Nihil Impossibile Erit Vobis

Nihil Impossibile Erit Vobis

Rain in horizontal sheets lashed against the window like it was blowing straight in off the Atlantic, but that was because it was blowing straight in off the Atlantic. Even coming face to face with an obstacle as imposing as Clare Island that sits in the waters where the ocean becomes Clew Bay didn’t do anything to take the terrific power out of the gale that it arrived on the back of. There’d be no wading around in search of bits of wave-polished sea glass and shiny pebbles with my socks in the pockets of my trousers and the legs of my trousers rolled up to the knees today, I thought. Today, herself and I would be seeking entertainment within the confines of our four whitewashed stone walls.

A good hot bowl of Flahavan’s pinhead oats is enough to warm the heart of your cockles on any day of the year and we’d plenty of that in the pantry. We’d also mouth-watering loaves of homemade soda bread from a shop in the main street, a handsome slab of butter donated by the lady at the farmhouse up the lane in exchange for the telling of our full life stories, and probably the finest rashers in the world that we’d bought at Kelly’s award-winning butcher’s shop in Newport. There was a fridge in the kitchen but it seemed more in keeping with the spirit of our adopted village to use the pantry instead, and it was probably colder in there than it was in the fridge anyway. Within its dark confines nothing went mouldy or runny, and a bottle of porter was always at the perfect temperature for drinking, so that was good enough for me.

However, tempting as it may be and despite what Mr Wetherspoon says, you can’t go on eating breakfast all day, with or without a glass of the black liquidation with the froth on the top, so by ten in the morning I was seeking pleasure elsewhere. Wiping crumbs and raspberry jam from her chin and slippers, my dear lady travelling companion set up shop to commence work on an aquarelle painting of the scene that lay beyond the four small window panes. She was going to be needing a lot of dark blue and black, unless she was just painting the window itself and the condensation that accompanied it.

Having already studied the central heating controls in depth and put my smalls on a hot wash in the rattling roaring rusting semi-automatic contraption that stood by the back door, I turned to the bookshelf tucked snugly into the alcove beside the chimney breast for stimulation. As well as few prized but dusty old Babycham glasses, a statue of the Virgin Mary and a faux solid 24 karat gold trophy that someone had been awarded years earlier for winning the pool tournament in a pub that no longer existed, there were a couple of dozen paperbacks. I always find it interesting to look through collections of books left behind by homeward bound holiday makers, even if they include little or nothing that I’d want to read myself. On the shelf before me I found almost exactly what I’d expected. The neatly fitted old wooden plank decorated with historic cigarette burns and coffee mug stains held volumes by the likes of Wilbur Smith and Jackie Collins along with the usual Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey (presumably a study of the local weather) and 1001 Sudoku Puzzles kind of stuff. There was a West of Ireland guide book written in French, a couple of German novels, a book about St Patrick spending the whole of Lent praying on top of the nearby sacred mountain Croagh Patrick in 441 AD, and volume two of a Teach Yourself to Speak Irish course. But it was the very last book that I picked up that really struck a chord.

Beginning on a forgotten day sometime during my mid-twenties I’d gradually developed a fondness for the poems of William Butler Yeats. I’d previously parted with half a euro to become the new owner of a hopelessly thin ‘Best of’ paperback in a charity shop in Athlone, I’d read a few of his longer works online, and I’d visited the beautiful spot where he was buried Under Ben Bulben in Drumcliffe graveyard near Sligo. But now I had in my hands a musty, dog-eared copy of the complete collection of his poems expressing his powerful personal feelings and the dilemma thrown up in social and political terms by Ireland’s arrival in the modern world. I had, and still have, strong feelings of my own in this respect but, unsurprisingly, Yeats describes his far better than I do mine. The feel of the book warmed me as much as the ancient cast iron stove beside which I would sit and read for a number of hours that I wouldn’t take the trouble to count.   

Some of Yeats verse is short and easily digested but other poems go on for pages and pages, taking as long as an hour to read and an hour more to digest, if I manage to get that far at all. My previous attempts at this had been hampered by everyday life’s time restrictions and distractions but, on this wild Mayo day, I had little else to do. So I immersed myself in the book as The Wild Swans at Coole might have done with their lake.

