Dhuibhne - Twelve Thousand Days: a memoir of love and loss

ils N 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, childrens 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 childrens 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 Irelands most important short story writers, N Dhuibhnes stories have appeared in many anthologies and have been widely translated. She is a member of Aosdna and President of the Folklore of Ireland Society.

ils N 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, ils N Dhuibhne, 2018, except where otherwise indicated.

Cover design: Two Associates

All rights reserved

ils N 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

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 persons 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 its useful to learn some colourful idioms that can be used in lots of different contexts. For instance, Just s ligger det till in Swedish, as an alternative to I agree or the usual resort of the learner Ja. It means you dont 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 wasnt 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 musicians 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 didnt 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 youre 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 Asbjrnsen 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.