Virginia in 1956 and sixty years later

My old friend Virginia Dillon died this week at 94. She'd lived a long, active and thoughtful life.

When I took this picture six or seven years ago, she was recovering quickly from a stroke. She was still hopeful that she would move back home from the care home she was then resident in. But she never did move home, at least not for very long, and she died in her room at this care home.

Here she was showing me -- in fact she gave me -- her official graduation portrait from May 1956 when she got her first degree, a BA (Ed) which allowed her to advance in the job she already had -- a schoolteacher. Ten years later, she went back to university and got an MA, writing an excellent thesis, still read widely, on Irish linguistic holdovers in the folk speech of the stretch of coast she lived on all her life.

And thirty-odd years later still, I started recording her memories, something I did for the following ten or fifteen years whenever we could get the chance. I have archived well over a hundred hours of those recordings. I hope to publish something based on it.

Virginia had a steel-trap mind, and a prodigious memory. I have often thought of her as a modern Irish bard. She never wrote poetry, nor sang, but she was a receptacle for oral history like no one else I have known, and a storyteller of top quality.