Hard lives and rag dolls are long forgotten

The same Leitrim telegraph poles with posters of Martin McGuinness were festooned with black flags 30 years ago as Bobby Sands starved to death

ONE EVENING last week Martin McGuinness was smiling at me from a poster on a lamp post as I was drinking a glass of wine at the smokers’ tables outside a hotel, when suddenly an old woman as thin as a rake sat down beside me and said: “That’s our Martin; next president of Ireland.” She wobbled a bit on the chair, and smoked with a shaky hand.

“I’m 80,” she said, “but do you know what destroyed this country?” I said, “I haven’t a clue.” She was still gazing up at the poster and I was afraid she was going to say West Brits, but I was wrong.

“Too many credit cards,” she declared.

I said, “I’m not following you.” She said, “It’s the people that are separated that’s the trouble; they have a credit card in their married name and a credit card in their maiden name, and nobody cops on. That’s why MBNA are in trouble. Nobody can pay. And I would be devastated if Carrick-on- Shannon went downhill. Do you know what I’m going to tell you? You couldn’t get a right meal in Balinamore nowadays. We have to come over here to Cryans, or to the Bush Hotel.”

She sipped from her glass of clear gin and lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. She had a nose like a hawk and a chin that would split hailstones, and she glared with bespectacled eyes at a group of young women wearing pink bunny-girl ears on the far side of the street.

“Just look at those Jezebels!” she said, with indignation. “Do you know what I’m going to tell you?”

I didn’t.

“It’s far from hen parties I was reared. Rag dolls; that’s what we had. Me mother used to give me the flitters of old blouses to put dresses on me dolls. Oh we didn’t have it easy; Duffy’s Circus once a year, that was all. And do you know,” she continued, “I made a costume for a trapeze act one time. They used to come to me father’s house. And he’d give them a field for the tent. And one year I remember the elephant ate all the onions that were drying on the roof of the shed. No credit cards in them days. And no hen parties either.”

One of the bunny girls across the street had fallen on her bum and the rest were in fits of laughter.

“Brazen hussies,” the old woman hissed, “flashing their credit cards. But what they don’t realise yet,” she added with toxic glee, “is that there’s no pockets in a shroud.”

I got up to go.

“Are you away?” she wondered.

I was. I was heading for the Cineplex to cheer myself up, although watching Jane Eyre weeping and being humiliated for the guts of two hours did nothing to improve my spirits.

And I was still thinking of the old woman, and her relish at having survived long enough to enjoy gin and cigarettes at 80, despite what she considered a hard life. In fact, her life of rag dolls and circuses was heaven compared with the misery of Jane Eyre’s existence in a corset.

As I drove past the hotel later, Martin McGuinness was still smiling at me from under the lamplight, but the old lady had vanished, her table taken by another group of unruly hens, in pink hats, black corsets and wild stilettos.

Further out towards Balinamore, it dawned on me that the only posters I had seen all evening were of Martin McGuinness, gazing at me from the gates of various cattle marts, from the railings of a bridge, from the gable of a derelict pub, and from all the telegraph poles along the dark and lonely ditches of Leitrim.

The same telegraph poles that were festooned with black flags 30 years ago, as Bobby Sands, MP for South Fermanagh, starved to death, and Republicans came away from his deathbed vowing that their day of triumph would eventually come.

And as I thought of Fermanagh, just a few miles away, it was impossible to avoid thinking also of the girl on the street who died holding her father’s hand, whispering, “Daddy I love you.” A girl who never reached 21, never mind 80.

And I don't know if she read Jane Eyre,or made dresses for dolls, but she certainly ended up as lifeless as a rag doll beneath the rubble in Enniskillen, on that long ago and long forgotten Remembrance Day.