Beautiful Just! by Lillian Beckwith Page B

and I was compelled to drive without its familiar support behind the small of my back. I was assailed by the feeling that the day which had begun so well was beginning to deteriorate but I shrugged off the thought, dismissing it as probably no more than the first pangs of hunger making themselves felt.
    â€˜Can we stop somewhere for a bite to eat?’ I proposed when we were back on the main road. ‘I’m feeling a bit peckish.’
    â€˜Ach, you should have come in an’ taken a wee strupak with the old man,’ Erchy told me.
    â€˜Indeed, mo ghaoil, you’d be best pleased you didn’t,’ said Morag. ‘The room we was in was in such a state you could have stirred it with a stick.’
    â€˜I mind there is a hotel we could get somethin’,’ Erchy recalled. ‘It’s on a bitty yet but I believe they’d give us a meal if we asked them for it.’
    I drove on until Morag, espying the post office, asked me to stop so that she could leave the old man’s firkin jar, and remembering that in my coat pocket were two letters I had intended posting at the first opportunity I announced that I would go in and buy some stamps.
    â€˜Ach, you shouldn’t buy stamps from this place,’ Erchy warned.
    â€˜Why ever not? It’s a post office, isn’t it?’ I asked.
    â€˜Aye, right enough but I was in there once when I came to collect a dog I’d bought an’ the old folks that was runnin’ the place didn’t seem to know a stamp from a telegram,’ he explained.
    â€˜Had they no had it long then?’ enquired Morag.
    â€˜Forty years,’ said Erchy. ‘You’d think they would have learned in that time or else had it taken away from them.’
    â€˜If they had it forty years the postmaster maybe hadn’t the heart to take it away from them,’ suggested Morag.
    â€˜Maybe so,’ allowed Erchy, ‘but judgin’ from the stamps they sold to me that day I’d think they’d likely had them in stock for forty years as well. There wasn’t a one of them would stick on an envelope.’
    I chuckled.
    â€˜It’s as true as I’m here,’ he affirmed. ‘An’ when I showed the old bodach the way they wouldn’t stick he tried would he do it himself an’ he brought his fist down with such a bang on the envelope the damty stamp broke into little bits. Honest,’ he reiterated, ‘he was still pickin’ the bits off himself when I left him.’
    â€˜In that case I won’t post my letters here,’ I said. ‘But please be sure and remind me as soon as we see another post office. They should have been posted two or three days ago and now they’re very urgent.’ I have an unfortunate habit of what my friends describe as ‘taking my letters for a walk’, i.e. I set out with the intention of posting them but something distracts me and on my return home I find the letters still in my pocket or in the pocket of the car.
    â€˜I’ll try to remember,’ promised Erchy.
    â€˜Supposin’ I forget my own name I’ll remind you to post your letters,’ Hector swore fervidly.
    When Morag returned after depositing the firkin Erchy observed, ‘I hate to see those jars bein’ used for paraffin. It gives me a kind of queer feelin’ inside myself.’ He regarded us with a pained expression.
    â€˜Why?’ I asked.
    â€˜When I was young they were always full of whisky, not paraffin, that’s why,’ he explained. ‘All the old folks had at least a firkin of whisky they kept beside the fire ready to warm them when they came in from the cold.’
    â€˜Aye, tse old folks always had plenty whisky,’ corroborated Hector with a deep sigh of regret.
    â€˜An’ there’s plenty of the old folks would be glad they died when they did sooner than suffer the pain of knowin’ the price of whisky today,’ added