Terry Prone: Storied minutiae of my past will be an asset to researchers of the future

It’s one of those things that happens the ageing eminent, like honorary doctorates. 

But handing over to a prestigious national institution the handwritten notes of something called The Gay Byrne Hour Shopping Basket? Really?

In fairness, those notes are a tiny part of what the NLI accepted from me in a truckload of sealed plastic crates last week. 

They will spend the next year collating and classifying the papers before making them publicly available as the Tom Savage and Terry Prone Collection.

My late husband’s papers — he being Tom Savage — are not extensive, but they are scholarly. 

Studies he conducted as the first Catholic priest to study in Queen’s University Belfast, letters to Cardinal William Conway when Tom, having been a Catholic priest, sought “reduction to the lay state”, transcripts of the television series in which he interviewed famous couples, entitled For Better or For Worse.

Mine are more extensive, less scholarly, which brings me to my surprise, not to say relief, that the powers that be at NLI considered giving storage space at all to the leftover documentation of my life.

The minute the topic was raised, an invitation came to meet the director of the library, Dr Audrey Whitty, (recently named honorary president of Sligo’s Yeats Society) and two of her senior colleagues.

I accepted the invitation, and that’s where the good times ceased to roll.

On that particular day, it rained, and Dublin ground to a halt. 

Although I had left the office on Adelaide Rd in plenty of time — on a dry day — to get to the library, which is on Kildare St next to Leinster House, the rain came as a surprise and mired me miles from where I should have been, moving me, as the clocks speeded forward and the radio programmes changed, from mild worry about being a few moments late to sick-making panicked certainty that I would be 15 minutes late.

Make that half an hour. Forty-five minutes. An hour. 

By the time I got to the director’s office, I was wringing wet, my clothes stinking of damp.

I was emotionally long passed the point of making an amused self-deprecatory apology. 

Entering her office on my knees would have been good, but when you reach papers-donation age, the knees don’t lend themselves to spontaneous demonstrations of contrition.

Not that it mattered. I was welcomed with kind generosity and good coffee, which took some of the edge off my remorseful misery, but sharpened the feeling that I was in the headmistress’s office braced to answer questions about smoking behind the bike shed.

Instead, they asked me questions about my collection, and I explained that it exists only because my mother kept stuff. 

Neatly and in chronological order, she kept stuff. 

I never looked at any of this stuff until two years ago when I started to write my first memoir, Racing the Moon, and went to verify a particular memory, discovering letters, forms, accreditations, and official documentation I had never known existed. 

Or rather, that I had once known existed, but that was another country and the wench might as well be dead, for all the recall she now has.

I found myself reading letters to me and Tom from people long dead, and, in one case, from a gorgeous couple still alive but sadly divorced in the years since the writing was done. 

Writing for magazine and newspaper competitions

Some of the documentation, I explained to the National Library folk, was of its time. Meaning that when I was a teenager, magazine and newspaper competitions were rife.

Today, all you have to do to win a fortune is remember the amount of the fortune specified and be ready to regurgitate it if called upon. 

The competitions in the1960s and ’70s, however, required application and artistry, which my mother bullied the family into providing.

She would sit us down and explain that a mop-maker was offering a garden swing for the most creative slogan beginning “I love my Vileda dishcloth because … ”.

We all hated this, but you didn’t get out to play until you delivered, and our box room was testament to my mother’s commitment, always filled to the walls with prizes won in this way.

Among my “papers”, accordingly, was a file stuffed with letters from managing directors working for companies subsumed decades back into bigger corporate bodies, congratulating my mother on her winning entry in their recent competition and confirming that the prize would be presented to her in the Mansion House or some hotel, on such-and-such a date.

Mortified to even mention this, I was surprised to find that the NLI took a quite positive view. 

They made two points. File material that was not about world events of the time might be valuable for that very reason: items like the price lists for the Gay Byrne Hour were testament to a thread of social history. 

The other point made was that they would prefer if I didn’t go through the documentation and curate it.

Because they are polite people and because I am slow on the uptake, it took a couple of go arounds before I realised that they didn’t want me editing the documents to remove letters where someone pissed on me from a great height or where a review described some aspect of my work as stinking like a gorilla’s armpit. 

Which led to a wonderful double realisation.

On the one hand, relatively few correspondents down the years have vented much venom at me. 

One gangland criminal did send me, from prison, a death threat incorporating a drawing of a gravestone with my name on it because he didn’t like a column I wrote about him, but I don’t still have it, I suspect because I forgot to ask the gardaí for its return after they looked at it.

Other than him, few people have hated me enough to send epistolary abuse, so no curating required, there. 

Similarly, critics have been kind to me with the exception of an Irish Times reviewer who once described me as having an impoverished vocabulary. 

That’s not in the files, either, probably because my mother rejected it: early defensive curation on her part.

The NLI examined the files in my home and took delivery of them a few days later. 

The whole exercise was a blast. It was like spring-cleaning my entire life under the supervision of an impressive group of professionals quietly committed to their organisation, its standards, and its mission.

The stored minutiae of my past will soon become a National Library of Ireland asset to a future researcher or researchers seeking insight into what life was like, back then.