. The future would come and hit them in the face like a gangster, or creep up on them like a hired assassin. Most would survive the assault, slowly recover, and drift out of dream and into reality, until finally the old world of passion, learning and exploration was forgotten, and the new regime became normal, then accepted, then the only good and possible way. For what do we teach our students if not the ability to adapt? What do the legends tell us if not that there is much in life outside our control?

  In folk tales, attempts to manipulate the future generally end in failure. Look at the story I was writing about: ‘With His Whole Heart’. A bailiff meets the devil. The devil is walking around planning to take anyone who is cursed and offered to him that day. The bailiff figures that he will have something to gain if he teams up with the devil. First they pass a garden. A woman is chasing a pig who is eating the cabbages. ‘The devil take you, you pest of a pig!’ she cries. The bailiff thinks, great, now I get some fine pork. But the devil says, no. That curse didn’t come from the heart so he can’t take the pig. At the next cottage a mother is
chasing her child who has broken a cup. ‘The devil take you, you rascal!’ she shouts. Once again the devil rejects the offer, because it was not from the heart. The bailiff, one might think, should begin to get worried. But like most characters in this kind of folk tale he has a short memory and never learns from experience. The next house is the bailiff’s own destination. He is issuing an eviction notice to the widow who lives there. ‘May the devil take you, bailiff!’ she cries, when she sees him coming. ‘Aha,’ says the devil. ‘That curse came from the heart!’ And he picks up the bailiff and stuffs him into his black bag and carries him off to hell.

  You cannot outwit the devil. You cannot manipulate fate. Look to the legends, Bo enjoined, if you want to learn something about life.

  He took his pipe out of his pocket, a packet of tobacco from the desk drawer, and began to fill his pipe. Soon the room was rich with the sweet aroma of tobacco smoke. He looked up, and asked, as an afterthought (although perhaps not; Bo could always think on his feet, and ask the pertinent question at the right moment), ‘What about Oliver?’

  ‘We broke up.’

  The room was dim, Bo’s room, always dim and shadowy as a cave, with its dark books and dark table and window on to a dark atrium filled with gloomy evergreen ferns that never got the sun. I said these words as if they were ordinary – as they are. Three little words. ‘I love you’ on a journey to ‘We broke up.’ Or to ‘Sorry for your loss.’

  Formulae are handy, all right. I could say these three words without emotion. At that moment, I felt none, in the dim, harmonious room, a haven of order and learning. Who would lose control in a room where the dignity of books prevailed, where the love of learning perfumed the air as easily and naturally as if books were wild flowers? The musty spice of old bindings, the leafy richness of Bo’s tobacco enhanced the mood. Also I was sitting close to Bo; being close to him physically injected me with confidence, then and always. It was as if his own courage, his self-knowledge, his energy, pulled me into his aura – perhaps that’s what charismatic people can do for those who are not charismatic? His body radiated something that threw around me a protective bubble, filled with some nourishing element, psychological oxygen. Under his spell I was reminded that there is more to life than the everyday, more to it than the present, more to it than standard personal relations. There are books. There are stories. There is love of humankind, and research, tales to be collected, books to be written, work to be done. So get on with it.