The Thousandth Day

We continued to meet in secret, in Bo’s apartment, from September 1979 until May 1982 – two and a half years.

The secret became more widely known. In May 1981, for instance, we celebrated Bo’s fiftieth birthday with a party in the flat to which two of his colleagues and their wives, as well as Bo’s daughter, Marja, were invited. My family too knew of the relationship. I was living at home again, which I found difficult, but Bo advised against moving out. We were to be married as soon as I finished my PhD. What was the point? I spent weekends, at least one night a week, at his apartment, anyway.

As soon as I returned from Denmark I got a job on the Urban Folklore Project, collecting folklore in Dublin. This was a dream job, independent, interesting. It involved meeting all kinds of people, interviewing them, recording them, transcribing the recordings.

Although I was now working in my field, it was in a position that was both menial, in the sense that it was badly paid, and anomalous. A big youth employment scheme – eighteen people were working on it, some with qualifications in the subject, some not. Nobody was going to ask questions about my right to such a job, which would last for eighteen months. The question of a career in folklore, the subject I was working on for my PhD, and in which I was passionately interested and now, after a year of intensive study in Copenhagen about which I was very knowledgeable, was uppermost in my mind. Bo preferred to push it under the carpet. We did not discuss how it would be possible for me to work in this field. In Dublin, in Ireland, there was only one place in which the subject could be pursued professionally, namely UCD, where he was head of department. I persisted in believing that since this was the case, since there was only one possible place of employment for someone with my qualifications, I was entitled to apply for any job that came up. Jobs didn’t come up very often, needless to say, and there would be several applicants for anything that did arise. That I would be viewed with resentment and suspicion if I happened to get one of these jobs did not bother me much. Bo seemed not overly concerned about it either. The problem was in any event hypothetical.

The 1980s was a decade of recession and unemployment. Many young people emigrated. Recruitment to the public service and the universities was limited. ‘Embargo’ was a word in common parlance. Embargo on recruitment, embargo on promotion. ‘Frozen’ was the adjective increasingly used in relation to positions. A job could be advertised and filled – and then frozen: that is, not filled. Or advertised, and frozen just before candidates were interviewed. This happened in connection with a few university positions of which I was aware, not in my field.

Curiously, the National Library advertised for Assistant Keepers Grade Two in January 1981. I had finally handed in my doctorate, which had taken five years to complete – given that I was working full time for four of those years, and learning a new language and participating full time in university courses for one of them, it was not a very long time, but it seemed long. Five years during which my relationship with Oliver had ended, my relationship with Bo had started and continued, during which I had had three different jobs and one year abroad. The years of my twenties. I was twenty-two when I started my PhD and twenty-seven when I handed it in for assessment.

I, who had vowed never to return to the National Library, applied. There was little else to apply for; nothing, in fact. Not having an income was an impossible situation. I didn’t consider the dole. Nobody in my family knew anything about it. It wasn’t that we were prejudiced against it, particularly. It was simply terra incognita to us. We were the sort of working-class people who always worked, and, as somebody once pointed out to me, in some bewilderment, I seemed to ‘like working’ and to get jobs easily. From the moment I finished the BA, in September 1974, until January 1982, I had never been without some sort of regular income – from jobs, scholarships, tutoring. Something. I felt at a complete loss when I realised that at the end of the week beginning 1 January, there would be no money at all coming in.

This was a class preoccupation, the desperate need for paid employment. Working class. My more bourgeois friends had no difficulty enduring periods of unemployment – they had a certain sense of entitlement, and, I think, a sense of security. They could say things that sounded quite outlandish, such as, ‘Well, the only thing I know how to do is write.’ Or ‘paint’. They might as well have been saying, ‘The only thing I know how to do is play marbles.’ I laughed when I heard some of these proclamations, from aspiring artists or academics who really believed that they were speaking from a position of necessity, who genuinely believed that they ‘could not’ work in an office, or a school, not to mention a factory, when it was abundantly clear that they spoke from a position of choice. Only people with money somewhere in their background could afford the luxury of such firm self-belief, such glorious ambitions to live lives that did not, for a start, oblige them to get up early in the morning and clock in. ‘I don’t do mornings!’ I had heard one of those people say. ‘I can’t do a job that involves getting dressed every morning.’

Did they really believe that everyone who had a job felt born to get up early in the morning, wash and dress, catch a bus, and work all day in an office or a shop or a field until 5.30 or 6? Did they really believe that all those people had chosen to do that, rather than ‘not do mornings’ and write a great book?

