Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  The latest and truest nevves from Ireland; or, A true relation of the happy victory obtained against the rebels before Droheda: and how the Earle of Ormond Sir Charles Coote, and Sir Simon Harecourt sallying out of Dublin to Donshoglen with two thousand souldiers; slew two hundred rebels, and but 5. of them slain: related in a letter from a privy councellor in Dublin, to Master Fenton Parsons of Lincolns-Inne, Feb 26. 1641. Whereunto is added another relation of an overthrow given them by Sir Henry Tichbourne, being related in a letter to Sir Robert King Knight, Feb 27. 1641 …/

  or

  A discoverie of the hellish plot against divers particular of the nobility of the kingdome of England: Also the papists gunpowder-plot, brought to light. With the copie of a letter sent from a noble-man in Ireland, to Colonel Lunsford. Jan. 11. 1642. Shewing, in a most true and reall relation, the manner how this hellish plot was laid, and how these noble pillars of Protestant-religion, the Earl of Cork, the Earl of Kildare, and the valourous Lord Iones, should have been blown up. As also, hovv they intended to burn dovvn the citie of Dublin with wild-fire, and how they were beaten back by the lord chief-justices in the castles.

  The contemporary publications were less challenging to catalogue but much easier to read. Even though you weren’t supposed to read books at work, a perk was that you could borrow them for reading at home. Which I did. Novels by John McGahern, Terence de Vere White, Benedict Kiely, Iris Murdoch. Or the new women writers who were just starting their careers and getting published in slim paperbacks: Maeve Kelly or Ita Daly or Emma Cooke.

  Some aspects of the job, however, were very enjoyable. The young Assistant Keepers were on duty for one day a week, and one night. When on duty you sat behind a big desk in the Librarian’s Office, or LO. Originally the LO had been the Director’s Office, and as such is the setting for the scene in Ulysses in which Stephen talks to the Librarian.

  This famous room was just off the Reading Room, but readers had little or no access to it – the Library Assistants, mostly men, who manned the big counter, and some of whom had worked in the library for decades, could handle almost every enquiry themselves. And even when they couldn’t, it was a matter of pride with them to keep readers well away from the Assistant Keepers, young people, increasingly young women like me, whom they regarded with friendly contempt. So while on duty we were left in relative peace. Our job was to answer telephone queries and letters of enquiry, and take orders for photocopying – a new technology for the library, with which it was very very slowly coming to terms, and a service that was so expensive and cumbersome that not many readers could avail of it. The Assistant Keepers were enjoined to do minimal research on behalf of enquirers, who should be pointed in the right direction and encouraged to find things out for themselves. Our guideline was the mantra, coined by the Director, ‘A helpful librarian is a bad librarian.’ The queries could relate to anything. Can you advise me on books about the Battle of Clontarf? I am researching the Cork writer, Margaret O’Leary. Any help you can give me will be appreciated. Have you got a photograph of the Famine? Have you got a photograph of St Patrick/St Bridget/Niall of the Nine Hostages?

  But most of the queries related to genealogy. The hunt for roots was relentless. My great-great-grandfather left Cork in 1847. Can you help me find information about him? My great-grandmother, Catherine Ann Doherty, came from Donegal in 1856. I would like to research her ancestry. Can you please send me information about her parents and grandparents?

  Although the instruction was to give general rather than specific information to enquirers, in practice how one dealt with these queries as Librarian on Duty was entirely up to oneself. I was a ‘bad librarian’ in more ways than one. For entirely selfish reasons I tried to answer the readers’ questions, doing whatever research was necessary, and resisting the temptation to remind the innumerable enquirers in search of photographs of medieval kings or early Christian saints that photography was not invented until the 1840s and so photographs of fifth-century saints were unlikely to be in stock. I contented myself with mild bureaucratic diplomacy, always most satisfactory to the bureaucrat who composes it: ‘I regret to inform you that we do not have a photograph of Brian Boru in our holdings. However, a pen and ink illustration is reproduced in An Leabharlann, Vol. XII, p. 46. We can supply a photocopy of this, at a cost of fifty pence plus postage and packing.’

