DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I GOT THE PROOFS of my new novel during the week, and spent a few days going over each sentence to make sure all the spelling and punctuation was correct, writes Michael Harding.
The inspiration occurred years ago when I was a writer-in- residence in Roscommon, and spent my time with Active Age groups listening to the stories of countrywomen who had lived colourful lives and had great treasuries of memory to enrich their old age.
I was overwhelmed by how many things they could hold in their hearts; the memories of life gone by, of things said and unsaid, of things done and not done. I listened attentively and learned everything I needed to know about writing from master storytellers.
But there was one lady who didn't come, because she had been recently bereaved, and I was encouraged to visit her, and press her to join a group. People thought it would help her get over the bereavement, if she shared some memories of all those little things that had filled her life.
I met her in her garden, as she gathered weeds in the sedate suburb of a small town. She was tall, with long fingers, and she was unwinding an orange silk headscarf as she stood in a flowerbed of yellow roses.
Her daughter fussed about making tea, as we talked in the drawing room, and the old lady complained that she had no one to help her any more.
"I don't know what I'll do now," she said. "Are you the writer?" I said I was. She said, "That's not much good to me, is it?" We stared at each other as the daughter handed out bone china cups and saucers. "Who sent you? Was it the health board?" The mother inquired.
"No," I said. "Your daughter mentioned your bereavement. And I mentioned the writers' group. So she said to come up and say hello."
"He was a very good man - " she said, " - my husband; tall, when I met him. He was a beautiful dancer." I fixed my eyes on the patterns in the carpet, and stayed quiet.
"I could never manage roses," she said. "But he was gifted with them. And he made me laugh. Though he could cry at the drop of a hat." Ham sandwiches were placed on the arm of my chair.
"A very well-bred man," she whispered. "The only cross word we ever had was about the rabbit. He insisted we eat it. Do you remember that Moira?" The daughter smiled.
"I told him I just couldn't. 'But I shot it,' he said. As if that made any difference. Oh I know he was a good shot. But not rabbits, thank you very much. How could anyone eat a rabbit?" A tear went down her cheek. She disposed of it with the back of her hand.
"There was so much I never told him," she said. "I didn't want to be annoying him."
Her daughter insisted I have another cup of tea. I refused. Then she cleared everything away, as reverently as a nun orbiting a house of bishops.
I asked the old lady could she remember the first time she met her husband. "It was at a dance in Galway," she said. "I was looking down from the balcony. We were married in Loughrea."
I told her about the writers' group and pressed her to join us. She said she'd think about it. Then she buried her nose in a handkerchief and blew like an elephant. Moira, her daughter escorted me to the front door.
But she never appeared at the writers' group. I asked the daughter some weeks later how things were, and she said her mother wasn't ready to go out just yet. "She took all his thick woollen jumpers out of the hot press," Moira said, "even his old trousers; and she wears them around the garden all day, weeding."
She died a year later. Whatever intimacies occurred behind the lace curtains of her home, or whatever memories she cherished, as she tended her husband's rose beds, were lost forever on the day she died.
