I haven’t lived in Ireland for 30 years, so I don’t think I am entitled to have an opinion on rural post offices, but they have a terrific draw on my imagination. I’ve always loved them, perhaps because I loved the first tiny post office I ever knew in the Co Cork village where I grew up. Burnfort post office was a single-storey, spotless white house with its post box inserted in an outside wall. There was a garden with daffodils, tulips, roses on one side and it was the nearest thing to a cottage from a fairy-tale book I’d ever seen.
When I first visited London at 11, I felt as if I had passed through Alice’s looking glass: the post boxes had turned red along with the buses and telephone kiosks. The complementary colours expressed an age-old antagonism and a kind of haunting too. Because those Irish green post boxes had once been red. There was something magical about it all, especially that old-fashioned green, it even entered my dreams. I painted several of my doors that shade a few years ago when I was writing a story set in a post office. Maybe that was why I failed to find a buyer – shamrock green was not popular with the new gentry flooding into Dalston.
Civil War politics
Somebody once said, “Postmistress is a Fianna Fáil job!” but Burnfort’s postmistress, Mrs O’Connell, seemed above politics, especially that queer embarrassing Civil War stuff that bubbled below the surface in my childhood. Mrs O’Connell was different – a quiet, sweet woman who never raised her voice. I loved to go there, just to be in her calm presence, watch her tearing the stamps and using the brass weights on the old-fashioned scales. Sometimes Mammy sent me running with a letter at 4pm to catch the last post and I got to watch Mrs O’Connell put the letters and parcels in a hessian sack which she tied with twine and a buff label at the neck. There was a sense of ceremony. She never rushed and the best part was the melting of the red wax for the seal – it was like a superior Communion.
I wanted to melt that wax, I wanted to be a postmistress but my family was staunch Fine Gael and I thought that might hold me back. Mrs O’Connell smelled sweet too as she often sucked boiled fruits. That was another draw. Her sweets always smelled sweeter than the sweets in our shop.
The post office was at the end of a short one-sided footpath that ran through the village. Our pub, shop and petrol pump was at the other end and the church and the national school were in between. Almost everything was within reach, although most people had cars and there were cyclists too. Walking became rare. I remember people stopped in their cars, waiting for me to get in for “a spin” unable to believe that I wanted to walk.
When Burnfort post office closed, everything changed. I returned home for a visit to find Mammy and her neighbour Bernie Deane marooned, nervous drivers who didn’t dare to take on the new Mallow-Cork road with its impatient speedy drivers. They had tried to crawl along the hard shoulder before being shouted off and now they were dependent on neighbours for “spins” to Mallow.
I don’t have a car but I am not marooned. Everything I need is on my doorstep in Dalston Kingsland. I love London, a collection of villages full of immigrants like myself, each with its own inimitable vibe. I miss the small post offices which have disappeared here too since I arrived in 1988. Further closures of crown post offices in the last year made way for franchises. Many services are moving online. Change is inevitable.
King’s land
For years I suffered the queues of the impersonal Dalston post office, where fights and screams of rage were not unusual. Yet only a few years ago I discovered a small post office, nine minutes away on the west side of Newington Green beside a Turkish greengrocers blazing with striped aubergines and the hot colours of 15 varieties of tomatoes. This post office is run by a courteous South Asian family and it’s Mrs O’Connell all over again. They even add tape to your parcel if you don’t have enough. The ground I walk every day was once “king’s land” protecting royal deer and boar. Henry VIII’s hunting lodge was on the green, King Henry’s Walk and Anne Boleyn Road are nearby. Mary Wollstonecraft ran a boarding school here too.
Recently I pushed a package through the scarlet pillar box and remembered the baskets full of St Patrick’s Day cards which I took to the post office as a child. Mammy filled envelopes with foil-wrapped bunches of fresh shamrock and letters full of news. All that trouble to send shamrock to dozens of people in America and Australia! Did that really happen? Was Henry VIII here? And Anne Boleyn and Mary Wollstonecraft? The borders of time are impenetrable. In 1999 a Traveller woman accurately read my palm at Puck Fair, finishing with a flourish. “Change, change and more change!” she said as the hair stood up on my neck. And she was right. It can’t be stopped.
Martina Evans is a poet and novelist. Her latest book, Now We Can Talk Openly About Men, is published by Carcanet