A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno – note from the author
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Image: Sophie de witt
A Country of Eternal Light is essentially a ghost story. Margaret Bryce, our narrator, is a native of Aberdeen, Scotland, who’s been dead since the mid 2010s.
Margaret’s not a particularly mystical woman (she doesn’t necessarily believe in ghosts, for example), and yet she finds herself visiting and revisiting scenes from her past, out of sequence – and she’s not just recalling them; she’s actually there, in ghostly form. That means sometimes there are two Margarets, living and dead, and sometimes only Dead Margaret watching something she didn’t experience first time round.
She revisits moments from her childhood; with her best friend, Barb; with her estranged husband, Henry. But mostly, she visits and revisits her twin daughters, Eva and Rachel.
As children, the twins were extremely close but drifted apart in their teenage years. Rachel now lives in Melbourne, with her wife Gem and their two children. Eva lives in Madrid, where she teaches at an international school. The first time they’ve been in the same place together for years is when they return toAberdeen to spend the last few weeks of Margaret’s life with her.
Margaret doesn’t know why she’s visiting and revisiting these moments, although she does have a growing sense that there’s something she’s maybe forgotten, either by accident or on purpose. She also starts to suspect that she can interact, even just a little, with the world of the past and present.
As we go back and forth with Marg, we also get to revisit some key historical events that happened during her life and that of her family. The allied bombing of Würzburg, Germany, during World War II; Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ housing scheme in the UK; the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster in Aberdeen, the death of Princess Diana – right through to the Black Summer bushfires and Covid/ post-lockdown era in Australia.
Stories and their importance play a big part in this book, whether that’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is stitched all the way through, or the work of Virginia Woolf, Robert Burns, Jane Austen, the Bible … even the seemingly impromptu bedtime stories Rachel tells her children in Australia. And that belief in the power of stories is related in many ways to why I wanted to write this book.
Frankenstein manuscript. Image: Eden, janine and jim/ flickr.
I’m from a working-class background, where the assumption was that there were certain books you didn’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t read, certain ideas you probably shouldn’t engage with. And if you did, you probably wouldn’t understand what you were reading, thinking or saying. That you didn’t go to university – that was another assumption. That improving yourself meant, at best, learning a trade as quickly as possible and leaving it at that.
As per that model, I left school at 14 with no exams and started working as a painter decorator’s apprentice, then as a washing machine engineer. A few years into that, in part, I think, because I had a love of music and was besotted with Bob Dylan and his lyrics, I signed up for a night class in English literature at my local college in Aberdeen. It changed my life.
For much of the year, it was just me in my work clothes and my teacher, Donald Cunningham, who was in his final year before retiring.
To cut a long story short, I couldn’t believe there was someone, maybe lots of people, for whom stories and literature mattered – not just as an airy-fairy thing for ‘other people’ but as a vital life-giving force available to everyone, a free resource that was literally there for the taking.
I didn’t have the words to express to Mr Cunningham what all of this meant to me at the time, but we kept in touch and I was able to tell him a few years later, while studying for a literature degree at uni.
Once, when talking to my paternal grandma about the text I was reading for my studies – Paradise Lost – she said casually that she’d enjoyed it but didn’y really rate the sequel, Paradise Regained, both of which she’d borrowed from the library at some point. I was stunned. This was someone who worked in the fish yards gutting fish, who was the first woman to successfully give birth to triplets at Aberdeen’s Foresterhill hospital and then had to raise them, and my infant father, on the smell of an oily dishcloth.
Jean Dalgarno (top left) with my aunts, the dalgarno triplets
My maternal grandad, an electrician by trade, taught himself to speak fluent Spanish from tapes, again borrowed from the library, after meeting a Spanish family, who became lifelong friends, on holiday. He was also a voracious reader across multiple genres. He was proud of me, as the first in our family to go to uni. As were my gran, my mum, and a number of others in my family, who would often say variations of: I’d have loved to have gone to university … if only I had the brains.
I’d try to tell them the truth, that there were loads of not-so-smart people at uni, a surprising amount really, and so many that were way less intelligent and engaged than them.
But I don’t know that they were ever fully convinced by that.
This book, then, is something of a tribute to them, to anyone who shines as brightly as they did, despite the odds, without fully realising it.
Because of Covid and other life issues, I remember thinking as I was writing it: if this is the last thing I ever create, I want it to be something that connects with people as deeply and genuinely as possible, something that expresses what I want to say as honestly as I possibly can.
It’s a story about love and family, written with my head, of course, and my hands, but also – more than anything I’ve done before – from the heart, and that’s where I want people to feel it as they’re reading it: in their hearts.
Buy A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno (Fourth Estate).