DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:I MAY BE old and grey but I have finally made it, to the front page of the Anglo-Celt arts supplement. There are other literary awards in the world, but to be acknowledged in the pages of the local newspaper is still the success that every Cavan writer craves.
The newspaper was sticking out of my pocket as I queued in the post office. In my childhood an ancient market house stood where the post office now stands, and an old woman in black used to sit at the gates on a stone, her hand outstretched in supplication.
The clerk behind the counter slipped the stamp under the glass and said: "I see you're making headlines." I was heading for the launch of my book, Bird in the Snow, in a bookshop on Church Street, where the two Miss Whelans once had a sweet and souvenir shop, with a glass door and a tinkling bell.
I walked down Farnham Street, where the red-bricked Protestant Hall once held gala dances before it was demolished, and I passed the Garda station built on the site of an 18th-century townhouse called Tower Hamlet, a haunted ramshackle mansion which, in my youth, was the unlikely meeting place for the Irish Countrywomens' Association.
As a child I would sometimes sit in the dark hallway waiting for my mother, breathing in the sweet aroma of the ladies' coats that hung on hooks beneath the winding stairs. I would listen to the ladies behind their closed door and wonder at what mysteries made them laugh so loudly.
After the book launch, I had a pint in a pub on Ashe Street, which was called Wesley Street when I was a child, in respect of a Methodist hall that dominated the streetscape in the 19th century. There was a wizened old man at the bar with twinkling eyes and white hair. He closed in on me like the ghost of a samurai warrior, and said accusingly: "I seen you on the front of the Anglo-Celt!" In the old days, men would idle the wintertime at that counter, savouring milky Guinness in a cloud of tobacco smoke; but there was no smoke now, and not much life at the bar, and the old codger stuck to me like glue.
Alistair Darling was on the television, and the old man observed that Mr Darling had eyes like "hairy mollies". I said: "I think you mean hairy horses." He said: "I mean the little brown furry fellows that crawl around the road in summertime, with about 10 sets of little legs." "Yes," I said, "that's them." And we began to explore the mystery of why they were called either horses or mollies.
He told me he was coming from a wedding.
"It was so big that it took three men, stripped to the waist, half the day just to mix the mustard," he said. "And the bride wore the biggest hat I've ever seen in my life; I've seen smaller creels on a donkey."
And so it went on, with me doing what writers do best, listening to the wild, hyperbolic jazz of country folk.
As a child I did not think it strange that Tower Hamlet was full of women, or that the pub on Wesley Street was full of men. That was a time when adults often separated themselves into male or female compartments, where they could chatter and cod and tell lies as big as wellingtons.
In Mullingar there is little time for talk at the 54 checkout counters spread through five supermarkets, where males and females stand in line all day long with glazed eyes.
Last week, I saw a woman who didn't have enough money to pay for all that was in her trolley. She had to put some things back. Each time she chose something, the checkout girl took it and placed it delicately behind the counter. Each time they both consulted the screen to monitor the bill going down, until it dipped below the €25 mark which the woman was able to pay.
People in the queue looked the other way and pretended not to notice, but the little girl clinging to her mother's trolley stared at all the things going back over the counter with great concern.
Perhaps she will write about all that, when she is old and grey.
Bird in the Snow, by Michael Harding, is published by Lilliput, €15. mharding@irish-times.ie
