Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Seamas O’Reilly

Author:Seamas O’Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little Brown, Book Group
Published: 2021-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

8

The Forge

The large, white, five-bedroom bungalow in which I was raised was sometimes called the Forge by my father, and literally no one else. This soubriquet is lovingly rendered on letters my dad sends to relatives, conferring a certain elegance of standing. The Forge could be a fancy B&B, the summer residence of a timber baron, or a stately home that’s been converted into a rehab centre for celebrity drug addicts.

It actually takes its name from its being set on a plot of land once used by a blacksmith, a fact pleasingly confirmed if you dig a hole anywhere around our garage, where you will find all manner of shrapnel, pig iron and horse shoes. The field behind the house once verged on the UK customs checkpoint, but after the demilitarisation of the border that was shut down and the land, together with the top bit of our field, was sold to build a family home for some new neighbours. My father planted trees to provide a barrier, as he did along two hundred metres stretching from the garage to the slope at the front of the house that has farmland on both sides. This second line of trees was essentially planted to keep the horse in Toland’s field from eating my dad’s flowers but, in the age of Brexit, it has now risen to the exalted position of being fully 0.04 per cent of the United Kingdom’s border with the European Union. Such a promotion might seem slightly above the paygrade of some mottled conifers and a fence you could knock over with a few harsh words. And if you ask that horse if it’s a solid barrier, he’ll tell you no. He may even do so from my dad’s flower beds, in between bites of nasturtium.

So, my family home is not merely on the border, it is a structural part of it, but none of that was of interest during my childhood because it was just my house and, for the most part, the border thing was largely irrelevant.

The land around the house is uncommonly pleasant: rolling hills, fields and open farmland pretty much as far as the eye can see. The hills in the distance are actually across the River Foyle, which itself isn’t visible from my home, although if you were to walk the short road down to Balloughry it’s so quiet you can hear the noise of the traffic as it passes along the far side. There’s wildlife here: wood pigeons, pheasant, large game birds and mid-sized raptors, along with the usual but slightly less commonly sighted owls, foxes and badgers. There are cows in the fields perhaps half the year, and a thin, scraggly electric wire separates their parish from ours where the slope meets the fence and our land terminates. The wire gives a faint electric shock that is barely painful, but enough to alarm cattle into thinking twice about ascending onto our property, and for the most part they seem to take no interest in us at all.

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