Religion and superstitions may be poppycock to the General, but they still have a place in my Christmas tales, writes MICHAEL HARDING
ME AND the General were trying to figure out where to put the crib. I’m still attached to the story of Christmas, though the General says that religion is just high-class superstition.
Eventually, I put it on top of the broken piano, behind the tree, so it’s there if people look for it, but it’s not in your face.
“I think that’s the right balance,” the General said.
Then I noticed the cat behind the piano with a bird in her jaws. I released the bird, flung the cat out the door, and then inspected the victim; it was a tiny wren, and he had lost a leg and some tail feathers, though he could still fly up against the window, and eventually out into the laurels, when I opened the front door.
“Christmas is all about the baby Jesus,” I told the General, “It’s a love story.” “Nonsense,” he replied. “It’s all poppycock; like stories about fairies and ghosts.” I said, “I believe in ghosts as well; especially out the Granard road, where you live!”
A Traveller woman once told me that on a certain road near Granard, there is an old tree, under which she and her husband once camped, and on the following morning, a farmer asked them did they sleep well.
“Now that you mention it,” her husband said, “I was awake all night.”
“Well,” said the farmer, “don’t expect to sleep tonight or any other night, if you remain under that tree, because that is what we call the Hanging Tree.”
The General dismissed the story. “People are not as superstitious as that nowadays,” he said.
Maybe not, but the Traveller woman’s story still echoes in my mind.
“There used to be a shop in Granard,” she said, “that you could be in all night and day, drinking. And me husband was in it late one night, until it was time to go home. This was years after we found out about the Hanging Tree. And there were a few of the boys with him, and they had the pony and cart with them. And on the way home didn’t they come down that same road again, by mistake. And they were passing the big tree, when a man walked out from behind it; he’d be roughly about 7ft in height, with a Macintosh coat on him and a top hat, and his face was as white as the range. And he walked behind their cart fair and easy, and says me husband: ‘Look at that man, walking at the back of the cart!’ And the rest of them looked, but they could see nothing.
“Only me husband could see him, and he had a beer bottle that he had brought with him from the pub and he flung it at the tall man that was walking behind them, and then the man vanished.
“We were living in a house at that time, and me husband come home, and got up the stairs, and went to bed, and in the morning I went down to cook the breakfast, and I called up, but there wasn’t a gig out of him, so I called again, and again, and then I went up. And God bless the mark, me poor husband was lying on the broad of his back in the bed, and his two hands that way, across his chest, and his face as white as the range, and him as dead as a dead fly.”
The day after the cat caught the bird I went to Dublin, and on the train I met a young singer. She was going up to her weekly singing class, and on her lap were sheets for If Music be the Food of Love, by Henry Purcell. She told me that she was performing in A Christmas Carol, at Mullingar Arts Centre.
“It’s a brilliant show,” she said. “It’s been running for two weeks and everyone loves it.”
I know that A Christmas Carol is full of ghosts, and the tall man behind the tree might just as easily have walked out of a novel by Charles Dickens – but of course as the General says – it’s all poppycock.
Nonetheless, that evening, when I took the crib from the piano and placed it on the mantelpiece where everyone can see it, and I found If Music be the Food of Loveon YouTube, I started wondering about the one-legged wren, and where he might be laying his poor little head this Christmas.