Near where I grew up, there used to be an old house, up a long lane and abandoned since of the death its last occupant, a man we’ll call Joe.
I never knew Joe – he was gone before my time. But although the house was used for storing hay bales occasionally, it had otherwise been left untouched. You could still see medicine bottles, covered with a fine layer of dust, in what must have been his bedroom.
From details I picked up over the years, he seemed to have had a hard life. His wife, who had long been an “invalid”, as people used to say, died before him. So did his only son and daughter, the former of something that was easily treatable – appendicitis, I think – but neglected until too late.
The story seemed all the sadder because Joe had built his home after coming back from America, with money hard earned in the car factories of Detroit and the copper mines of Montana.
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Like thousands of others, he had been injured out there, but maybe the compensation helped too. In any case, he was able to turn his savings into a new house, bigger than the one he himself grew up in, the remains of which also stood nearby.
Then, within a generation, his family was gone. And when he followed them, the house was left to crumble. All traces of it and its predecessor have long since disappeared, the ground where they stood now reclaimed by grass.
But sad as Joe’s life story always sounded to my child’s ears, he used to come cheerfully alive in two stories my parents often told about him.
On sunny hay days, when the mood was good and work stopped for tea, my father liked to remember a similar afternoon, from the 1940s or 50s. He and neighbours were making hay together then when, suddenly, a field mouse ran up Joe’s leg, inside his trousers.
Even as he struggled to evict it, Joe had laughed: “He knows where the warm spot is”. And recalling this, my father would laugh too. But as a child, what most impressed me was the idea that a man could retain his sense of humour with a rodent running loose in his underclothes.
My mother’s story, by contrast, was prompted by bad weather. Whenever it was stormy, she would invoke a similar occasion from the late 1950s, which Joe had declared “a night that would make you forget all earthly things and turn your thoughts to heaven”.
It was always a bonus for my mother when a story also had a religious moral. Teasing her once, I half-remembered something I had heard elsewhere about how Joe’s years in socialist Butte had left him more a free thinker than devout Catholic. But undaunted, she was always able to fall back on the “heaven” line again, like scripture.
So it was that, despite the apparent harshness of his life, I grew up thinking of this neighbour I had never known as a happy man. Poor perhaps, and unlucky, but good-humoured, philosophical, and at ease with himself.
Forever frozen in those cheerful stories from the 1940s and 50s, he seemed the epitome of the Ireland Heinrich Böll romanticised in his Irish Journal of the same years. Seeking refuge from post-war Germany, Böll found it in a country that was impoverished but beautiful, whose people were friendly, soulful, and content with little.
In a typical passage from his book, he joked that 1950s Ireland held the world record in at least four things: tea-drinking, movie-going, the production of priests and – he dared not say if there was a causal relationship with the first three – having “fewer suicides than anywhere else on earth”.
Typically too, however, he had added a droll disclaimer for the countless Germans who would be enchanted by his account: “This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.”
I thought of Böll’s Irish Journal again a few years ago when meeting an old neighbour – himself since dead – who had known Joe well half a century ago. He added to the romantic lore about him by recalling musical evenings in the house, across the fields from theirs.
But he also remembered Joe’s later years when his sole relative, a bossy sister from Dublin, visited occasionally and nursed him. Then the patient was wont to mutter that he would not to be here the next time she came.
“And what did he die of in the end?” I asked the neighbour. Wordlessly, but with a grimace, he touched his throat with a thumb and finger. I looked at him in puzzlement: “You mean…?” The neighbour nodded: “It was us that had to cut him down.”