It wasn’t a choice open to me. There was no money to shore me up while I ‘found myself’ – accepting the scholarship to Denmark was as wild and free and reckless as I was ever going to get. I belonged to the ranks of those who have to earn their living. So I applied to the library and, to my surprise – and to that of many people – was offered the post again.

In 1978 I had left the library. And now in April 1982, almost four years later, I was back. It was a relief to get a job, and, in 1982, something of a miracle. With very mixed feelings I took up the position.

Some changes had occurred. There were a few new staff members. The previous director had taken another job, as head of one of the university libraries, and been replaced. I sat in a different room, a much nicer room, than the one I had been in previously. The work of checking catalogues continued, but there seemed to be a lot less of it. The atmosphere was lighter, more optimistic, more cheerful.

The National Library had begun its march out of the nineteenth century and into modernity. It was a much happier and more stimulating environment than it had been in the 1970s.

A few weeks after I started working in the library, I was conferred with my doctorate. Bo joined me and my family for a celebration dinner, in a restaurant that was popular just then: a cosy bistro on Pleasant Street, off Camden Street – the area that would soon be called Portobello, and become very fashionable, but was still in transit from slummy to trendy.

Now there was no reason to postpone the marriage further. Looking at the little houses on Pleasant Street, and Synge Street, some of which were rundown and some of which were being newly gentrified, with geraniums on the windowsills, the thought crossed my mind that I would like to live in a place like this.

Love can go smoothly, or it can, as in fairy tales, involve a series of tests.

I had been tested several times already, more than most, perhaps. There was the issue of Bo’s age – I had to overcome my own and my family’s and the wider community’s prejudices and just do what I wanted to do. There was the Oliver hurdle which I had stumbled over ingloriously rather than tackling with noble dignity. There was the PhD – Bo was definite that no marriage could occur until the doctorate was finished. At first I was fully in agreement with him, but as time, and the PhD, dragged on, I wondered if it was such a good idea to wait. I was determined to finish it – the idea of not finishing never crossed my mind. But I believed I could be married and finishing a PhD at the same time; that I could find a new supervisor, and that indeed that might have been preferable.

But now that hurdle was crossed. I was a doctor. My photograph appeared in the newspapers, smiling at the camera in my red gown and black cap, clutching my rolled-up scroll, my PhD.

In the library, everyone congratulated me. But more than one decided they should let me know that my achievement was not worth much. They told anecdotes about jobs for junior office workers. Half the applicants had PhDs. The folly of it all!

So many doctorates out there! Nevertheless, there was only one other doctor on the staff of the entire library, but I accepted these anecdotes as the truth. PhDs were two a penny. I had achieved nothing special. On the contrary, some of these men in the library, who had BAs, were telling me I was a bit of a fool for having worked so hard for what was essentially a worthless piece of paper.

In fact, although I didn’t think to check the statistics, I belonged to a tiny minority. There was a reason for the photos in the national newspapers. Very few women, especially women aged twenty-eight, were awarded with the degree of doctor in Ireland in 1982. Relatively few ever are, in this country. To finish a PhD is a considerable achievement, and only those who are doctors know how much work is involved. In my case, I had learnt to read several languages, explored the cultures of most of the countries in northern Europe, and read widely in the fields of folklore and ethnology, in order to write my thesis.

Now it was done. I had the passport to marriage to Bo, and a full-time, well-paid job in the library, albeit the same job I had had when I was starting the PhD.

But there were more hurdles to cross.

First, Bo became depressed.

The prospect of marriage wasn’t the reason for the depression, or the ostensible reason, although that the attack came around the time I finished the doctorate could hardly have been entirely coincidental. Now, what had been almost a fantasy, a vague prospect on the distant horizon, was realised. Soon – there were more barriers than either of us realised – we could be married.

Marriage is a stressful life event. On the Holmes and Rahe scale of stressful events, it comes somewhere in the top ten. Losing a spouse is number one, followed by divorce and separation. Losing a job, going to prison. But marriage is there, among all these events involving loss, at about seven or eight. It’s the only positive event that causes so much stress. I’m not sure why exactly. Because it involves loss of freedom? Because it is such a serious commitment? The mechanics of big weddings clearly create a lot of – needless – stress for some people, but the big fat wedding, which we were definitely not planning to have, is not ‘marriage’, as such.

