Driving with Daisy. Tom Nestor

       To May

      During the time of the Second World War and for some years after that, food was scarce. At that time we only went to the town of Rath when we needed new clothing or when some broken piece of farm machinery had to be fixed. Everything else we bought in Tommy Hanley’s shop in Creeves. It was a couple of miles away, about half the distance to Rath. A person could buy most things there: groceries, hardware, animal feed, twine, coal. ‘Almost everything from a needle to an anchor,’ his trade slogan read. It was written in a brass plate beside the entrance door. If he didn’t have something, he would order it down from Dublin or out from Limerick. It made the item sound very rare and important.

      Dublin was so far away it might as well have been in another country. Limerick was a city that made our rural village sound like a backwater.

      When we needed something from Hanley’s our neighbour Pat the Dog would fetch it. We called him Pat the Dog because that was a saying of his. Instead of saying ‘cool down’ when someone got upset and angry, he would say, ‘pat the dog’. He cycled home from work on a Friday night like a laden camel. There was an oilskin bag hanging from each side of the handlebars. There was a larger one dangling from the bar. The carrier was so full that it was falling over the side. I can see him battling against the wind and the bike wobbling as he came up the hill by Mick Smith’s cottage.

      When the war ended, word reached us about the wonderful things that had reached the shops in Rath. My older sisters, wiser and more in tune with the outside world, had heard that there were oranges and bananas arriving in Dublin. It was only a matter of time before they found their way to our neck of the woods. But wonderful as these fruits were, they were nothing compared to chocolate. It melted on the tongue and gave a pleasure that was hard to describe. Listening to them, I saw Rath as a kind of caravan stop where traders brought magical gifts from a land of spices on the far side of the world.

      When I was eleven and we had a little more money to spend, I became the messenger boy. Every Saturday morning I set out for Rath. It was five and a half miles away and I did most of the journey on foot. There was only one bicycle in our house, which my eldest brother had wrecked. The pedals were worn down. There were no brakes. The front wheel was more square than round and the handlebars had been twisted out of shape.

      In the beginning, I looked forward to those trips. I set off with an oilskin message bag and my mother’s message list pinned to the lining of my jacket. I saw myself as a kind of pioneer. I was heading into unknown territory, not knowing what adventures I might find on the way. I would meet buffalo and coyotes, silver fox and grizzly bear. Perhaps the Indians would be raiding out of the forests in the Massey estate.

      Paddy White, who worked on Colonel Cripps’s stud farm, was responsible for putting those kind of ideas into my head. He let me read the Western books that the Colonel loaned to him. My mind was a whirl of sounds and smells, of mesas, prairie and heather. I believed those stories. I thought the cowboy was as natural a part of America as the farmer was of mine. I thought all Indians were savages and that all white pioneers were perfect Christians. Like the white missionaries who went from Ireland to Africa, they spoke the true word of God against the evil works of the devil.

      After a few Saturdays my journey became known. Children kept watch for me behind windows and half-closed doors. I was a God-sent messenger who went to Rath every Saturday, along a route that no one had travelled much before, except the Marshall.

      McMahon’s first name was Jim but he was called Marshall after Napoleon’s military hero. Once a week, with a full cart, he came out from the boglands around his home and sold peat from door to door in Rath. As he journeyed to the town, people came out of their houses, not to buy his turf but to ask him to do messages for them. He obliged and they wanted more. They blamed him for the poor quality of the goods he brought, queried the change and were angry with him if he forgot. So he stopped serving. He sat up there in the high seat that jutted out from the creel of turf. He greeted everyone he passed with the civil salute and a shake of his head. Every time they asked him, he had the same answer: ‘Don’t do no messages for no one no more.’

      I would have loved to give the Marshall’s answer to Mrs Mack. Hers was the first house I passed on my way and she was waiting from the moment I came on to the road at the end of our lane. She had a tongue like a rasp and a war in her mind about the unfairness of the world she had been cast into. Poor as she made herself out to be, she would have the price of half-a-dozen lamb chops, which we could never afford then. I got the money for the meat wrapped up in one piece of paper. As I tried to walk away she grabbed me by the shoulder and gave me another piece. The second roll of paper had more money and a list of horse names. I was to go to the clerk in the bookmaker’s shop and have him transfer them onto a betting slip. If I wasn’t allowed near the counter, she told me, I was to wait until some adult I knew and could trust came along and would place the bet for me. Innocent as I was and afraid of her tongue, I accepted it. She knew exactly what her winnings would be if either of the wagers came good.

      I dealt with Mrs Mack by taking another route across the fields. It brought me out at White’s Cross, a hundred yards beyond her house. Beyond the cross I would come upon the Harolds, father and son. For years they had lived without a woman in the house and each had almost become a copy of the other. Jimmy was thirty years younger than his father, and the only difference I could see was that one face looked older. They spoke the same words in the same accent.

      Both were very shy and would choose to avoid people as far as possible. My father said that they owned one pipe. Most of the talk that passed between them was an argument about its use. Years later, when the father had passed on, I came across Jimmy one day cutting thistles in a field. He was singing and I was amazed as I listened. Not only could Jimmy sing very well, but the song he was singing was as much out of place as if he were singing an operatic aria.

      ‘I have heard the mavis singing her love song to the morn,

      I