‘Raglan Road’, a song that has served me well

I went to RTÉ last week in a Mercedes Benz, driven by a young woman who left me off just before the Saturday Night Show began. Then I was escorted in behind the set to sit and wait, as a make-up artist dabbed my face with a powdered brush and I heard Brendan O'Connor call my name, and that was it.

I don’t remember anything else, except that I woke up in a fancy hotel and went for a morning walk in through Donnybrook and towards the city centre, until I came to the canal, where I had a chat with the ghost of Patrick Kavanagh, not far from where he is commemorated with a seat and a bronze statue.

He warned me against being inflated after my television appearance, and I thanked him for writing Raglan Road , a song I traded on for years at various student parties and in country houses in west Cavan, where I once heard it sung by a gifted singer, one night when we were all gathered in his kitchen to sing and play tunes and deliver recitations before his brother went to Australia.

The young man that was leaving showed his Aer Lingus tickets to everyone in the room, and he sang The Rocks of Bawn with such sorrow that I have never succeeded in getting his voice out of my mind.

Over the years I sang Raglan Road into the eyes of numerous girlfriends, as if each one was the only one. I sang it in Cavan pubs and around mid-summer campfires near Lough Allen, and in a small house near Clanbrassil Street where I used to visit a cheerful clutch of undergraduate feminists. A little paper man dangled by a string from the ceiling, mutilated in a comic fashion, but gender issues paled into insignificance when the music started, and although I couldn't sing well I got away with Raglan Road most of the time by phrasing Kavanagh's words with sincerity.

Not that Patrick Kavanagh was a feminist. I remember Nuala O'Faolain once declaring that Kavanagh was a formidable and verbose drunk when he came calling in the middle of the night to her friend's house where she happened to be staying, and that she got little sleep as he struggled through the night with his demons on a sofa in the corner.

Praying beside a pagan tree
As I sat on the Kavanagh seat last week, I felt slightly stunned by the dazzle of having been on a television show the previous evening.

Not far from the seat is a place where somebody's young life ended in tragedy, and I found myself praying beside a pagan tree that was drenched with tokens of grief: Christmas decorations and plastic flowers, old chimes, and a bird feeder, and a child's pink rosary beads, all entwined on the bare branches. I wished I could recite Kavanagh's A Christmas Childhood to the tree, but I could only remember the last line: "And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned/ On the Virgin Mary's blouse."

The filling station on the far side of the canal appeared vulgar and out of proportion; it’s big blue canopy eaten by the weather , and the lush green roller mops of the car wash whirring, and the price of petrol shining in red digits beneath the gaudy Maxol sign.

On the edge of the canal, cement pots that may once have held flowers were full of wild weeds and ivy crept up from the canal water and tangled its vines around anything it could.

I walked past the old red-bricked hospital on Baggot Street where I once lay with blood seeping from my lungs after a wet week camping in Mayo when I was 22, with a woman who had lovely hands.

On the street, a pale ghost of a man in a maroon hoodie crouched in the standard begging position, wrapped in a blue sleeping bag; he held his plastic cup out to the world and waited for euro to drop from the sky.

And then my driver arrived, her wide open smile showing perfect white teeth, and a sensual lower lip. She had black hair and a tight black Lycra top, and I got into her Mercedes Benz and she carried me away, like an angel in her chariot, driving me out to the M50 and then on to the M6 and down deep into the lush midlands beyond Tullamore, and all the while I sat in the passenger seat, admiring her, and singing to her the same old song, Raglan Road .