A traditional tune to drive away the monsoon blues

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WENT TO the Fleadh in Tullamore to round off the summer. There were hundreds of people with musical instruments slung over their shoulders, walking about the streets in the drizzle, just gawking at the world; drinking coffee and talking about long-ago sessions, fingering knick-knacks at street stalls and admiring the glistening new instruments that were on sale in the shops. Teenagers on fiddles and concertinas, scattered about the streets, playing jigs and reels for television crews.

I bought a CD of obscure flute music, in the hope of learning a few new tunes during the winter. And I sat on a bench in the main square and chatted with a button accordion player.

“Where were you for August?” he asked.

“I was away.”

“You missed the riot in Mullingar,” he said.

I told him that I had seen video footage of it; men dancing around on a lawn like a pack of agitated gorillas, brandishing hayforks and golf clubs; and women with supermarket trolleys full of stones, to keep the men on the front line supplied. The button accordion player drank coffee and watched the clouds. The drizzle had stopped.

“I had a bad summer,” he said. “I was at the railway station one morning, on my way to the RDS, with two horse blankets. I only left them out of me hand for a minute, and when I came back they were gone.”

He stared across the street, to where three women in long dresses and brightly coloured scarves loitered, outside the Post Office.

“But it was the pheasants that really broke me heart,” he explained.

Suddenly I remembered walking his land in early May, to admire the tidy coop he had built in a sheltered hollow for the little brown birds; more than 100 of them, strutting about behind wire mesh, and surrounded by an electric fence that would burn the snout off any predator.

The fox had slaughtered more than a dozen before he put up the fence, but when I viewed the coop, he was optimistic about the future; it looked as secure as Guantánamo Bay.

“But they’re all gone now,” he declared. “Every one of them.” I said the fox must have had wire-cutters, and an enormous appetite.

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t the fox, it was the monsoon. I went away for a week and when I came back they were all drowned in a small lake. I never thought that a sandpit would hold that measure of water.” He winced.

I assembled my black flute and played a tune, to cheer him up. But even music cannot lighten the heart of a man who has lost 70 pheasants in one night.

And then the women from the post office decided to join us; Romanian women in long skirts and headscarves.

One of them was old and as plump as a Christmas turkey, and nothing less than €2 would satisfy her little hand. I played a tune as the youngest one danced; a teenager in a long brown dress and a sky-blue blouse and a black frock-length waistcoat. Her young face was encased in a green scarf, and realising that my friend was not happy, she sat beside him and linked his arm, and made him smile by leaning her head on his shoulder.

The third woman was also young, but looked gaunt and delicate, and she wore a sheepskin coat with fur at the rim, like the ones that used to hang on the top of stalls in the Dandelion Market on St Stephen’s Green, years ago.

The tune I had played was called My Darling is Asleep, and when the gaunt woman heard this she came over to me and said that she was a widow.

“My darling is asleep,” she repeated, slowly.

They moved off like birds as suddenly as they had come, slipping through the crowd as nifty as swallows through the air.

But just then I noticed John Daly, a fiddle-player from Mallow, sitting outside a coffee shop across the street, and Padraig Sweeney, one of Roscommon’s finest flute-players, strolling towards us, and Art Duffy from Derry, at the door of a music shop, clutching a new Odyssey flute in its silver case. It was only two o’clock, and the last lovely afternoon of summer was about to begin.

mharding@irish-times.ie