What appeared to precipitate the distress was something quite different. Bo was invited to do a lecture tour in Scandinavia – Norway, Sweden, Finland. He would visit six or seven universities and lecture on a topic of his choice. This invitation had come in the late autumn and the tour was to take place in the summer term, April or May.

He accepted the invitation, which was an honour, and began to work on papers.

The easy, and obvious, and expected, way to handle a lecture tour of that kind is to write one lecture and deliver a version of it in all the venues. Bo’s predecessor, Séamus Delargy, wrote ‘The Gaelic Storyteller’ – one of very few scholarly articles he ever wrote, in fact, since he was an activist and administrator rather than a researcher – and gave the lecture wherever he went. It was, and remained for half a century, one of the definitive works on storytelling in Ireland. Bo would have been expected to do something similar – a survey work, impressions of the state of the art of storytelling in particular and oral tradition in general in Ireland today.

But he had a difficulty.

Bo was a scholar of a particular bent: he was a comparative philologist and folklorist. He loved literature, languages and learning, and was outstandingly knowledgeable in the fields of oral literature in Ireland, Iceland and Scandinavia, and was well versed in history and anthropology in general. He had been educated in an empirical school and distrusted theory and speculation. ‘In scholarship there are no shortcuts.’ His preferred, his established, method was to study in minute detail specific texts, from oral tradition and literature, to chart their history, and to comment on their context and meaning. Any theory he had was strictly evidence-based and he disliked generalisations. The school of research in which he had been trained was scientific in its methods.

But folkloristics had changed since Bo’s day, in Uppsala and Iceland in the 1950s. One of the reasons he had left Sweden was that standards had dropped so drastically, as he saw it. Folklore had become ethnology – the student revolution of 1968 had had dramatic consequences for the study of folklore in Sweden and much of Scandinavia. ‘We want no old books!’ had been the slogan on a placard in a demonstration against the traditional study of literature on Carolinabacken, the hill on which the great library of Uppsala sits. Students didn’t want to study the classical texts in literature, and in folklore they no longer wanted to learn about the old stories and legends, the medieval sources. They didn’t want to learn languages, old or, it seemed, new (apart from English).

In Denmark, I had encountered the new ways. The professor in Copenhagen had advised me to stop writing my thesis on the Chaucerian folk tale, and select a more up-to date topic. ‘Nobody has written a historical–geographical monograph in the past thirty years in Denmark,’ he said. He himself, Bengt Holbeck, was writing a mammoth work on the meaning of fairy tales – a book which was both scholarly and evidence-based, and imaginative and theoretical. I would have liked to work on something similar. I had suggested to Bo that I switch and study the storytelling of women in Ireland, a topic which had not been investigated at all at that point in time, but he had persuaded me not to change.

In Copenhagen, students were writing dissertations on the celebration of May Day in contemporary Denmark, on gardening as a hobby in North Zealand, on the work practices and customs of chimney sweeps in Copenhagen.

Since coming to Ireland in 1972, Bo had seldom gone to an international conference. He visited Iceland occasionally, where he lectured on topics related to Icelandic literature and folklore, and he liked to attend events on the Faroes, and on Shetland and Orkney. Otherwise he focussed exclusively on Ireland. He considered conferences a waste of time, and in any case he was always extremely busy in UCD, running a department and an archive, editing an annual journal, Béaloideas, which he transformed from being a journal of folklore texts to a research journal that was gradually gaining an international reputation. In his free time he collected folklore in Kerry and spent a great deal of time transcribing stories he had recorded from Micheál Ó Gaoithín and Bab Feirtéar. He also worked consistently on a huge edition of the stories of Peig Sayers.

While it is true that he was very busy, took his duties very seriously, and saw the collecting, editing, surveying and analysis of Irish folklore as the most important work in the world, and did not have much time for anything else, it is possible that he preferred to avoid the international folkloristic scene. He was regarded as old-fashioned in his approach. His detailed focus on individual texts, the historic dissemination patterns, was considered dull, and his refusal to engage with modern theory marginalised him in a world where folklore research was increasingly driven by theory – Marxism, structuralism, formalism, feminism. Bo was a liberal humanist, but, like most liberal humanists, he did not categorise himself. (They are like writers of literary fiction in this way. We don’t regard literary fiction as a ‘genre’, but tend to believe it is the only fiction. This attitude is increasingly challenged by writers in ‘genre’ fiction – quite rightly, I believe.) Liberal humanism still held sway in literary studies in Ireland, but even here was about to be replaced by more consciously theoretical approaches.

