Long ago I knew an elderly Traveller woman whose father fought in the first World War. He got married to a 14-year-old girl who had 10 children by him. She died before she was 40, and he was left on the side of the road, a soldier rearing his 10 little chicks.
“He would be there at the fire,” the old woman told me, “playing a mouth organ and telling us of the places he had been in; Salonica and northern Italy. He’d sit down and explain that he was in the trenches and that there would be any amount of soldiers shot. And he got frostbitten hands and feet out of the army. He could put his hands in the fire and it wouldn’t make a difference. But he was broken-hearted all his life and at the camp fire I would sing My Mary from Murroe and he would remember his wife in the singing.”
He was buried somewhere in Cavan, she told me, and I was thinking of him recently as I walked around the place where my own family members are buried. It was near All Souls’ Day, and the sloping graveyard looked lovely despite the storms.
There’s a big tree at one end that leans across the wall. I remember the time when me and the tree were both small. Back then I could touch the leaves that stretched towards me, but now it is enormous and seems like it’s sheltering all the dead. In November I like to stand beneath it when it’s raining and remember the people I knew who are sleeping now in the earth.
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Because it’s not just my own family I recall in that graveyard. There was a beautiful girl I knew as a teenager. She died very young and she’s buried near my parents’ plot. And there was a schoolmate who was bullied in his youth and ended tragically when he fell off a balcony in a faraway holiday resort. And the dentist who gave me my first fillings lies near the gable of the church. And close to my parents’ grave, the gentle lilting musician Séamus Fay rests in peace.
In fact, I bumped into a living musician an hour earlier in the Hotel Kilmore where I had gone for a bit of dinner.
“How are things?” I asked him.
“I’m exhausted,” he said. “I’ve just finished a book.”
“Was that difficult?” I wondered.
“It was my first,” he confessed.
“Do you have a problem with literacy?” I wondered, but he laughed and said, “No, I wasn’t reading it. I was writing it.”
The winds were getting up again as I left the hotel, and a man stopped me in the car park and said I should mind myself on the roads
The conversation moved on to my accordion, which I love but can’t play. I take it everywhere with me in the back of the car.
“Is it a button accordion?” he inquired tentatively.
“It’s a piano,” I said sadly, knowing how some musicians view the piano accordion with disdain. But he reassured me.
“Any instrument that makes music is worth having,” he declared.
The winds were getting up again as I left the hotel, and a man stopped me in the car park and said I should mind myself on the roads.
“There is trees fallen everywhere,” he declared.
“It was rough last night,” says I.
“Listen,” he said, “I woke up this morning and there was a cock of hay in the front garden and a terrified little man sitting on top of it. Where have you come from, I inquired. Monaghan, he said!”
And we both laughed at the thought of a haycock sailing across Monaghan in the wind.
[ Michael Harding: No wonder the graveyards are full of young menOpens in new window ]
I was hoping that the tree in the graveyard was still standing. And sure enough it was. I walked from one plot to another but couldn’t find the Traveller woman’s father; the forgotten soldier who fought in the war. The man who was broken-hearted for decades. The tinsmith who made mugs called pin saucepans, and small ones for the children called pannikins.
“And lanterns to hold the candles in the winter tent,” his daughter told me.
“And he sat with his frostbitten hands looking at the fire and telling us stories about Salonica.”
I didn’t find his grave but as I stood beneath the tree for shelter I wished him a happy eternity. And the limbs of the tree stretched out above me as if offering shelter to anyone who might need it.
And then I drove home, and it felt very good just to be alive. I suppose that’s what November does to the soul.