The days were quiet, like lake water lapping. During the day, when we could escape, he from his work, me from the house, we lay on the sand, or on the hillside, or in the long grass on the burn bank. We kissed. We kissed. We kissed.
When I left I was steeped in love for him, love like warm water or warm wine or warm butter, flowing through me and over me. I did not see how I could survive without him. I sat in my convent classroom drowning in this love.
There were dances, in the convent, organised by the nuns at special calendar festivals – Halloween, Christmas, St Patrick’s Day – to keep the girls away from real dances. At the first of these decorous occasions I danced with Aisling’s brother, Sean. He wore glasses, and claimed to have read a book by Jean-Paul Sartre. Besides, he was good-humoured and handsome in a squeaky-clean, well-groomed way, and besides, I felt I knew him inside out, long before I met him, thanks to Aisling’s stories.
It was a passionate, tempestuous, disastrous relationship, lasting six or seven years. Long after I recovered from it, I married my husband, my husband who is back at the house, reading or studying, while I roast on the sand.
A woman joins Micheál and the little girl. She is young, I think, much younger than me, with long fair hair. She’s fattish. What have I heard about him in Tubber? Not much – people are not fools, they know sensitive areas and do not tread on them. But I heard, nevertheless, that he went to England and managed a pub. That was fifteen years ago – he never got anywhere academically, didn’t even do his Leaving.
Of course it was out of the question.
Marriage.
Maybe he still lives in England. I see him in a holiday village, on the Isle of Wight where Elizabeth came from. Why not? If she could come from there to Tubber, he could go there. That is the way of the world, coming, going. Staying. He manages a quaint little inn with a deep golden thatch, serves cider and ale over a knotty pine counter. And around the door grow roses, roses, and his little girl shakes her auburn curls in the southern sun. The bedroom is, there’s a white lace quilt on the bed, the window looks to France.
Or north, perhaps.
For the rest of the week, the last week of the holidays, I frequent the beach, hoping to see him again. If I see him one more time I will speak to him and find out everything. Learn his story.
But he does not return, and I do not spot him in the heritage centre, or any of the pubs, or the supermarket, either – which is surprising. He must have been passing through. He must have been doing a tour, stopping a night here, a night there.
Since then, I have not seen him.
About Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Born
Dublin, 1954
Educated
Scoil Bhríde, Ranelagh, Dublin;
Scoil Chaitríona, Eccles Street,
Dublin; University College
Dublin; University of Copenhagen
Lives
Dublin
Fiction
The Inland Ice and Other Stories (1987); Blood and Water (1988); The Bray House (1989); Eating Women is Not Recommended (1991); Singles (1992); The Pale Gold of Alaska and Other Stories (2001); Dúnmharú sa Daingean (2001); Midwife to the Fairies (2002); Cailíní Beaga Ghleann na mBláth (2003); Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (2007)
Books for young people
The Uncommon Cormorant (1990); Hugo and the Sunshine Girl (1991); The Hiring Fair (1993); Blaeberry Sunday (1994); Penny Farthing Sally (1996); The Sparkling Rain (2002); Hurlamaboc (2006)
Plays
Dún na mBan trí Thine (1994); Milseog an tSamhraidh (1997); The Nettle Spinner (1998)
Non fiction
Voices on the Wind: Women Poets of the Celtic Twilight (as editor, 1995); W.B. Yeats, Works and Days: Treasures from the Yeats Collection (as editor, 2006)
Awards and prizes
Stewart Parker Award for Drama, three Bisto Book Awards for children’s literature, Butler Award for Prose and several Oireachtas awards for novels and plays in Irish. The Dancers Dancing was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne began writing in her teens. Her first short story was published in ‘New Irish Writing’ in the Irish Press when she was an undergraduate student at University College Dublin, and a succession of stories followed. After graduation, she worked in a variety of jobs and began a PhD in Irish Folklore at UCD. In 1978 she was awarded a research scholarship and spent a year at the University of Copenhagen, working on her doctorate and learning Danish. She married Bo Almqvist, a Swede living in Ireland, in 1982. They have two sons.
