Dave White's Field

“If you hear her eerie, ghostly wailing at night ... ” Auntie Mary throws a thin, barely audible wail into the distance. Her mimicry, pitch perfect, sounds too much like the real thing and sends shivers down my spine.

“ ... she is warning you that somebody close by, whom you know, is about to die.”

Well at least, if I hear the banshee, it is somebody else who is going to die. Not me. But then how close is close by?

“One night, many years ago, so they say, Mary Kate O'Brien, from a few doors down the lane from your Nanny's, heard strange but beautiful singing coming from the entrance to the lane --- where the stone is.

“She went to look but by the time she got there, the singer had vanished. She walked around the corner and up onto the bridge which spans the river and took a look downstream. It was low tide.

the banshee brushing her hair by moonlight

“She could see a glowing light just above some rocks by the steps across the river from the little wall at the end of the turn in the lane. When she returned to the lane, she came up to the wall to get a closer look, but the glow was no longer there --- only the sound of the water rippling around the rocks as the tide rose.

``The very next night her husband, a healthy young man, was drowned and his body found lying across those very same rocks by the steps, where she had seen the glowing light. There was no apparent reason for his death."

The kitchen is silent apart from the odd flicker from the fire. We are finding it hard to take in this part of the story. The words `healthy young man was drowned' and `no apparent reason for his death' trigger uncomfortable mixed sad feelings in me about my dad's death.