Bo realised that he was expected to provide some general insight into Irish folklore and Irish folklore studies, but he rejected any notion of writing a journalistic type of lecture – which is what ‘The Gaelic Storyteller’, for instance, is – a series of informed impressions. It wasn’t in his nature to write such things, although in conversation it emerged that he had many impressions, ideas, and general theories, and they were all fascinating and important. He always, then and later, dismissed this sort of thing as lightweight chatter. When he sometimes wrote pieces that were descriptive, such as his introductions to his collections of Bab Feirtéar’s stories, or articles recounting his collecting experiences with Micheál Ó Gaoithín, they were among his more accessible and interesting writing. Sadly, he didn’t understand what people saw in these pieces, and he himself thought nothing of them. There was no problem to be solved, no evidence to be sifted forensically, and thus no intellectual challenge.

For the Finnish tour, he could have simply described his experiences in Ireland as head of the Department of Irish Folklore, or of his collecting in Kerry. Those two papers would have been simple to compose and would have been exactly what was needed. He could have taken articles or lectures previously written and recast them. Shortcuts are what invitations like this demand.

Instead, he compiled a list of six different topics, each one focusing on a minute question of historic connection: was there an Irish–Icelandic connection as regards the legend ‘Midwife to the Fairies’? What is the history of ‘The Man Who Married the Mermaid’ in Ireland and Scandinavia? That sort of thing.

He could have – in due course he did – written these papers, methodically and meticulously. But he had limited time. He was preoccupied with personal issues – my thesis, the question of marriage – and administrative problems: retiring staff, lack of funding for the department, new plans to expand the department, to obtain better and more suitable premises, which involved many meetings and eventually came to nothing – a pattern that was to be repeated again and again in UCD. Much squealing and little wool, as the man said when he sheared the pig.

He sat in his flat, with his typewriter, throwing papers in the bin.

The date of the tour came closer and closer and he had not written a single lecture.

I tried to advise. Write about collecting in Kerry. Regurgitate some old lectures.

He looked at me in puzzlement. Who would want to hear about such things? And how could he write about them anyway?

He went back to the psychiatrist.

He took pills.

These were dull days.

Despair was setting in, for me as for him.

I was twenty-eight. I had a doctorate and I was a librarian – not my career of choice, but the work in the National Library was getting more and more interesting.

Now, when I should have been looking forward to getting married, Bo was depressed.

He sat in the evenings with tears in his eyes. The lecture tour loomed like a guillotine. Finland became a dark cloud hanging over the flat in Booterstown. The prospect of the lecture tour, which should have been a joy, invaded our lives like a poison gas, which paralysed Bo, that swift-moving, light-hearted creature.

I tried to push away the monster that is depression. Gradually I found I couldn’t. It was almost as if Bo didn’t want it to lift, although that was not the case. But that is how someone else’s depression can look to those who are closest to them. Why can’t they shake it off?

In this instance, I think Bo wanted someone to shift the burden for him, to get him off the hook of Finland. And of the marriage? Was that the real issue? Sometimes what the client believes to be the problem is just displacing the real problem, a psychoanalyst told me, years later.

After a month, I thought I could not go through with the marriage anyway. I couldn’t be with someone who was so depressed, so immobile, so unable or unwilling to get out of it. I would have to end up a spinster librarian, after all the Arctic exploring.

But no.

Bo decided to go into hospital.

His doctor had asked him if he wanted to.

According to Bo, he left everything to the patient. If Bo wanted to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, he would sign the paper. If he didn’t, that was okay too.

I knew nothing about psychiatric hospitals, who was admitted and who was not. If I had, I would have realised that the doctor did not think Bo was a very serious case. If he had, there would have been no question of choice. But Bo was not suicidal, for instance. His sense of duty to the Department of Irish Folklore was such that he would never be suicidal while he was in charge there.

I advised him to go to hospital.

We both knew one thing: the moment he was admitted to hospital he could cancel the lecture tour without guilt. It would be the perfect excuse.

Bo was admitted to St Patrick’s Hospital. He was given medication which made him sleep for three days.

I went to visit him, in his little room in the old building.

When the aggressive medication was finished, when he emerged from his sleep, he was his old cheerful self. He had his tape recorder, his books. By the end of the week, he was sitting up, working.

I brought fruit, sweets.