  The genealogical queries were glanced at, sighed over or laughed at, and then despatched in fat bundles to the Genealogical Office, the busiest section of the Library, located in a tower in Dublin Castle.

  When on duty you communicated with readers on the telephone or by letter, or more rarely in person. You carried out research on a multitude of topics, you learnt how to find sources in the Library, and got a sense of its depth and usefulness. You got the odd laugh, and an occasional invitation to go on a date. Usually these approaches were made when you were on night duty, the green-shaded lamps glowing in the dimness like candles, the only sounds the whisper of pages being turned, a soft voice murmuring goodbye as a reader slipped gently into the night. At night, the Library felt exactly as it must have at the start of the century. It was easy to imagine that Joyce was reading by the gaslight, or that bureaucrats with vivid faces were slipping down to the steps to have a smoke and to exchange polite meaningless words, or discuss their dreams of an armed rebellion.

  I had limited access to the duty desk – as a new recruit, I was considered too inexperienced to deal with its challenges, except in cases of emergency, such as, for instance, when the real Librarian On Duty was on her tea break, or out to lunch.

  ‘It gets easier as you get used to it,’ Maurice, the Assistant Keeper Grade One, who supervised the Assistant Keepers Grade Two, said. ‘The first two years are the hardest.’

  It’s what they say about widowhood.

  Most of the time I catalogued the pamphlets and the books. That was not too bad. At least I was sitting down, and there were moments of brightness. Finding the appropriate subject heading demanded a certain ingenuity.

  But there was much duller work going on. And for at least half the year, that year in the library, I did it. This work was called ‘Checking the Booksellers’ Catalogues’.

  The National Library’s original acquisitions policy had been to collect books and publications and manuscripts of Irish interest, as well as literature of international importance. But from the early 1970s, it collected only books of Irish interest.

  The books were acquired in the following way. Booksellers, who had become aware of the library’s policy, began to specialise in buying up books of Irish interest, old and new. Every week, sometimes more often, a bookseller’s catalogue would arrive on Maurice’s desk in the Cataloguing Room. These catalogues were amateurish publications, sometimes printed, sometimes typed lists that had been photocopied and bound with staples. Typically they would offer for sale five or six hundred books, of diverse nature, but all ‘of Irish interest’. Library staff would then identify which ones were not in the collection, and buy them.

  Maurice would have a look at the bookseller’s catalogue when it arrived. Sitting at his desk by the window, he would hum and haw and tick off the books he suspected we did not have – quite a lot of them. His instinct, or knowledge, was good, but – quite sensibly – he erred on the side of caution and ticked many books which were, in fact, in the collection.

  The catalogue was then ripped apart and sections given to the five or six Assistant Keepers. It was up to us to check the marked books against the two main catalogues: if a book was not listed in the library’s collection, it would be bought. By this means gaps were filled and the National Library’s collection of books of Irish interest up to the late 1970s is very comprehensive.

  But the work of looking up title after title in the catalogue for days on end was tedious in the extreme. As the readers who adore the National Library know, it is great fun to search for three or four books in the catalogue of a great library – the Guard Books are especially engag
ing, because you often see names and titles that fascinate you as you check for a particular item. But standing at the Guard Book stand, looking up two hundred titles, one after the other, is not enjoyable. The only skill required was a knowledge of the alphabet and basic literacy. I had an MPhil in Medieval Studies. I was writing a doctoral thesis. I was a writer of short stories. Like many young people, I had quite a high opinion of my talents and abilities. The other Assistant Keepers had first-class honours in subjects like Latin or English or History.

  ‘It is a bit boring,’ Maurice admitted. As a Grade One, he didn’t have to check titles himself. ‘It’s the sort of work we should get temporary staff to do. Married women,’ he intoned, and laughed drily.

  Everyone agreed. But of course! This was the kind of menial work married women could do in their spare time, for pin money, when their children had gone to school. The library didn’t employ temporary or part-time staff back then. Or married women, in any capacity except that of cleaning lady, although I didn’t notice this at the time – we always have our blind spots.

