So I was up on the bus to Galway last Tuesday — the 51 out of Ennis, the one that goes the long way round through Gort and stops at every gate and gatepost in County Clare — and something happened that I've been turning over in my head ever since. It's not a big thing. It's the kind of thing you'd tell a mate over a pint and they'd say "ah that's lovely" and you'd move on. But I can't move on. So here we are.
I had the window seat. There was an old woman beside me. I'd put her at eighty, maybe more — small, neat coat, a shopping bag on her lap that she held the whole way like it might escape. We didn't talk. You don't, on the bus, not really. You nod and you mind your own.
And somewhere past Kilcolgan she started humming.
Quietly. Under her breath. The way people do when they don't know they're doing it. And I knew the tune straight away because of course I did — it was the bog. Our bog. The Rattlin' Bog, the rare bog, the bog down in the valley-o. I nearly laughed out loud. Of all the tunes for the woman beside me to hum.
Now. I am not a man who hides his enthusiasms (this whole site is the evidence). So I said, gentle as I could, "That's a great oul' song." And she smiled — small, like she'd been caught — and she said "it is, it is" and she kept on. And then she did something that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
She sang a verse I have never heard in my life.
I want to be careful here because I know what it sounds like. People know all SORTS of variants. I've spent twenty-odd years collecting them and I'm still finding new branches every other month — there's the Norwegian one, there's school versions with a frog instead of a flea, there's a Cork crowd who put a priest in it, God help us. Variants are the whole joy of the thing. The song breeds. That's the point of a cumulative song, it's a living animal, everybody who sings it changes it a wee bit and hands it on. So a stranger knowing a verse I don't know is not, on the face of it, strange at ALL. It's the most natural thing in the world.
But here's the thing.
It wasn't a new ANIMAL on the bog or a new thing on the tree or a new feather on the wing. You know how the song builds — tree, branch, twig, nest, egg, bird, feather, flea. The whole ladder is right there if you want it. Her verse wasn't another rung on that ladder. It came AFTER the flea. It came after the part where the song's meant to stop. And it went — and I'm writing this from memory, so forgive me if the words have drifted, they always drift — it went something like:
"And on that flea there was a name, a rare name and a rattlin' name, and the name was on the flea, and the flea was on the feather..."
And then she rolled the whole thing back down the way you do, name to flea to feather to wing to bird, all the way to the bog down in the valley-o. Eleven things on the ladder. Eleven. I counted on my fingers like an eejit, twice, to be sure.
A NAME on the flea.
I've never seen a name verse. Not in any of the broadsides, not in the old collected versions — well, not that one, but you know the kind of thing I mean, the proper printed ones. Not in any session I've ever sat in, and lads, I've sat in a LOT of sessions. A name on the flea. What name? Whose name? I wanted to ask her so badly my mouth went dry.
So I turned to ask. "Where did you learn that —"
And the bus was slowing. And she was already standing up, that shopping bag clutched to her, already saying "ah this is me now" and shuffling past my knees with a "thank you, son" — son! she called me son and I'm forty-four — and she was down the steps and out the door before I'd got my own seatbelt off.
I looked out the window to see where she'd gone.
I couldn't tell you the name of the stop. Somewhere on the Clare side, a small road, a few houses, that flat bit of bog land you get out past Ardrahan where the ground goes soft and brown and the rushes come right up to the verge. There was no shelter, no sign that I could read from the bus. Just her, small in her neat coat, walking up a lane toward nothing I could see. And then we pulled off and she was gone behind a hedge and that was it. That was the whole thing.
I'm not saying anything happened. Nothing happened! An old woman hummed a song and got off a bus. That's the entire event. Write it down and it's nothing.
But I've been trying to reconstruct that verse ever since and it keeps sliding off the edge of my memory like water off a leaf. I've sung it into my phone three times and each time the words come out a bit different and I can't tell anymore which one was hers. A name on the flea. A rare name and a rattlin' name. Whose name was it? I never asked. I never got to ask. She was gone before her stop had a name either.
If you know a name verse — if your granny sang it, if you've seen it written down, if there's a county or a townland out there that adds an eleventh thing to the ladder and puts a NAME on the flea — for the love of God get in touch. I need to know I didn't imagine the kindest, oddest fifteen minutes I've had on a bus in years.
She held that bag the whole way like there was something in it. I never saw what.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — When I got home I sang the bit I could remember to Rattlin', the way you do. Most songs she ignores entirely, the madam. This one she sat up for. Sat up straight and looked at the door. Probably wanted her dinner. Probably nothing. I'm leaving it at probably nothing.