He smoked his pipe and after ten days was allowed out for walks. We strolled along the quays, and into the dark old streets around the hospital. Viking Dublin. Arbour Hill, Stoneybatter – places that were unfamiliar to us southsiders, and which I found fascinating and exciting.

It was spring. The trees in the city were veiled in their lovely lime green leaves. The spring was coming back to Bo’s step.

In three weeks, he decided to leave the hospital. The depression had lifted like a cloud being blown away by a fresh breeze on a sunny day.

We bought an engagement ring in a jeweller’s shop on Nassau Street and began to plan our marriage.

He was never depressed again for the rest of his life.

Bo insisted on getting a house first.

I would have preferred to live in the flat for a while, take our time about choosing a house. But I knew he didn’t like the flat and so I compromised. We looked at four or five or six houses, in Stillorgan, Booterstown and Blackrock.

I assumed Bo knew a lot about this sort of thing. He must have known more than me, since I’d never house-hunted before in my life, and he had bought at least four homes so far in his, in various countries and places. But he wasn’t much wiser than I was when it came to this task.

He wanted to choose the house, then sell his flat. ‘Can’t the two transactions be married?’ he asked the estate agent, a stocky, belligerent man called Brad.

‘We can try,’ Brad said.

The housing market was very sluggish in 1982. It was very difficult to sell, so it was a buyer’s market. Bo and I, both permanently employed, he with a large salary and I with a reasonable one, were well placed to get a mortgage. We had no difficulty in obtaining the go-ahead. The question was, how much?

Memory does not store all experience.

I have no memory of meetings with the building society, although there must have been at least one. I have no memory of the discussions about mortgages – how much could we have borrowed? Was it twice the man’s salary, the woman’s not taken into account? I have no memory of how much Bo’s salary was at that time. I think I was earning about £10,000. Between leaving the library in 1978 and return in 1982 salaries had increased significantly. And I got increments for my MPhil and PhD.

I remember a few houses we viewed.

One on the Stillorgan Road, near RTÉ and Belfield. A big house with five bedrooms, a garden that backed on to Elm Park Golf Club. There was a bar in the front room.

This house cost £74,000. We thought it was too much. Our limit was about £60,000.

Another house on Booterstown Avenue, not far from Bo’s apartment. Four bedrooms. A blocky, ugly house, empty. It was within our price range but dismissed as not looking right.

An estate agent whom we knew as a friend, because she was the daughter of one of Bo’s former colleagues, wanted to show us a house in Dundrum. ‘You really should see it,’ she said. ‘They have done such wonderful things to it.’

No. For some reason we didn’t want to live in Dundrum. We didn’t pay attention to her advice. Didn’t even go to look at the house.

I saw a picture I liked, of a house in Shankill. It had the small panes of glass in the window. Neo-Georgian. One Saturday morning in early June we drove out to look at it, with Brad. The house when we stepped inside it was small and dark. Not suitable.

‘We have another one around the corner,’ Brad said.

I had seen the photo. Seafield. In the photo it looked ugly, the gable to the road, nothing in it that appealed to me at all.

But we drove around to see it.

What the ad had not said was that Seafield was on the seafront.

We drove around the corner of Corbawn Lane. In front of us, the Irish Sea, blue and sparkling. Dalkey Island. The Hill of Killiney.

Wow!

By comparison with the house we had just viewed, this one was spacious. It had a big, generous front room, looking out over the sea. The floor was solid wood, maple or oak or something like that. There was a dining room opening off the sitting room, a kitchen of a reasonable size at the back. A downstairs cloakroom, and decent bathroom. One very big bedroom at the front of the house, with the sea view.

‘This can be the library!’ said Bo.

A smaller room overlooking the back garden would be a study for me.

The garden itself was big, shaded by trees in their early summer beauty: big sycamores at the end. A weeping willow, a copper beech, a strange twisted tree covered in yellow blossom that remained unidentified – a Siberian pea tree, I later discovered. In the middle of the garden were two rhododendron bushes, in full flower: bright brilliant pink blossoms enticed the beholder.

‘Impressed?’ Brad sized up our reactions.

‘We like it,’ I said.

‘How much is it?’ Bo asked.

‘£60,000. But make me an offer.’

From Brad, that was an invitation to offer less, probably much less. But neither Bo nor I understood the code.

We offered £60,000.

We knew absolutely nothing about the area. It was ten miles from town, but close to the train station. ‘You’ll be in in half an hour,’ the owner told us. He didn’t add that the train ran only twice or three times a day and that the last one left town at 6 p.m.

