As the country enters a new era, our politicians are no better than rabbits caught in headlights, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I WANTED a bell for my bicycle, so I went to Coyne Cycles in Kinnegad last Saturday. Afterwards I paid a visit to a friend, an old woman who lives just outside the town.
She gave me tea and brown bread with homemade marmalade and we talked about Kinnegad in the old days when everyone travelled by bicycle and the tailor sat in his shop window, and the tannery cured cattle hides and exported them to swanky leather shops in England.
“My mother died in childbirth,” the woman declared. “She had eight children, and she was only 38 and I was only 15. After the funeral, the priest came to the house and said he had all the arrangements made to take us away to an institution in Kells. And my little brother was sitting on Daddy’s lap, and my sister was at his feet on the floor, and all of us were around him, holding on to his shirt. The priest told Daddy that he would never be able to manage all those children on his own. ‘That bit of land you have wouldn’t feed snipes,’ the priest said. ‘So we’ll take the children off your hands’.”
“That must have been a dreadful moment,” I said.
“Yes, it was,” she said. “But thank God, my father spoke up. He said, ‘If it’s all right with you, your reverence, I’ll keep my children as long as I can, and when I can’t, I’ll let you know’.
“And the clergyman never came to see us ever again, or never inquired if we died of hunger or not.”
On the way home I noticed a barrel-top wagon in a field with a couple of piebald gypsy cobs with thick and hairy legs grazing nearby. A family huddled around an open fire with a boiling kettle.
Scrap iron was piled at a distance. Two teenage boys sat by the fire, quiet and gentle.
Their father said they were having a better life on the road than they would have in any housing estate. We chatted for a while about wagon designs; the ornamental scrolls and gold leaf that mark English gypsy wagons, and the horse and other figurative works that mark Irish Traveller wagons.
“I was born on a farm in Kildare,” the man said. “I brought the barrel-top wagon in from Wales.”
I asked them whether they thought the world was falling apart, but they just laughed. “That’s the kind of thing people in houses worry about,” the woman said.
When I got home, two men with guns and dogs were in the stable yard lacing their boots before marching up the fields in search of rabbits or wild pheasants. I didn’t try to engage them in conversation because I know nothing about the sport of shooting.
The only time I ever tried to shoot anything was in Fermanagh. A friend strapped me to a gun one day, threw a bucket in the air and told me to fire. I did so before he could get out from under the flying bucket. The shot went so close to his ears that it almost ruined our friendship.
There is a dread in the air before a gun goes off. Not a twig breaks beneath the shooter’s feet. The woodland is still. The reeds in the river make no sound. And the beating heart in the woods that the shooter wants to wound, thumps against its own ribcage. Fear oozes out into the air; the erotic scent of a death to come. The hunted animal, sensing what is about to happen, is filled with a dreadful arousal.
On Saturday’s Six One news the politicians were in a state of arousal, like agitated bees whose hive has been disturbed, and they were talking about the future as if it were a dreadful abyss.
But that’s how the cookie crumbles, I suppose.
We are on the threshold of a new era and the dross of history suddenly looks like it might be swept away in a moment. Politicians, like rabbits caught in a tractor’s headlamps, are overcome by dread. The only thing the poor creatures can do is cling to each other, and sing, “We are where we are.”
When I turned off the television I heard a loud bang, which I guessed was a shot somewhere up the fields. The gunmen had bagged my lovely friend, the pheasant, who used to loiter around the laurel hedge all winter, looking for shelter.