God be with you Ireland and the Old Bog Road

Back then old people wore black, and passed their days rolling up newspapers into firelighters, or dangling string in front of cats . . .

I WAS IN Rochfortbridge one morning, in a thick fog, waiting for the bus that goes through at 8am, on its way to the airport. A friend of mine was going to London. I said goodbye and then drove back to Mullingar, humming The Old Bog Road. The Old Bog Road, is still a very popular song in midland lounges, where three-piece bands, usually consisting of drums, keyboards and accordion, play genteel ballads discreetly, so as not to disturb elderly couples drinking lemonade.

When I got home I lit the fire and sat there all morning, dozing, as if I too was an elderly doddering man, like the ones that in my youth always sat in the corner of every kitchen. Back then old people wore black, and passed their days rolling up newspapers into firelighters, or dangling string in front of cats, or minding grandchildren from falling into the fire.

But it’s amazing the way the world has changed. The Celtic Tiger emptied all the houses, because people became too busy with work to remain at home, and so the old folks went off to nursing homes where they could sit in the community room and dream of long ago.

Sometimes when I visit my mother, in the community room of a nursing home, her eyes are closed as she dozes, and I wonder what she dreams of. A time before telephones and emails I suppose, when lovers wrote their sweet nothings in letters that were transported across the countryside by horse-drawn coaches. A dream with no soundtrack, except perhaps for the clanging hammer of a blacksmith sweating over his fires, making wheels for carts, and shoes for horses that pulled heavy loads on the stoney highway.

My mother was reared at a time when the clop of a horse was the only noise on the roads, and traffic was the sight of a thousand horses gathered on a fair green.

At the fair of Ballyboggin the buyers came from Ulster, and brought their horses home by train, through Cavan, and onwards through the North. Before they entered the wagons, the horses’ shoes were removed. Michael Geraghty, a local historian in Westmeath, told me once that on one single day, his grandfather removed the shoes of 58 horses, heading north.

The day my friend left for London I had lunch with the General, and I was waxing away to him about how lovely the world was long ago.

“You’re daft,” he said. “The past was truly horrible. In the 1950s,” he said, “you could meet three or four grown men in any farmyard, as idle as infants, all gawking out of hay barns or cow byres, or standing against the gable wall of the house, like imbeciles.”

“Why was that?” I wondered.

“It was on account of the Mammy,” he explained. “People were very poor, but the Mammy would be too proud to let her sons go out and work as labourers. She’d keep them at home, until they were destroyed.” Not that there’s anything wrong with pride. We’re all proud of one thing or another, until we grow old, and find ourselves holding the wall for support, or foraging in Marks Spencer for long johns, and trousers with elastic in the waist.

When I was young I stopped in Harry's of Kinnegad one wet Friday night. A band with the usual accordion, drum and keyboard were belting out The Old Bog Road, and at the bar there was a man with a cigar.

“I’ll advertise for no man,” he declared to the barman, as he tore the label off the cigar, before lighting it. I watched him swallow a few brandies before he went to the dining area for steak and onions.

He was no imbecile, and he looked as pleased as if Mammy had just left him the farm. Or as if he had just sold a horse for a ball of money. He looked like someone who had travelled the world, made his fortune, and just arrived home to enjoy it. But what made him so cocky, I do not know, because we didn’t speak.

Nor do I know what's in store for anyone who gets the airport bus from Rochfortbridge. Maybe they too will make fortunes, or just end up carrying sandwich boards, on the sidewalks of the world, advertising exotic boutiques, with earplugs shielding them from some city's din. And I don't know what they'll be listening to, on their iPods, but it certainly won't be The Old Bog Road.