I asked my friend, Mary, who was a town planner, for advice. She gave it with caution.

‘My colleague who works out there thought the price was a bit high. He hasn’t seen the house, though.’ She paused and added, ‘It’s near a county council estate.’

This could have been interpreted as ‘The house is much too expensive and it is in a dodgy area.’ But I didn’t interpret it like that. I didn’t know about council estates and what they meant for property values in the Dublin suburbs. I took the advice at face value.

Our offer was accepted. That was on a Wednesday. The next day the house was advertised in the property supplement in the Irish Times for £55,000. Obviously it had been impossible to pull the ad in time. We then withdrew our offer of £60,000 and offered £54,000.

You could have bought almost anything anywhere in Dublin for that money in 1982. In Ranelagh or Dalkey or Ballsbridge. Killiney. Fashionable areas that were going to become ever more fashionable, where property values would increase enormously.

We didn’t know anything about property, values, desirable neighbourhoods. We loved the sea view, and the willow tree and the big sycamores, the rhododendrons in the big back garden. We overlooked the basic kitchen, a damp patch on the sitting room wall, the functional 1960s exterior: seaside bungalow.

That it was far from the city centre we saw as a minor problem. All my life I had lived within walking distance of Grafton Street. I wanted to get away from the area I had grown up in, Ranelagh – poised to become the most desirable place to live in Dublin. Bo had also lived there, when he first came to Ireland. His memories of it were far from happy.

So we bought the house in Seafield, which was called Cala D’Or. Sometime in July we signed the papers, and in early August moved in.

We decided to have a quiet wedding. We went back to Sweden, and married in our favourite city, Uppsala, in December 1982, at a small ceremony attended by Bo’s brother and sister and a few friends. His sister and brother were the sponsors. After the wedding, in the registry office, we had dinner in a famous old restaurant, looking out over the English Park, covered in snow. What did I wear? A dark blue suit, designed by John Rocha, still an exclusive, expensive designer in those days. It had a tight jacket with puff sleeves, and a skirt gathered into a blue leather cummerbund. A white lacy blouse and a blue hat with a feather. The suit was stylish, slightly avant-garde, flattering. ‘Now that’s clothes!’ someone said, when I wore it to a party some months later. It was the kind of outfit I could wear again and again.

But dark blue? For my wedding? What a strange choice.

Ever since, I have regretted not wearing white, which would have looked so perfect in the snowy landscape of Sweden.

About a month after the wedding, back at work in the National Library, I ate a sandwich at a new cafe on Molesworth Street. I usually went out to lunch, in some cafe in town, rather than sensibly and frugally eating in the tea room of the Library, which was a smoky shabby prefab in the yard at the bottom of Leinster Lane. I loved walking around Grafton Street, Stephen’s Green, Dawson Street, having a look in the shops, picking up bargains, and eating in some cafe, usually on my own, although I regularly met friends for lunch in the Kilkenny Shop or the Alliance Française. Cafes were always springing up and closing down in Dublin in the eighties, recession or no recession, just as they are today.

It was a tasty sandwich, bacon and avocado. But in the middle of the night I felt extremely sick, as nauseous as I ever had been. I vomited profusely during the night and the next day. I was convinced that I had been poisoned by the sandwich. There was no possibility of going to work the next day, and in the evening I went to the doctor. She agreed that it could be food poisoning. Then she asked if there was any chance that I could be pregnant.

‘It’s very unlikely,’ I said

But she did a pregnancy test. A week later she telephoned me with the result. I was at my desk in the National Library.

Positive.

I telephoned Bo from the coin box in the hall of the library, which was more private than the room that I shared with several other librarians.

‘Jag är gravid,’ I told him in Swedish.

‘Va säger du?’ he didn’t understand.

‘I’m pregnant.’

He laughed and whooped.

‘Du är havande.’

The old-fashioned way of saying you are pregnant, in Swedish. In his day they didn’t say ‘gravid’. Just as we usen’t to use the word ‘pregnant’, but some euphemism. ‘In the family way’. ‘Expecting’.

What surprised me most was the discovery that, during all those years, the pill, while I had been on it, and the condoms, had really worked. I had always used contraceptives but never really believed in their efficacy. They looked so flimsy and unreliable. But I became pregnant the minute we stopped using them. We, who looked so stiff and bookish, were very lucky in that way. Nine months after our wedding, almost to the day, our first son was born. Two years later, we had a second boy. The lights of my life.