Her own granny was frightened by a gramophone. It wasn't right to have a man singing in a box inside the house, her granny said. And her uncle Tommy had a musical ear. He was only a child standing in the cot when he could play The Rose of Aranmore .
And when she herself was young she got four pence for half a dozen eggs, and a pound of sugar cost four pence, so she’d stand for days waiting for eggs to drop from the hen’s arse, dreaming of sugar.
When I arrived at her back door, she said: “Your thoughts betray you like the lady with the monkey.”
She had white hair and she made tea and we ate warm bread in the kitchen.
“Did anything ever frighten you as a child?” I wondered.
“The Germans,” she replied. “I was terrified in case they’d come this far. There was a big house near here with a thousand-acre field and they put stakes in the field so planes couldn’t land.”
I tried to imagine the stakes in the field as if Youtube existed back then.
“Were there tragedies in your youth?” I wondered.
“There were no inhalers,” she replied, “and the forge was dirty, and there was a fire in the middle of it under a thatched roof, and the straws hanging down were black with soot. And when the war came, we used anthracite. So the straws turned white, and me uncle was inhaling it, until it killed him.”
She remembered her brother being born all of a sudden, and the handywoman coming, and her hands not washed.
“I fetched the buckets of water to wash the child and make the tea.”
And later the council appointed a nurse for the district, and the handywomen weren’t needed any more.
High-definition images
Then her face darkened. I suspect she was seeing images as clear as if they were on a 50-inch high-definition screen inside her head.
“What’s the worst memory?” I wondered.
“Me mother in labour from a Monday morning to the following Sunday when the baby come dead at 10lb weight. And then the following morning me mother died. She was 39.
“You wouldn’t leave a cow in labour that long. A full week and a clot in her neck finished her, and when she died there was a big black mark all down her neck. I remember it as if it was yesterday,” she whispered.
Stillness in old people
Sometimes I find stillness in old people. They sit in kitchens, pretending to watch the television, or wait on verandas in wheelchairs for visitors.
And they are comfortable with long silences, as their minds run footage on interior screens.
The old lady chuckled.
“What are you thinking of now?” I wondered.
The landlord,” she said.
“He had his own seat in the church, and cushions with feathers, and we had to wash them.
“The feathers?”
“No, the cushions. And don’t be interrupting me! I got friendly with his daughters because they came to the forge with their horses, and we got on great and they went to Japan and wrote to me for years.”
“Did you have to pay rent?” I asked.
“July 12th the rent was collected. And you didn’t get the bog unless you had the rent paid.”
For some reason I started humming The Old Bog Road , and her crossed leg kept time unconsciously with the music.
“Me father seen them burning a house one time and the children in it. And it was easy burned, because of the thatch.”
We paused again. I was having flashes of a movie by Ken Loach.
She looked into her mug of tea.
“You were just allowed 40 clamps of turf, and if you had more the landlord would come and he’d kick the extra clamp back into the bog. Then one summer me father found ashes of an ancient fire deep down that must have been the hearth of an old house, hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
We smiled at each other.
“Would you like more tea?” she asked, already pouring it for me.
A big John Deere tractor landed in the yard like a helicopter from nowhere. A young man came in.
“What are ye two talking about?” he inquired.
But neither of us could say, and already he had the television on to watch the evening news. And I was still thinking of the remnants of a fire hidden deep below the surface of a bog; like an old woman’s heart, still singing away.