Following her marriage and the completion of her PhD, Éilís began writing seriously. Since then she has published more than twenty books, in both English and Irish. She has also written plays, television scripts and many lectures, articles and reviews. In addition, she has taught creative writing at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Trinity College Dublin and UCD. She has worked as an assistant keeper in the National Library of Ireland since 1982. She co-curated the world-renowned Yeats Exhibition at the National Library, and co-edited W.B. Yeats, Works and Days: Treasures from the Yeats Collection, a book accompanying the exhibition. A member of Aosdána, Éilís has won many literary awards and is a frequent speaker at literary events around the world.
A collection of essays on Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s writing, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Perspectives, edited by Rebecca Pelan, was published by Arlen House in November 2007.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne on writing The Dancers Dancing
In 1986 or so, I wrote ‘Blood and Water’, a partly autobiographical story drawing on childhood experiences of visiting my father’s home-place, a glen in the Gaeltacht on the shores of Lough Swilly in County Donegal. The story dealt with my own ambivalent feelings about this place, and about my relatives there, who were not, frankly, the relatives I would have chosen for myself. A working-class child of country origins, I would have very much liked to have been the daughter of a duke, or at least of a family that contained a single person who had a university or a secondary school education. Most children I knew seemed to belong to families of the latter kind, although the children of dukes were naturally enough in short supply.
Anyway, I wrote the story, describing a holiday in my father’s valley, analysing my feelings about it, and using as the central image, a metaphor for intellectual density and misunderstanding, a pat of butter. In Donegal it had been the custom to smear a bit of butter on the wall of the dairy or kitchen after every churning, for luck. I had seen these ancient dabs of butter attached to the wall of my father’s family home in Donegal, but had never known why they were there. Nobody explained. Perhaps they had forgotten what it was, or didn’t notice it, or, most likely, felt such a custom was too silly to be worth explaining. My aunt, who owned the old family house, still churned, at least until I was eight or nine, and the butter she produced was one of the many Irish country things I was enjoined to admire and appreciate, and – this was much harder – actually eat. The taste of it made me sick. I hated it. It represented the negative side of Donegal for me. Some aspects of Donegal I loved passionately, even when I was eight: the nature, the beauty, the donkeys, my innumerable third cousins, who were wonderful playmates. But the dark past, the strange rituals, I mistrusted deeply. I had ambivalent feelings about the languages of the place: it had two, Ulster Irish and Ulster Scots, both of which were foreign to me, a speaker of Dublin Irish and Dublin English. I didn’t like the toilet facilities much either.
That was long ago, in the 1960s. But by the 1980s, when I wrote ‘Blood and Water’, my tastes had changed. Everything about Irish country life fascinated me: its customs, traditions and beliefs, its languages (although not, I must admit, its butter). I had studied Irish folklore for many years at university and had come to an appreciation of my own past. By then I realised what the pat of ancient butter meant, that it was smeared on the wall to appease the forces that can cause churning to fail. (Like all industry related to cattle and milk, churning was a delicate task, sub
ject to conditions over which the churner, the woman of the house, had little control.) Smearing the butter on the wall was a form of magic and was still in practice up until the 1960s in parts of Ireland. Understanding this ritual worked like alchemy for me – it transformed my view of my past, my childhood, my ancestors, from one of diffident boredom and scepticism, at best, to one of enchantment. Knowledge is magic.
‘Blood and Water’ was what Alice Munro calls a ‘breakthrough short story’ for me. It was the first piece of fiction in which I drew on my own childhood experiences, and my first visit to the territory of childhood as a writer, a visit I was to repeat again and again, as a novelist, shortstory writer, and writer of fiction for children. Indeed, although I have never intended to write only about children or teenagers, and have, and hopefully will, write about other kinds of people, I continue to find this age group intriguing and fascinating. I tend to the belief that childhood and adolescence are the most interesting parts of human life, as well as the richest and the most rewarding for exploration in literature.
