CO LONGFORD: In the last of our series in which writers reflect on the places they call home, BELINDA MCKEONremembers working at the local paper and sifting local gossip from real news.
‘GOOD CHILD,” our neighbour Johnny said, as I gave him the car passenger seat. He’d been standing outside his house, with no particular urgency, knowing that someone would give him a lift to Longford. Sitting in beside my father, he went straight to what mattered. “And there’s a thing I only heard last night,” he said. “He’s an awful funny fella.”
A brother of another neighbour had died in Galway, it transpired, and the neighbour had decided not to tell anyone around home. This, as Johnny was making clear now, was not the done thing. This was not what you did when you had news to share. I listened. It was my summer of news-hunting. Ours was a county where few things were more valuable than a bit of news, and now I had made a job of it, or at least a couple of months of work experience at the Longford Leader.
I was 18, and not exactly a natural. I might have grown up in a place where opinions were as plentiful as whin bushes, but as for developing my own, and turning them into something I could actually put into print, that was another matter. When the reporter who had taken it upon himself to be my mentor suggested, at the end of my first week, that I should maybe pitch some stories, I went home in a welter of panic. Over the next two days, I scoured every newspaper I could get my hands on for something I could adapt – something, that is, that I could steal (I thought, at the time, that this was a shameful tactic, like copying answers in an exam hall; I didn’t realise that it was called journalism).
On Monday morning, I showed up more confused than ever – how could I put a Longford spin on the Mars landing of the Pathfinder probe, on the murder of Gianni Versace? I envied the sports reporters. At least they could rely on a kicking for the county team in an early round of the senior football championship to fill a few pages. At least one local team was always beating another at Pearse Park.
"Right," said my mentor, rolling his eyes. He directed me to the microfilm machine in the corner. "You're doing 'Times Past' from now on," he said, referring to a weekly feature which reprinted Leaderitems from each of the six preceding decades. He handed me a reel marked 1937. "And you're to do the agricultural shows as well," he added. "Go in the van with Joe. Don't come back empty handed."
Joe was the Leaderphotographer, and before long we were a crack team of agricultural correspondents, tearing up the roads in his red and white van, arriving at showgrounds hectic with farming rivalry, as animals were groomed and poked and paraded in front of frowning judges; as queen cakes and quilts and best decorated vegetables (I was a veteran of the best decorated vegetable scene myself) were rigorously assessed. My job, as I had worked out from reading show reports from previous years, was to give an account of the good time had by all: to report on the reactions of the winners – but never the losers – and to glean what was called "colour" from the general goings-on. So, a quote from the best-dressed lady, from the mother of a child whose face was covered in ice-cream, from a group of lads in Longford jerseys, skulking around with bags of chips. Anything less than salubrious, such as horses kicking their handlers in the head, counted as off-the-record information.
As for “Times Past”, which saw me squinting into the microfilm reader for the rest of the week, it proved an unexpected entry into the glamorous side of journalism. Joe decided that I should have a byline photograph to accompany the column. In the resulting image I looked – no fault of Joe’s – as though I had tried to create a long-haired homage to Hugh Grant’s police mugshot but, to my astonishment, people began to recognise me, and by people, I mean a boy I had fancied all through secondary school and had (of course) never once spoken to. One Friday night that summer in Blazers, he pointed to me and exclaimed, “Times Past in County Longford, ha?”
This was a decent piece of news (and in fact I spent so long telling my friends of this development that I neglected to take the conversation with the boy in question any further), but as to what I was supposed to be writing as news, I still didn’t have the first idea. It seemed to me that news was what you heard from people, and always about other people. That people went to the shop for their newspaper and came away with more stories than it could ever contain.
And it seemed to me, too, that there was a vast difference between the glee with which such news was disseminated and the positive spin I felt obliged to put on all local stories. The fact of something happening locally at all seemed, often, justification enough to present it as a good news story. Longford Woman Does This, or Longford Man Does That seemed to be the gist of everything I came up with, and that didn’t seem enough, somehow. It wasn’t that I wanted to start muckraking. I wasn’t about to start hacking phones. But I wanted more. And it was only when I started to look at what I was actually doing that I realised it had been in front of me all the time.
Because they were beginning to pay off, those hours at the microfilm machine, immersed in stories from years ago. The days chasing farmers for quotes at the agricultural shows were beginning to pay off too. By which I mean that it clicked, somewhere along the line (somewhere between 1937 and the line to guess the weight of the Pedigree bull), that it was in the small details – the fiercely local details – that the news lived, after all.
I got my first proper story by accident; somebody else couldn’t go along to interview the women who worked in the local charity shop, and so I ended up going along, tongue-tied with nervousness, instead. But I barely needed to ask any questions. I just needed to pay close heed. I needed to watch and to listen as the women took me through the donations left at their door, some of them poignantly or even weirdly personal (who would donate an album of family photographs, or a shoebox full of old letters?). Some of it such rubbish – and sometimes even actual household rubbish – as to be insulting.
The next week, I went to talk to young parents whose child was awaiting a transplant. The next, to the minibus owner who kept his fleet in the disused chapel of an old big house, angels staring down at the engines.
There was the man in his sixties, who had been living with Motor Neurone Disease for over 20 years; he had worked on building sites until the diagnosis, and he was writing his memoir on a computer using his right foot (much to my pleasure I discovered, while glancing at the Leaderrecently, that this man, Andy McGovern, is still going strong).
There was the new Methodist minister and his family, who were having Friday evening barbecues in the church grounds after services and finding that locals of every denomination were coming along.
There was a father and his son who had been footing turf in their patch of bog and come upon a piece of precious metal 2,000 years old. There was the woman from up the road from me, who was forging a career in an area that seemed impossibly upbeat to Longford ears: life coaching. There was the director of the local theatre, the Backstage, which had been built on the grounds of Slashers GAA club and was now bringing productions from the Abbey, Corcadorca and Rough Magic to the town, the actors sharing dressing rooms with the hurlers and footballers for a while.
In the details, and in the different ways in which those details mattered to different people, I began to see the stories, and to see the place around me as I had not seen it before. I’d known the county, its townlands, only in terms of the school buses which had come to the cathedral carpark every morning before school and spilled out their contents: Killoe, Tarmon, Ardagh, Newtownforbes.
Now I took my notebook and I understood that these places were their stories, these were the individual lives that the notebook, if I was lucky, allowed me to glimpse at. I began to see that if I talked to people, and gave them the chance to talk themselves, the stories would come out more fully than they ever could at any shop counter, from any passenger seat.
It wouldn’t be gossip – it wouldn’t be half as good, a voice in my head says even now, in a good Longford accent – but it would be something to fill the gap. And it wouldn’t be news, not really. It would be the stories you’d come upon; it would be how they were told. It would be your job to tell them all over again. And if you did it properly, well then, as our neighbour Johnny might say, it would do.
Series concluded
