Life lessons learnt from pigs and horses

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:LAST MONDAY morning, the sky was blue, so I abandoned the breakfast dishes on the kitchen table, the dirty linen, the unmade bed and the unhoovered floors, just to walk through suburbia while the sun was still shining.

Lawns were drenched with flowering hydrangeas, fuchsia, variegated ivies and big juicy red rosehips. The laurel and box hedges had everywhere been clipped back to smooth and severe lines. Clearly, the middle classes had not been idle over the weekend. The cut lawns of Ballinderry glistened in a film of dew and the air was crisp.

I went to Dunnes Stores, where an old woman stood in the queue ahead of me, counting her change. She was suspicious that the checkout girl might have cheated her. Everyone waited patiently - there was no telling how great were the things she had lost in a lifetime, or what was in her heart as she walked away muttering something about life not being fair.

"Special Offer: 1.99!" was plastered on my bag of spinach, and the girl said that it was great value. I agreed. She said that she puts spinach leaves in her salad, instead of lettuce.

At dinner that evening with some friends, the hostess told me that she sometimes puts curry powder in her salad dressing to make it spicy. I asked her did she ever use spinach instead of lettuce leaves, and she looked at me as if I had asked her did she wear pyjamas in bed.

"Yes, of course," she said. "Doesn't everyone?"

Far from salads I was reared, and far from horses too.

I'm amazed at what goes on in the stables of Co Westmeath. For example, I never knew that horses could fall in love. And apparently it causes no end of trouble. A guest at the dinner table said that he had a gelding and a mare; they stabled next to each other; they travelled in the one horsebox; they went out to grass together, and they were both as happy as the day was long. And then he had to sell the mare.

When she went away the other horse wouldn't take any feed, refused any attempts to be put into a horsebox alone, bit the arses off other mares that came near him, and stood at the ditch, roaring at the sky as if the love of his life might still be somewhere just over the hill, or as if his wounded cry might bring her bolting back to him.

I once sat on a horse the size of a wolfhound. I was about three years of age, and it was a little piebald nag on the strand at Bundoran. A man lifted me into the saddle, held the reigns and walked me the length of the beach. All the while I kept an eye on my father, in his suit and soft hat, as he sat on a tartan rug in the distance, with my mother, and a wicker basket of sandwiches and dainty cream buns.

After I had shared this memory with the assembled guests, the hostess tersely suggested that it might have been a pony and not a horse that I had been on.

Apart from a lifelong devotion to cats, I know damn-all about animals, even though I am told that my grandfather was a pig dealer. He would buy pigs in Belfast, and convey them by train back to McCarrons' bacon factory in Cavan. An old man once told me how a crowd of young boys would gather at the station wall as the train pulled in, everyone hoping that big John Finlay was on board and that they might earn a few pennies driving the pigs from the station down the hill to the factory.

In my own childhood the factory owner, Tom McCarron, a regal figure with watchful eyes, had a Jaguar car that floated silently down Farnham Road, and bounced up on the pavement outside the factory like a big boat coming to rest on a beach. I would finger the chrome cat on the bonnet as I walked home from school, and listen to the squeal of the pigs inside the factory, as they were shuttled along cables upside down to their awful death.

I could not imagine what was in their hearts, but I certainly deduced that for some unfortunate creatures, life is never fair.