DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS TALKING to a couple of Travellers last week. The wife sat very still, on a hard chair, with her back to the wall; her husband beside her, on the sofa, in the front room of their beautiful home, writes Michael Harding.
There were porcelain figures in every nook and cranny. China cabinets chock-full of white dinner plates with gold-rimmed teacups. Small clusters of saintly figures – Padre Pio, the Virgin Mary, St Antony, and a communion of others – huddled in the corners on ornate coffee tables.
Above the mantlepiece was a majestic barrel-topped wagon flanked by two mighty horses on their hind legs; all in dazzling white porcelain.
The husband sprawled on the sofa, and the lady wife kept her back straight as we all enjoyed the open fire, and chatted about Longford, Leitrim, and other far-off places.
The conversation began with rabbits. We shared memories of times when rabbits were easily caught in the open fields. Fresh meat was constantly available until someone devised the pernicious strategy of infecting the population of Irish rabbits with a hideous disease, just to diminish the damage they were doing to vegetable plots.
Then we spoke of ghosts; of the shadows who walk beside human beings in the dead of night; ghouls with red eyes or long teeth, who grin at us when we sink to the deepest level of our unconscious. The little keening women in ditches, or the dog with the flaming feet, or the man who walks through the graveyard gates at midnight, or the tall man with the top hat and the tailed coat who appears at the gable of a house, or a trailer, or at the far end of a halting site, when someone is ready to die.
A young man came into the room. He had coal-black hair and dark eyes, and the swagger of a gallant that García Lorca might have crossed deserts to admire. He listened for a while and then said: “Of course, none of that is true. Them is all yarns. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
I did not disagree. Ghosts are merely the imaginative residue of a time before electricity.
And yet yarns are a weave, a tapestry of talk that spins a strange web in the mind; and like the Dreamcatcher, yarns can net the truth in us, and draw us to the core of our being.
The porcelain ornaments on the mantlepiece were beautiful, but I suspect that most young Travellers have as little faith in barrel-topped wagons and shelter tents as they do in ghosts.
Then the young man went away, while the older couple and I continued talking superstitious blather at the open fire in a state of dozy self-contentment.
After a while I remarked that I got lost one night recently, because I was using a satnav, and when I was driving through Trim the satnav recognised nothing.
The roads were new, so the maps on the tiny screen on my dashboard indicated that I was driving through fields most of the time, and the lady in the machine was going daft, telling me over and over again to turn left.
The old man laughed.
“I know the feeling,” he said. “I do go looking for old halting sites sometimes, but most of them have been wiped out.”
And he mumbled out lots of old names. Places I had heard tell of from Travellers in Offaly 15 years ago; places long gone, that had tender and revealing names: White Lady’s Road, the Cross and Gates, the Gammy Forge, Bradley’s Corner, the Red-Eyed Girls.
And he talked of Cavan too, for Cavan was a great place for tin in the old days. There was a man, he told me, who used to stand at the Market Square in Cavan selling sheets of it, and the Travellers would go there to buy from him. It was good quality. And there was a great demand in Cavan for tinsmiths. The bakers wanted trays and the farmers wanted buckets.
“I can still see that man selling his tin,” the old man said. “And in my sleep, I do still dream of the old halting sites. That necklace of green venues around Westmeath; lovely places under dripping trees, in the summer rain.”
“And the horses,” his wife added, sorrowfully. “The horses.”
