Life is a song, and we have one chance to sing it well

ONCE UPON a time there was a fisherman who caught a pike.

He saw it in the river one day, following a swan and her signets. Suddenly the pike heaved up and swallowed one of the signets. And then he took the second. And eventually he ate them all, including the big mammy swan.

The fisherman said to himself, “By jingo that’s a big pike.” So he took a dead dog from the boot of his car and tied barbed wire around it, and threw the dog into the lake and wound the other end of the wire around the rear mudguard of his Morris Minor. After a few minutes, the fish took the bait and he landed the leviathan on the bank. At least that’s what the fisherman told me.

On another occasion, he caught an even larger monster; a fish so big that he used the scales to roof the house.

“Well that must certainly have been a very, very big fish,” I said.

“Well now, I’ll not say it was a big fish,” he declared, modestly, “no, but the water level in Lough Erne went down six inches when I took him out.”

The General laughed when I told him this, because he enjoys fishing yarns, but the evening was too cold to go out in his boat so we decided to sit and watch the television instead.

We watched Henry V on BBC and the General wept when the king spoke the famous speech about how great it was to fight for England, and how lucky all those soldiers were to be on the battlefield, and how those who were not there that day would think themselves afterwards accursed.

“That’s the spirit that made England great,” he whispered so as not to spoil the mood. “High culture,” he called it. “And you don’t just see it in the army. You see it in the ballet schools and in the Royal Opera. They have a sense of history.”

He always gets sentimental about the British in bad weather.

“Do you realise,” he said, “that even though we in Ireland give off yards about the Black and Tans, the fact is that they weren’t all bad. I remember an old man in Ballaghaderreen telling me that when the convent was burning it was a Black and Tan from the barracks who had the courage to go in and rescue the statue of the Virgin Mary.”

Of course, he wasn’t admitting that it might have been the Black and Tans who started the fire in the first place.

I said: “General, sometimes you sound like you know absolutely nothing about history.” He said: “I know everything about it. In fact, the entirety of all Irish history is written in one word on the door of every bank in the country – Pull.”

After that he headed home.

When he was gone, I took out the bamboo flute and played a few tunes. Little Lotus brought me the instrument from China and I’d been rasping on it all week as I looked out at the clouds coming in from the Atlantic with more rain.

When I was sad as a child I used to play a tin whistle with tears running down my cheeks, to cheer myself up, and in middle age I bought a flute in Grehans of Boyle to comfort myself, and I’ve never looked back since.

But the odd thing about music is that it arises from silence; those empty spaces between the notes. When someone sings a song they must begin with the first note. And that first note is born out of silence. And as they finish the song they come to the last note and the last note falls back again into silence.

When someone plays an instrument, they too begin with a first note which is plucked from nothing, and inevitably, whether they like it or not, and no matter how many rounds of a jig they can endure, they must eventually reach the last note, and that last note again falls into emptiness.

Last week, I stood for the first time at my mother’s grave, newly opened on a windswept hill outside the town of Cavan and it struck me that life is a song sung once and once only.

At 96, her death was not unexpected, but young or old we are all one in this; that we have one chance to sing our song and sing it well. The rest is silence.