Retrospectively, I see that this awakening occurred around the time I became a mother, an experience which is deeply interesting in itself for a writer (as for anyone else). And it also coincided with a time when I began to revisit Donegal, a place with which I had been deeply in love as a child but had forgotten about for over fifteen years. Place matters to me, and affects my writing, always.
‘Blood and Water’ was, like many of my earlier short stories, published by David Marcus in New Irish Writing. Later it appeared in my first collection of stories, my first book, to which it gave its title, Blood and Water, and in the first Blackstaff Anthology of Short Stories, both of which appeared in 1988. By then I was a member of that phenomenon of the 1980s, a women’s writing group. Someone in that group whose opinion I valued, Dolores Walsh, a playwright with a passion for social justice who wrote a number of plays about apartheid, suggested that I write a novel based on that short story. Something about this opinion impressed me – possibly the respect I had for Dolores and the strength of all her convictions, and possibly my own sense that in ‘Blood and Water’ I had struck a vein that merited more prospecting. I paid little attention to the advice at the time, but it lodged in my memory, as good advice does.
Almost ten years later, after I had written three other novels (one unpublished) and a few collections of short stories, I began to work on the novel which is now The Dancers Dancing. The inspiration for it came in the summer of 1997 when the IRA initiated its first significant ceasefire, which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement and the cessation of the Northern Ireland conflict. I began to think of the summers I had spent in the Irish college in Donegal, in 1965 and 1966, when I was eleven and twelve, the summers to which I refer rather cursorily in the short story ‘Blood and Water’. An interesting feature of the Donegal Gaeltacht experience for me as a Dublin child was that there I met, for the first time, many young people from the North of Ireland, from Derry and Belfast. In fact it was these citiesthat supplied the Donegal Gaeltacht colleges with their students for the most part – my friends and I from Scoil Bhríde in Ranelagh were anomalies. Dublin schoolchildren tended to go to Connemara or Kerry or Cork, to learn Irish in the summers. Even in the 1960s, most Dubliners would have died rather than go to Donegal, since the journey entailed driving through County Tyrone, in Northern Ireland, a place that most Dubliners believed would be blown to pieces the minute they set foot in it. Many people in the South still regard Donegal as an Ultima Thule, even though it is not all that far away.
These thoughts occurred to me, that summer of 1997, listening to the news about the ceasefire. I was in another Gaeltacht at the time, Dún Chaoin in County Kerry. The contrast between the vibrancy, self-confidence and energy of the Gaeltacht there on the Dingle Peninsula, and the little marginalised quiet Gaeltacht where I had gone during the summers of 1966 and 1967, also struck me.
It was these two points that ‘triggered’ The Dancers Dancing. Drawing on ‘Blood and Water’, which deals exclusively with the relationship of its first person narrator to her Gaeltacht background and ancestors, I began to write a new novel, which would deal, according to my initial plan, with the relationships between the girls from Dublin and the girls from the North.
Although my own Gaeltacht experiences, in the mid-1960s, pre-dated the Troubles, I decided to set the novel in 1972. The diffident attitude which I, and many people in the South, had to the Northern situation was one I was concerned to explore. Another more immediate reason for choosing 1972 was that an IRA ceasefire had been called in that year, obviously a ceasefire which was very shortlived. I began to write The Dancers Dancing as another ceasefire was announced, a ceasefire which was to endure (although not without terrible lapses).
