I was up in the attic on Saturday because the water tank had been making a noise. Not a dangerous noise. A sort of gurgle, a tut, like the house disapproving of something. So up I went with the torch, in my good socks, regretting it immediately, and the tank was grand. Fine. Doing its job. The noise was just air in the pipe, Mick tells me, which is the sort of thing Mick says and you have to take on faith.
But while I was up there I started moving boxes. You know how it is. You go up for one thing and you come down two hours later having decided the whole attic needs sorting and your tea's gone cold.
And in a box of Da's things — a box I'd genuinely forgotten existed, marked "DAD — MISC" in my own handwriting from when we cleared his house in 2009 and I couldn't face opening any of it properly — there was a notebook. Soft red cover, the cardboard kind that's gone furry at the corners. A school exercise copy, basically. The lines on the front where you'd write your name and subject, except Da had written, in biro, just: SONGS.
I knew his hand the second I saw it.
He had this way of doing his capital letters, all a bit tall and leaning forward like they were in a hurry. And the way he did a 7 with the line through it, which he picked up I don't know where, no one else in the family did it. I sat down on the attic floor. Insulation and all. I didn't care.
Da was Tom. Tom Mac. He died in 2009 and I miss him in a low constant way that I've mostly stopped noticing, the way you stop noticing the weight of your own coat. Until something like a red copybook reminds you and then it's the whole weight at once.
The songbook is from the sixties, I'm fairly sure. There's a date inside the front cover — "1964" — and a few song titles with little notes beside them, keys mostly, "G for Paddy" beside one, and "DON'T let Eamon start it" beside another which made me laugh out loud alone in an attic, which is its own kind of mad. He'd have been in his early twenties. Before my mam. Before me. Before any of it. Just a young fella writing down the songs he wanted to be able to do at a session so he wouldn't get caught out.
And lads.
The bog was on page four.
The Rattlin' Bog. In his hand. Written out — not all the verses, he'd only got down the bog, the tree, the branch and the nest, then he'd written "etc — you know the rest" which, again, made me laugh, because of COURSE you know the rest, that's the whole point of the song, the song teaches itself. But there it was. The tree on the bog and the bog down in the valley-o. His handwriting. Page four.
I want to be honest about something, because this is that kind of post and not the flea-verse kind. I didn't actually know my father sang it. I know that sounds strange given that I've built an entire website about this song and apparently spend my evenings typing about it like a man possessed. But Da wasn't a singer in the showy way. He'd hum. He'd sit at the back of a session with a pint and his foot would be going, and now and then a line would come out of him almost by accident. I always assumed I got the bog from my nan's side, from her kitchen in Kilrush, and maybe I did. But here's Da, twenty-two years old, writing it down on page four before I was even a notion.
So it came down both sides. It was waiting for me from two directions.
There's a thing people say about folk songs, that they're "handed down", and it's true but it's also a bit smooth, a bit tidy, the way these things get said. It wasn't handed down to me in a ceremony. Nobody sat me on a knee. It came down through a hummed line in a pub and a copybook in a box I was too sad to open for fifteen years. It came down sideways and by accident and half-forgotten. That's how the real things travel. Not carefully. They just refuse to stop.
I brought the copybook down out of the attic. It's on the kitchen table now and I keep picking it up. Rattlin the cat has decided it's hers, naturally, and has sat on it twice, but I'll allow it, she's keeping it warm I suppose.
I'm going to copy it all out properly. Scan it, even, when I work out how the scanner talks to the new laptop (it doesn't, currently, we are not on speaking terms). And then I think I'll put a bit of it up here, on the site, somewhere. Da would have had no idea what a website was. He'd have squinted at the whole concept. But he wrote SONGS on a copybook so the songs wouldn't get lost, and that's — I mean that's just this, isn't it. That's exactly this. He had a red copybook and I have a fan shrine. Same impulse. Forty years and one attic apart.
I'm grand, by the way, before anyone in the forum starts worrying and sending me kind messages (you're sound, you really are). It's a good kind of sad. The kind where you find out the song was already in the house, in a box, the whole time, waiting.
Page four.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin has now slept on the copybook three nights running. I'm choosing to read something into it. Don't talk me out of it.