9th March 2oo6

Dear Mother,
Peggy was your favourite niece, wasn’t she? She spent a lot of time at our house when we were growing up, looking after us, pushing the younger ones around in the purple and silver pram, and then, when she married herself, pushing the same pram up Ballyhussa boreen with her own children in it. She wasn’t that much older than me, probably no more than five years, but for some reason I always associated her with your generation. Why did she marry Mattie? Was it because she had to? Because it seems to me looking back on it now that they were never a married couple in any real sense of the word. They were never together – or if they were it was only when staggering home together from the pub in Carroll’s Cross. If he wasn’t there she was there, and visa versa; they never seemed to spend any time at home together looking after the children.
You must have seen the writing on the wall for the marriage from a long way off. Was that why you hatched the plan to get Peggy the house? So that she could leave Mattie and have a place of her own in which to rear her family? There was no fear of me; I was newly married and living in England now.
The first part of the plan worked fine. And my loss was Peggy’s gain. Incidentally, you were right when you said I would never have lived there anyway. I would have sold it before the ink on the agreement was dry.
But the second part of the plan backfired badly didn’t it? Because separating Peggy from Mattie didn’t stop her drinking; in fact nothing has ever stopped Peggy from drinking.
It didn’t make her a better mother either, did it? At some point it dawned on you that you weren’t going to change her for the better, because as time passed you distanced yourself from her, so that your expression ‘walking the road with the tinkers’, could just as easily have applied to her as to the many others you disapproved of.
Your loving son
Tom

Dear grand-uncle Mikey,
When you marched off to war in the spring of 1915 did you know what you were fighting for? Or did you care? Was it purely on economic grounds – at least the British Army would feed you and keep you and put a few shillings in your pocket at the end of each week – or did you have an overwhelming desire to kill Germans? But perhaps it never even entered your head that you might end up in the green fields of France, a part of the greatest military slaughtering exercise that ever took place?
You certainly never thought you would lose a leg in it, or that your friend, JN, would lose his life there. I still don’t know where you enlisted or with what regiment, but I imagine the place was either Waterford city or Clonmel and the regiment either the Royal Munster Fusiliers or the Royal Irish Regiment. Was it a spur of the moment decision? Did one of you say to the other – ‘come on, let’s join up, there’s nothing to do around this place?’ Was that how it was? And how did your sister feel about J going away? Or did J not know her then? Maybe it was later – when you were home on leave – that he met her? You see how many questions there are? The only people who know the answers for sure are all dead now so I can only guess what they might be.
I wish you were still around in 1973, when an Australian singer called Eric Bogle was so moved by a visit to the WW1 memorials in France that he wrote a song called ‘The Green Fields of France’. It begins:
Well, how do you do young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while neath the warm summer sun
I’ve been working all day and I’m nearly done
I see by your graveside you were only nineteen
When you joined the great fallen in nineteen sixteen
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or young Willie McBride was it slow and obscene
Chorus:
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly
Did they sound the dead march as they lowered you down
And did the band play the Last Post and chorus
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest.
There is more in the same vein but I am sure you get my drift. I first heard it sung by a group called the Fury Brothers. You would have liked the Furies; saloon bar musicians with voices like a load of gravel sliding down a chute. The eldest brother, Finbarr I think his name is, played your favorite instrument, the melodeon. You told me many times you carried yours around with you during the war, strapped to your back. And showed me the dent in it which had prevented a lump of shrapnel from injuring or killing you. I wonder if it was true, or if you made stories up for goggle-eyed young boys like John and myself ?
I still remember the one you told about the ‘Big Push’ of 1917 – November I believe it was – when one of your comrades took out a German machine-gun nest with a grenade using the road bowling technique he had perfected bowling the roads in his native Cork. You said he had saved many of you from being slaughtered that day, and that he had subsequently been awarded the Military Cross.
I wonder now if you knew John Condon from Waterford, who is widely acknowledged as the youngest soldier ever to enlist in the British Army? He must have stood out because he was only 12 years of age when he enlisted, and still only 14 years old when he died during a gas attack in 1915. His burial plot in France is now a shrine, and one of the most visited of all the graves. A shrine to what, I wonder – the folly of youth?

Your grand nephew
Tom



Dear father,
The Sunday night you died you had been dancing with my mother - a slow waltz I expect – when your heart gave up, and you died right there on the dance floor, in full view of all your friends and neighbors.
I, who had been drinking heavily some seventy miles away, learned of it when I was awakened in the early hours of the following morning by a member of the local Gardai. I can still recall it; fuzzy-headed from the effects of the alcohol, and wondering what kind of country it was that had the police waking up people in the middle of the night to tell them their father is dead.
Later, sobered up, and in the cold reality of daylight, I realized that however little we had said to each other in the past there was no chance of expanding on it now – or ever again.
You were always the silent type; I wouldn’t say you were secretive but you were definitely silent. This poem is for you

The Night the Music Died
He lay in the box quite comfortably
His waxen face staring into infinity
Looking much better in death than he had ever done in life.
And all I could do was peer at him through slatted fingers
From the back of the room.
The ever-present smell of tanning and leather aprons was absent now
More than forty seeping years of it
Scrubbed away one last time.

The moped which was a natural progression
From pedal-power when his legs gave out,
Lay discarded in the coal-house.
No driver you see; And mother still had her shopping to do.
He dug turf, cut down young Sally trees,
And turned over his bit of stony ground
Endlessly.
In summer he clipped sheep slowly
With a machine bought by post from Clery’s.
Carefully stowing it away in its box when the shearing was done.

The chalk pipes he sucked on,
Their stems held together with blood pricked from his thumb,
And his three bottles of Sunday night Guinness
Standing corked still under the counter
Were redundant now.
Who would dance a half-set with her now
My mother enquired of no one in particular.
The smoky saloon bar stunned that the music had felled him,
Knocked him to the floor in the middle of the tune.
He lay there with a smile on his face
Knowing it was over.
And I never got to know what was on his mind.

Later, we put him in the ground
And sadness trickled down me like dust through my fingers.
And afterwards, everybody stood around
Saying what a great man he was.
Slapping the back of my overcoat
Sure he gave forty years to that tannery
And what did it give him? I wanted to shout to the throng.
A gold watch and a tin tray
And both had his name spelled wrong.

Your loving son
Tom