  This was the kind of work that a computer could do in seconds – and did, when computers finally arrived in the National Library in the late 1980s.

  And yet there were several positive aspects to working in the National Library in the 1970s, principally the interesting workmates and ‘the stacks’. The stacks were the old iron bookshelves that stretched from the ground floor over three or four storeys to the roof. On the shelves over a million books were lined up neatly, according to subject. Poetry, fiction, history, geography, ethnology, women. It was a vast, hushed, magical place unlike anything I have ever encountered, before or since. Walking through the stacks was inspiring and uplifting, as if the books, some dating back three or four centuries, were singing a gentle ancient incantation: Read me, read me, read me! For me, the stacks was a space as spiritual in atmosphere as a cathedral, a precious monument, not to the glory of God but for the glory of knowledge, literature and the human imagination. My religion, even then – perhaps especially back then.

  But in many ways I was totally unsuited for much of the work, which seemed to me mechanical and repetitive. I was not neat and orderly; I had no talent for the kind of librarianship then practised. It was neither creative nor intellectually challenging. All this changed in later years and now the National Library has been transformed. But in 1978, the decision that many kind friends saw as rash was the right one for me. I had to get out of the library.

  DAY 11,989

  The end of the rainbow

  The Saturday workshop in Acadamh Ghaoth Dobhair was successful and enjoyable. As in the best creative writing workshops, the atmosphere was friendly and industrious. I was above all impressed by the fluent mellifluous Irish of the eight or nine participants, and some of them had composed excellent poems or stories. The day passed quickly, and on Sunday Bo and I left Gweedore and drove east to the cottage on Lough Swilly.

  It’s an old house, dating from the eighteenth century, owned by my parents during the last decades of their lives, and now shared by me, my brother and my sister. Nestling among big old trees in a large garden, with the hills behind and the sea in front, it must have looked really beautiful when its roof was thatched, but even with grey slates it has a hospitable appearance. Everything was in fine shape – the grass in the garden was cut, the fire set on the hearth. My brother Donagh (one of the kindest, wisest and most entertaining people I know) and his lovely wife, Linda, had hung some pictures on the walls – reproductions of paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, Jack B. Yeats. Bo and I were both pleased by the pictures, which were predictable but which the house needed. We unpacked the car – all our stuff, out again, with added bags of food. After lunch, Bo lay down for a nap and I went for a walk on the beach – the walk I have so often taken with him, but that he hasn’t been able to do for two years now, because of pain in his back.

  The beach – Stocker Beach, Warden Strand, an Trá Bán, Portsalon strand; kärt barn har många namn, a beloved child has many names – is a few miles long. It stretches in a shallow crescent from the foot of the Knockalla hills to the cliffs at Portsalon – the last wide bay in Lough Swilly, facing the open sea which looks very ‘North Atlantic’ at this place, cold and vast, stretching from Donegal to the Arctic. The sea is often rough, and so it was today. Great waves broke on the sand; the sea roared, its voice like that of angry lions or of heavy traffic pounding along a motorway.

  The beach is magnificent, a fine sandy beach that is sometimes golden, sometimes russet. It’s bisected by a river – Warden Burn – about half a kilometre from the place where you enter through the sloping dunes, the silvery green marram grass spouting from the sand. You used to have to wade through this river to cross it. Bo always hated doing that, even in summer when the water level was low. He didn’t like taking off his shoes and socks, and putting them back on again at the other side, and he never felt confident on uneven surfaces – for some years, his toes felt numb sometimes, and he didn’t trust his sense of balance. And even in summer, Warden Burn is cold. That meant that Bo seldom walked the full length of the beach – perhaps three miles or so. In 2011 however, the county council thoughtfully bridged the river, as close to the landward side of the beach as they could, since near the sea it changed course constantly. The following winter the bridge caved in under pressure from storms and when we were last in Donegal in late May it was unusable. The burn was now in flood, its voice up, its waters swollen and rushing fast towards the ocean. Impossible to wade through. But I walked up towards the land and – hey presto! – the bridge was there, rebuilt, allowing easy access to the other bank. Indeed, I met three or four groups, mostly families or couples, with their dogs, all ‘walking the beach’.

