I'm going to try to write this without crying onto the keyboard. No promises.
A teacher in Kerry emailed me on Tuesday. Her name is Bríd. She teaches in a small national school — she didn't say the village and I won't either, in case she'd rather I didn't, but it's somewhere out past Killorglin, the kind of place where the church and the shop and the school are the whole of it. Twelve children in her sixth class. Twelve. That's the entire leaving cohort. In a city school that's a bad attendance day. Out there it's a generation.
And at their graduation — the little ceremony they do, the one where the lads in their good jumpers go up one at a time and the mams have the tissues out before it even starts — those twelve children sang The Rattlin' Bog. As their leaving song. The last thing they did together before they scatter off to secondary in September.
Bríd sent me the video. She filmed it on her phone from the back of the hall, so it's a bit wobbly and you can hear someone's chair scraping, and there's a fella in the front row of parents who clearly cannot find his camera app in time. And it is the most beautiful thing I have ever been sent in twenty-four years of running this site. (That is a real claim. I am not being soft for the internet. I MEAN it.)
They start slow. They're nervous, you can hear it — twelve small voices being careful, watching the teacher. Ho ro the rattlin' bog. Grand. Steady. And then the bog's on the bog, and the tree's on the bog, and somewhere around the limb you feel the whole thing change gear. They stop being careful. They start LIVING in it. By the bird verse one of the girls has completely given up on dignity and is just bellowing, joyful, the way you can only bellow when you're eleven and you've known these eleven other people since you were four and you're about to lose them.
The flea verse. Lads. The flea verse.
They demolish it. They tear it apart. Twelve children machine-gunning their way down through nest, egg, bird, feather, flea, and back up the whole chain, and you can see two of them counting on their fingers, and you can see one of them lose his place completely and just shout the word "BOG" with total confidence at the wrong moment, and nobody minds, because that is exactly correct, that is how the song is supposed to be sung. By the end they're nearly screaming the bog down in the valley-o and the hall has gone up and one of the mams is openly weeping and so, reader, was I, in my kitchen in Ennis, on a Tuesday, with the tea gone cold.
Here's the bit that got me, though. Bríd said she didn't choose it. The children did. She gave them a list of songs — proper graduation songs, the kind of thing you'd expect, the slow sad ones — and the class voted, and they voted for the bog. Unanimous, she said. Not one of them wanted the sad song. They wanted the one that's daft and fast and impossible and gets louder the longer it goes on.
I think about that a lot. Eleven-year-olds, on the edge of the biggest goodbye of their small lives so far, and given the choice of a song to mark it, they did not reach for sorrow. They reached for the rattlin' bog. They marked the ending with the song that has no ending — the one you can keep adding to forever, the one where you just go faster, the one where the whole point is that you hold everything that came before inside everything that comes next.
That's the cumulative thing, isn't it. That's the actual genius of it that I've banged on about for years on why cumulative songs work without ever once putting it this simply: you never let go of the bog. The tree doesn't replace the bog. The flea doesn't replace the bird. You carry all of it, all the way down, every single time. Nothing you've sung gets left behind.
Twelve children worked that out by instinct. They didn't have words for it. They just knew, the way kids know things, that this was the right song for a goodbye that isn't really a goodbye.
I wrote back to Bríd straightaway. Told her about the other teachers who've written in over the years, the ones who teach it to their third classes and dread the principal's footsteps in the corridor. Told her she'd given me the best thing that's landed in my inbox in a very long time. And I asked her — gently, because I didn't want to push — would the children mind me mentioning it here. She asked them. They voted again (this class loves a vote). Yes. As long as I said hello.
So. Hello, sixth class. From a man in Clare you've never met. Ye were SAVAGE. Every one of ye. The fella who shouted "BOG" at the wrong moment — that was the best part, don't let anyone tell you different. Go well in September. Be a bit afraid of secondary, that's fair, everyone is. But remember ye're carrying the whole bog with ye. The first day, the four-year-old version of ye, the muck and the yard and these eleven other faces — none of it gets left behind. You just go faster.
I've watched the video eleven times now. One for each child, I told myself, though there's twelve of them, so I suppose I owe it another watch. I'll do that now. Then I'll probably do it again.
A small school in Kerry. Twelve voices. A song about a flea on a feather on a bird in an egg in a nest. And somehow the truest goodbye I've heard all year.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' sat on the kitchen table the whole time I was watching it, tail going, the way she does when she knows something's up. She doesn't understand graduations. But she understands when I'm crying over the laptop, and she came over and put her head against my hand, which she almost never does. Good cat. Strange cat. Old, OLD cat. But a good one.