Read The New Policeman for Free Online Page A

never why we had dances here. But the new act, which was passed by the government under pressure from the Church, made the house dances illegal. From that time onward, all dances had to be held in the parish hall, where the priest could keep an eye on the goings-on. It nearly worked, too, because it wasn’t long before other kinds of music began to get popular. We very nearly lost our musical tradition.”

    “But people could still play, couldn’t they? In the pub or in their houses?”
    “They could, but sessions are a relatively new thing, you know—people playing tunes while other people sit around and talk. I don’t like it myself. This music is dance music, J.J. It always was. That’s why I made sure you and Maz learned to dance. Even if you never do it again, you understand the music from the inside out.”
    J.J. nodded. He had been to a lot of fleadhs and heard a lot of people playing. You could almost always tell from their playing whether they knew how to dance or not.
    “Anyway,” Helen went on, “the long and the short of it was that the house dances were in danger of dying out. You could hold a dance if you didn’t charge an entrance fee, but there weren’t many people around in those days who could afford to do that.”
    “But the Liddys could,” said J.J.
    “Yup. The Liddys could. We weren’t rich by modern standards, but we were pretty well off by the standards of those days. And we had one big advantage over a lot of the other houses that used to hold dances. We didn’t have to pay the musicians. We were the musicians.”

     
----

GARRETT BARRY’S JIG
Trad

----

13
    The new policeman went into Kinvara, got a bite to eat in Rosaleen’s, and made his way down the street to Green’s. He was on the early side, he knew. Sessions never got going much before ten o’clock. He had thought long and hard about whether it would be better to arrive early or late and had eventually decided on early. If he arrived when the session had already started, there was a danger that the shock of being joined by a policeman would knock the spirit out of the music. Getting there early would give Mary Green a chance to get used to the idea, and with luck, he would be able to convince the musicians that he wasn’t there in any official capacity.
    At the door he paused, his fiddle in his hand. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all? Hispresence was sure to inhibit the others, and Mary Green would probably hunt them all out into the street at twelve o’clock on the dot. He would ruin it for everyone. Maybe it would be better if he just went home and had a tune there with the others, free from the tyranny of the licensing laws?
    No. He’d better stay. He’d set out to investigate something, after all. There might be clues anywhere. You could never know what you might hear.
     
    He met with a frosty reception in Green’s. Mary was a generous woman, but it was beyond even her powers of hospitality to make a man welcome when, just the previous night, he had raided her premises. Some of the same customers were in that evening, and it didn’t take them long to reveal Larry’s identity to the ones who didn’t yet know it. One of the musicians turned round the moment he set eyes on the policeman and went up the road to play in Winkles instead. The others stood around the bar and engaged in a game of musical politics that might have gone on all night if it hadn’t been for a piper who lived locally. He didn’t drink and he couldn’t abide standing around. He was there for the music, not for the politics, and he was always gone before closing time anyway.

    “I suppose we’ll play a tune,” he said to Larry.
    “I suppose we will,” said Larry.
    By the end of the first set of tunes there wasn’t a musician left standing. Whatever his profession, Larry’s fiddle playing left little to be desired. No one in the room had ever heard anything quite like it. Within minutes everyone had tuned up their