"The year of the Munich bother"
While talking to my mother on the phone last night there was no mention of what Oriana Fallaci calls the "brusque turn of history" that is now bearing down on us. Instead, the conversation was mainly about Johnny Grogan and the death of his "pet" cow. Seventeen years old, she was, and although she had not delivered a calf in the past five years, Johnny had kept her, out of affection. Such gestures are rare in rural places, where animals have a simple function to fulfil. Normally, however, if they don't produce, they're a burden, consuming needed resources, and must go — to their death, usually.
Anyway, after some late reading last week ("He should have been a barrister", said my mother) Johnny fell asleep but was awakened at half past two in the morning by the sound of an animal in pain. What was it but "My darlin' cow," as he put it. She was clearly dying. This being a winter scene from life at the foot of the Galtee Mountains and not from a Disney movie, Michael Maher was sent for and he shot the cow on the spot. Affection, yes; sentimentality, no.
Listening to the story, I was reminded of lines from Patrick Kavanagh's great poem, Epic, which contrasts an incident from rural Irish life with events in a world where the spectre of war was looming. On the stony grey soil of Monaghan in 1939 the Duffeys and the McCabes were making their "pitchfork-armed claims" to "half a rood of rock", obsessed by their hatreds and oblivious to the world beyond their farms. "That was the year of the Munich bother", as Kavanagh so brilliantly related the farmers' strife to the promise of "peace in our time". Which event was more important, Kavanagh asked himself. An absurd question? The poet was inclined to agree?
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind. He said: I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance
Is there a Homer or a Kavanagh today capable of making our "rows" immortal?
EpicI have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffeys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel —
"Here is the march along these iron stones".
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importancePatrick Kavanagh, 1904-1967
Diarist of the day: James Lees-Milne, 26 January 1977"Sitting in a bus in London last week, it being a raw day I took out of my pocket my white lip salve and applied it to my chapped lips. An elderly woman sitting opposite put on a strongly disapproving face, and said, 'Well!' in a long drawn-out tone. I paid not the slightest notice."
