Letting the grass grow under the Lady's Fingers

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I WAS ADMIRING an apple tree last week, with a farmer just south of Mullingar. There were such apples on the tree that I said we should get a plastic sheet, and I could climb up and shake the branches.

He said I might fall.

So we went instead to look at his Miscanthus grass, 20 acres of green narrow leaf that rose to a height of 10ft and was surrounded by a fence equally high, which he erected to keep out the wild deer.

Where the Miscanthus now grows was once a great field for sowing. The farmer grew cabbage and parsnip and carrot. And in the very centre was an apple orchard, and on the perimeter ditches there were plum and cherry trees.

"It was beautiful back then," he said. "I got great satisfaction from seeing things grow. From looking back in the autumn, and knowing they all did well."

There were no sprays or fertilisers in those days, only what the cows provided. And in summer he wore a sack around his knees as he knelt on the ground and weeded the fields.

He showed me the old milking parlour, where the machines now stand in a cloud of cobwebs. The steel urns for milk, the long pipes across the ceiling, and the old claws and clusters that went around the cows' teats.

Then he reached up, and from the top of a partition wall he took down a three-legged stool made from the slice of a beech tree.

"That," he said, "was my mother's." He put it back up into the cobwebs with great care.

In the corner there was a stack of turf, clamped so tightly that it looked like a black brick wall.

"Even the turf-cutting is over now," he said.

On the way back to the house we passed the apple tree again. "Those apples were called Lady's Fingers," he said. "Real sweet."

I said: "I fell from a tree once, when I was eight years old, but it wasn't an apple tree. Apple trees are not tall enough to be dangerous."

In fact it was a fir tree, and Dr McCabe drove out to our house in order to establish that I had no broken bones. When it was clear that I had been spared a winter in plaster casts, or a lifetime in a wheelchair, the doctor said it was by the grace of God that I had not been killed. I knew better; my life had been spared by the soft branches of the tree that broke my fall on the way down. But I didn't disabuse the doctor of his personal faith.

I was shocked two years later when I saw the same doctor stagger on to the stage of the town hall, wearing a tuxedo, a top hat and a white silk scarf around his neck. I didn't think such an earnest man capable of comic frolics, and I was mesmerised as he mimicked the toffee-nosed rogues who drank too much in the local golf club. The audience loved him. As Fr Gargan said, handing out the cup: "He had the place in stitches."

In Cavan, we were accustomed to doctors with unusual talents. Long ago, Dr Galligan could play tunes on the tin whistle that eased the labour pains of women in country houses, where epidurals had not yet been imagined. And there were a few temporary surgeons who, according to legend, often required a stiff drink in the Farnham Hotel to steady their hands before the morning's work across the street.

A friend of mine once told me that he went under the knife of a surgeon whose wolfhound would sleep on a mat at the front door, as the good doctor busied himself like a butcher, collecting tonsils and other titbits on a kidney dish, for his hound's supper.

I shared these memories with the farmer, hoping they might cheer him up. But they had little effect. He gazed with a cold equanimity at the Lady's Fingers lying on the ground beneath the apple tree, and his hand moved through the cobwebs that clung to the old milking machines as if he understood the passing of time, and the growing of things, and the withering of all things in the end.

"I know very little about doctors," he said. "I was never a day sick in my life."