Funny Exam Answers

Details of people's lives make a place

CO LONGFORD  : In the last of our series in which writers reflect on the places they call home, BELINDA MCKEON  remembers working at the local paper and sifting local gossip from real news.

‘GOOD CHILD,” our neighbour Johnny said, as I gave him the car passenger seat. He’d been standing outside his house, with no particular urgency, knowing that someone would give him a lift to Longford. Sitting in beside my father, he went straight to what mattered. “And there’s a thing I only heard last night,” he said. “He’s an awful funny fella.”

A brother of another neighbour had died in Galway, it transpired, and the neighbour had decided not to tell anyone around home. This, as Johnny was making clear now, was not the done thing. This was not what you did when you had news to share. I listened. It was my summer of news-hunting. Ours was a county where few things were more valuable than a bit of news, and now I had made a job of it, or at least a couple of months of work experience at the Longford Leader  .

I was 18, and not exactly a natural. I might have grown up in a place where opinions were as plentiful as whin bushes, but as for developing my own, and turning them into something I could actually put into print, that was another matter. When the reporter who had taken it upon himself to be my mentor suggested, at the end of my first week, that I should maybe pitch some stories, I went home in a welter of panic. Over the next two days, I scoured every newspaper I could get my hands on for something I could adapt – something, that is, that I could steal (I thought, at the time, that this was a shameful tactic, like copying answers in an exam hall; I didn’t realise that it was called journalism).

On Monday morning, I showed up more confused than ever – how could I put a Longford spin on the Mars landing of the Pathfinder probe, on the murder of Gianni Versace? I envied the sports reporters. At least they could rely on a kicking for the county team in an early round of the senior football championship to fill a few pages. At least one local team was always beating another at Pearse Park.

“Right,” said my mentor, rolling his eyes. He directed me to the microfilm machine in the corner.