  I walked a few kilometres, as far as the next burn, just before the cove of Portsalon itself, and then returned. The sea was still splendidly rough and loud, lashing in on the sand – Emily Brontë would have loved it. But a few hundred yards out, it looked smooth as a mirror, and bobbing about on the lake of calm water were two large birds. Not seagulls, not cormorants. Grebes? They swam about looking as if the great wide bay was under their exclusive command, as if they had a magical druidic power to calm a section of the stormy ocean, the way a farmer moulds a field out of mountainside or forest.

  Clouds scudded across the iron sea as I was halfway back, but it rained only for a minute. Then a magnificent rainbow appeared. I photographed it with both my camera and my phone, and sent the snap to my sister Síle with the text, End of the rainbow.

  Later – dinner, then Bo and I sat down by the fire to enjoy the Sunday night episode of Downton Abbey. To our disappointment, we couldn’t get it, and when I phoned my brother he said there was a problem with the television set and it wasn’t receiving that channel any more. Drat! We were both irritated. Such minor things do irritate you – when life is normal, when life is at its best. We played Scrabble instead. I won by quite a wide margin and Bo laughed. The page with our score that night is still in the box. But he wasn’t trying very hard and my easy victory puzzled me. Bo always loved to win a game. This wasn’t like him. I guessed the pain in his back was very bad, or that he felt unusually tired, and my heart sank.

  There was a loneliness in the cottage that night. Perhaps the ghosts of my parents hovered? For Bo, if not for me. Because the next day he wanted to go to their grave, in the small churchyard in Glenvar overlooking Lough Swilly. We visited it briefly, in driving rain. I never visited graves – then. I didn’t see the point. But he did.

  We slept in the big bed in the room at the back. Our room, traditionally – we have always slept there, ever since my parents got the cottage. Bo complained of the cold, and the room was freezing – even though the central heating was on it did little more than take the bite out of the chill in that room, with its three exterior stone walls, in this wintry weather. Next morning Bo said he hadn’t slept well. So we decided to move to the room in the middle, which adjoined the kitchen. It was warmer
there, although we had to sleep in single beds, which Bo hated. Somehow the cosiness of the marital bed was very important to him – it was more important to him than to me, or to most people of his age, or even my age, as far as I have noticed. Even in hotels, where sometimes we were given rooms with adjoining twin beds, Bo seemed to feel abandoned even though I often slept better. He, however, had the great gift of being able to fall asleep as soon as he had read for fifteen minutes and turned out the light, and usually he slept peacefully till morning. Ett rent samvete är den besta huvudkudden, a clear conscience, he claimed, is the best pillow. Sometimes I could lie awake for hours, waiting for sleep to come, and I often woke at four in the morning. Bo would be sleeping like a newborn baby. I often put my hand to his chest to check that he was breathing, whereupon he would wake up for a second and say impatiently, ‘Yes, yes, I am still alive.’ And then fall fast asleep again.

  We stayed in Magherawarden for Monday and Tuesday. The days followed the same routine. In the morning, I wrote – I was preparing a speech for a book launch on that Thursday, 31 October, Halloween, and a short presentation that I was going to give at the concert in aid of the National Folklore Collection, which would take place on the same night. Bo wrote in the small room – what was he writing? I can’t remember. Probably he was working on the introduction to a second selection of stories by Peig Sayers, stories for which sound recordings survive. He went for a walk, on both mornings, not to the beach but up the boreen past Knockalla Caravan Park, which is not far from the cottage, and along there – a leafy ramble; it pleased him that he could do this walk without difficulty, and, smiling in delight, he reported that his back was not aching. Bo had a true capacity for happiness; he was naturally cheerful, and tiny pleasures, such as this, lifted his spirits enormously.