By the middle of the afternoon the murderous weather outside had subsided in inverse proportion to my hunger and need for a cup of tea. So I eased my way out of the book with a canter At Galway Races. With my thumb still lodged between pages 146 and 147, I managed to fill the kettle and put it on a lit gas ring before starting to think about a search for a bookmark. It was a tidy house, and it wasn’t our house, so there was nothing obvious lying around that would meet the requirements. Minutes later, with the kettle’s whistling silenced, I scalded a couple of Barry’s Gold Blend teabags in the shiny alloy teapot that had no doubt seen a myriad or more teabags scalded during its long life. The next step was to make a visit to the pantry for the purpose of slapping some of Bridie’s butter on a couple of slices of the other Bridie’s gorgeous bread, pausing briefly to panic that time was running out for the great bookmark hunt.

Salvation came as I entered the pantry for a second time to get the bottle of milk for turning the tea’s colour from black to terracotta. It was then that I saw an oblong piece of paper fall from somewhere in the middle of the nine-hundred-page tome held loosely in my hand. Making its way fluttering, flapping, spiralling and drifting in a zigzag motion down to the floor took round about the time it might have taken to read Tom the Lunatic on page 319.

I’d like to point out at this juncture that more than half of the book comprises of explanatory notes, so you shouldn’t be put off reading the poetry yourself. It’s all good stuff, even when there’s no soda bread and butter around.

Suddenly more interested in what had escaped from the leafs of Yeats’ book than in anything else, I tore a piece from the red cardboard of the Gold Blend teabag box to insert as a makeshift marker and turned my attention to examining the mystery item that had landed on the floor.

To my dismay and delight, I found that it was an Ulster Bank five pound note in as pristine a condition as it would have been the day it rolled off the Orangemen’s printing press. An item of legal tender that had somehow found a home on the wrong side of Michael Collins’ dividing line on the Island of Ireland. It was of no use to me in my current surroundings but in Derry or Armagh it would have bought a lovely pint of stout, or two and a half loaves of soda bread… no definitely a pint of stout! Technically, it was even possible to spend it in Great Britain, though there its validity would have been questioned and argued about up until to a point beyond which the pub had closed.

The design of the note was a bit uninspiring, it being predominantly brown and displaying on its front side pictures of an unrecognisable mountain, Belfast harbour and the Giant’s Causeway. Coming from that part of the world I would have expected to see on it the face of the English Queen or maybe Arlene Foster, Ian Paisley or Liam Neeson. On the reverse I found the crest of the Ulster Bank which included the obligatory heraldic lions, and the mythological Red Hand of Ulster (in brown). The crest also bore the bank’s Latin motto, Nihil Impossibile Erit Vobis, which translates as Nothing Will Be Impossible For You (a big hit for Sinéad O'Connor in 1990).

This little piece of monetary joy became the bookmark in my borrowed book for the remainder of our stay. This seemed the right thing to do as it had been lurking in there for heaven only knows how long before I discovered it. A week later I managed to buy my own copy of Yeats’ Poems in a gorgeous little bookshop (they offered free coffee to customers, but not Barry’s tea) by the quay in Westport, but my problem was that thoughts of keeping the fiver seemed tantamount to stealing. To put my mind at ease in both directions, I put the Ulster Bank note in my own book and replaced it in the cottage’s book with a Bulgarian ten leva note, which was about the same value. In pencil I wrote on the original book’s inside cover, in English and Bulgarian, an apology for the lack of availability of a lovely pint of stout in the Veliko Tarnovo region that I call home but with the promise of a grand cup of Barry’s Gold Label tea at our house if the reader should ever care to get in touch.

A strange consequence of this experience is that now, whenever I borrow a book or buy a second hand one, before starting to read it I always check to see if there’s any money hidden inside. It’s a bit like birthday cards but the whole year round, and I’m disappointed every time.

It’s a pity that my bookmark hadn’t been a Central Bank of Ireland twenty punts note from the 1980s as that would have had on its front a picture of yer man W.B. Yeats himself, together with the Irish legendary giant, Cú Chulainn. I also regret that his poem Brown Penny hadn’t instead been entitled Brown Fiver.

Image: My own photo of my own copy of William Butler Yeats’ book of poems together with its priceless wee bookmark.