I was looking for the library in a small town some time ago because I was due to give a talk to a book club. I walked up and down the street, but couldn’t find the venue. So I ventured into a coffee shop with rickety wicker tables and a bell that tinkled when the door opened.
I was hoping for a good coffee, but the only person inside was a woman of my own age with prominent teeth and glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was wiping tables with a yellow cloth and she reminded me of Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street 50 years ago, which was one of my favourite TV programmes as a teenager. I asked if it would be possible to get a flat white and she looked at me with some confusion. Then the penny dropped.
There are swarms of people in every village in the country who will still share their lives, worries and obsessions with a stranger, at the drop of a hat
“Oh, you want a coffee. I’ll call Magda. Magda!” she bellowed, and a younger woman appeared from the kitchen, and made the best flat white I’ve ever enjoyed. I exchanged a few phrases with her while the woman with the yellow cloth stood at the glass door staring out into the street.
Some Irish towns are so devastated by economic disasters that I get homesick on the road and yearn for the quiet pastoral beauty of Leitrim. But, as Daniel O’Donnell once remarked: “If you don’t go to bed at night, you can’t get up in the morning.” And with the same ruthless logic, I know that if I don’t go on tour occasionally, then I can’t really enjoy the hills so much when I return.
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In the hills I can sit all day staring at the lake, and at the tracks of last night’s badgers, but small towns have a more vibrant allure. They are cauldrons of living stories. There are swarms of people in every village in the country who will still share their lives, worries and obsessions with a stranger, at the drop of a hat, at the door of a church, or at the table of some coffee house.
The woman with the yellow cloth was wiping the glass door to the street in name only; she was really watching a man in a high-vis jacket on the pavement who was standing in a hole, shovelling mud out of a blocked drain. Suddenly, she opened the door and shouted at him.
“Did you not get your sandwich?”
He nodded negative.
“Go and get your sandwich,” she said, “now.”
He put away the spade and with a token wipe of his boots on the mat he passed through to the kitchen.
“Magda,” the woman bellowed once more, “get Arthur his tea.”
Meanwhile, on a small transistor radio perched on top of the display fridge and tuned to a local radio station, a 95-year-old woman was being interviewed.
“Isn’t she a great age,” declared the woman with the yellow cloth, as if we were old friends.
“She is!” I agreed. Seizing the opportunity, I asked her did she happen to know where the library was.
“Beyond the butchers,” she said, “just before the post office. The garda station is across the road, but they closed that down a few years ago. And the post office is gone too. And the butcher doesn’t open on Mondays, so no wonder you couldn’t find it.”
As Daniel O’Donnell once remarked: ‘If you don’t go to bed at night, you can’t get up in the morning’
The library was a discreet building with a glass wall fronting onto the street; earlier, I had taken it for a bookshop. And by 7pm, a few ladies from the book club were waiting inside.
I gravitated towards the only other man in the room as he perused the shelves of Crime Fiction. He was tall, with pale skin and fragile hands.
“I’m a retired teacher,” he said. “And the bookclub is great company. Because it’s been lonely since my wife died. And the librarian is simply wonderful; she gets me any book I want.”
Sure enough, the librarian was at the door greeting each person that came in, and waiting until everyone was seated in order to begin the proceedings.
I love meeting people like that librarian or the woman in the coffee shop, who are constantly alert to the needs of others; making sure someone has the book they want, or getting someone the sandwich they deserve, and in so many other unnoticed ways sustaining the soul of a community. And, as it happened, the last one in the door – because she had just finished work – was Magda.