What I remembered best from my childhood summers in Donegal was, however, not the girls from Derry and Belfast, or the bean-an-tís or the céilís, or any of that, but the river. I always loved playing in water, and especially in rivers, little narrow mountain streams. On Saturdays when I was very young my parents used to bring us on a drive to somewhere not too far from Ranelagh, in Dublin, where we lived – Dollymount for swims in summer, Brittas for walks, and the river in spring and autumn. In Brittas there was a stream where my brother and sister and I messed about for hours, with toy boats or bits of twigs. During summers in Donegal I continued the practice. On my first summer there without my parents, when I was eight, and staying with a large lively family of cousins, I spent most of the two weeks in the river which flowed under a stone bridge beside their house, fishing for tiny fish called pinkeens. The river was full of mysteries, it seemed to me. You never knew what would come out from under a stone. The weeds and plants which grew in it and on its banks were many and strange. Its capacity to surprise was infinite, as it rushed along, babbling over rocks and stones, hellbent on reaching its destination. I didn’t know where it came from, although I knew where it was going – down to Lough Swilly, where it spread out, a wide dark brown slow water, before it mixed with the sea in a place we were forbidden to swim, presumably because of the currents.
The river in Donegal was called the burn – like a lot of short rivers in Irish country places, it seemed to have no proper name, just as the river in Dún Chaoin where I spent my holidays and where I wrote The Dancers Dancing is called An Abhainn (the river) or even Abhainn Baile na hAbha (the River of the Townland of the River!). I spent the summer when I was eight in the burn. A boy from Glasgow, also on holiday with his family, was my water mate, although we never exchanged a word as we paddled and fished in the cold, companionable stream.
When I went to the Irish college, like Orla in the novel, I found the burn again – in new locations, which I had not discovered in my earlier childhood. The other girls with whom I lived took to it with greater or lesser enthusiasm. Some were not enthralled. They did not like getting their clothes wet. Or they just didn’t get the point of spending hours wading in cold running water. Others shared my love for the river and outstripped me in daring. They ventured further downstream and upstream than I would have, left to my own devices (I was curious but timid). They found deep pools, they dove into them. It was wonderful, magical, and slightly mad. These were girls on the cusp of childhood and adolescence. They were not sexually awakened, although they might dress up a bit for céilís and pretend to prefer one dancing partner over another. They were wild. Wild about the river.
In 1978–9 I had spent a year at the University of Copenhagen, as a graduate student, and there I attended a seminar on the fairytale given by Professor Bengt Holbek, a great Danish folklorist who was writing his mammoth and brilliant study The Interpretation of Fairytales. I remember him telling us that lakes and wells, swans and ducks often occur as symbols in fairytales. Water almost always has a sexual meaning. Men, he said, male storytellers, often didn’t seem to understand this, but women storytellers were invariably aware of it, and made this clear in the way they use the symbol in their tales.
> It occurred to me, looking back on this obsession with water, that somehow there was a connection. In the novel I intended to suggest some link of that kind, but the river in The Dancers Dancing means much more than that. It is a symbol of life and a metaphor for eternity: ‘Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.’ The river is also a place of beauty and mystery: to me it seemed that anything could be hiding in there, in that little country river. It represented the great potential of the world to yield astonishing treasures.
Although I was unfamiliar with W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Stolen Child’ at the time of writing The Dancers Dancing, its expression of a child’s longing to live in ‘the water and the wild’, informs the novel, in part. Originally I called the novel The Burn, but Anne Tannahill, at Blackstaff Press, suggested I change the title. The Dancers Dancing was her idea – a phrase from the novel that also links the book to Yeats, whose line, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ from his poem ‘Among School Children’, inspired mine. Although I was reluctant to abandon the title The Burn at the time, I am glad I did. The motif of dancing runs through the novel; it represents unease and clumsiness, to begin with, and finally – when the students learn to dance – becomes a symbol of harmony, the quintessential symbol, as used by Yeats. For Orla, the heroine of The Dancers Dancing, the well-danced dance serves, like the symbol of the magic butter in ‘Blood and Water’, as a metaphor for understanding and self-acceptance.
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