THE OLD HOUSE

THE OLD HOUSE
By Veronica Breen Hogle

The minute I got off the train in the Bagenalstown Station, Mary Doyle, my mother’s dearest friend, met me and said she was glad I’d come back.

“There’s a new restaurant on Main Street, called the Estoria. Would you like to try it?” Mary asked as we drove past the boy’s school along the Station Road.

“Yes,” I said. My eyes swept over the houses and shops I remembered so well in the little town where I had lived until I was seventeen and a half years old. She parked the car and we entered the restaurant.

“Mary, this used to be Connolly’s hardware shop!”

We sat at the only available table at the window. Right in front of my eyes was 3 Main Street, probably the second oldest house in the town. The slate roof looked fairly new. The dark green doors, windows and French shutters had not changed; and the name B r e e n, in somber red letters, was still over the shop front window.

“Look how tarnished the brass letterbox is now,” Mary remarked. I looked back across the street at the premises where my mother had worked and lived for sixty-four years. The house stood deserted. There was no light in the window, no welcome at the door. The sadness of the words ‘the children are all scattered, the old folk are gone,’ from the Irish song “The Old House,” seeped through me.

Just then, the restaurant owner came to say our lunch was on the house. He asked if I remembered his father, Pat Kennedy, who used to work in Connolly’s hardware shop.

“Of course, I do! I can’t believe I’m having lunch in what used to be the Connolly’s display window!” I told him.

When Mary left to use the phone, I looked over at the old house again and saw the wind had blown one of the windows open. On Fair Days, I opened those windows and looked down on the street. I listened to farmers haggling over the price of squealing bonhams in crates. I watched funerals, people walking to and from Mass, boys with jam jars heading down High Street to catch tadpoles in the Barrow. I saw the Count McCormick, the coalman, standing in his wagon, his coat flying out behind him, holding on to the reins as his horse trotted through the streets. Across in Connolly’s shop window, I saw brass fire screens, cookers, and all kinds of tools. And day and night, I heard St. Andrew’s Church clock strike the hour and the half hour.

While waiting for Mary, I stared at the old house. The rhyme about the crooked man, who found a crooked sixpense, and bought a crooked house jumped into my head. Parts of the walls were as crooked as rams’ horns, and held together by several layers of embossed wallpaper. Partitions were put up, taken down, and put up again so often, it was hard to know how many real rooms were in the house.
The back bedrooms had skylights, and in the summer, mother lay on the beds in her birthday suit to get some vitamin D. Another skylight over the landing gave such perfect light to a fern; it cascaded like a green lace curtain down the sides of its brass pot. The stairs were so steep and narrow, the doctor said,

“It’s like stairs in a submarine!”

The last time I was in the house was two years ago, when I came back from America for my mother’s funeral. In preparation for her Mass, two priests came to talk with me.

“How did your mother, Eileen Breen, happen to be in the town and in this house?” one priest asked me.

“She got a job taking care of May Walsh who had cancer and tuberculosis. She was the wife of Michael, called Dottie Walsh, who was a tailor. My mother took care of May for three years, until she died in 1945. Then Dottie offered to teach mother how to make ladies’ dresses, and she stayed on to work for him.”

“What are some of your own recollections of the old house?” the priest asked.

His question brought back scenes of Mr. Barry who stayed in bed in the big room upstairs, with a coal-burning fireplace. He kept his long gray beard spread out over the top sheet, and he smelled of pipe tobacco, disinfectant, and the odor of old men.

“Can you say a little poem for me?” old Mr. Barry often asked me. Then he handed me a little silver coin with a rabbit on it.

He was an uncle of Kevin Barry who was hanged in Mountjoy Jail in Dublin. He may have been a tailor. Before Mr. Barry died, he signed the lease of the house, owned by Connolly’s, the local merchants, over to Dottie Walsh.

Some time after that, Mr. Caleb Tyndall, an artist from Leighlinbridge, whose uncle Professor John Tyndall, discovered why the sky is blue needed a place to live. He was a well-spoken man with a brush mustache. He wore a soft hat and a gold watch hung on a chain inside the waistcoat pocket of his tweed suit. He often stood on the landing and called down to my mother.

“Missy? Missy? I say, Missy, what is the official time?”

Then Mr. Lacy, a retired stationmaster from Tralee came to live with his sister, Mrs. Kelly, who owned the Jeweler’s Shop, also on Main Street. After she died, Mr. Lacy, who had no local family, took up residence in the big front room. When he became bedridden, Dottie shaved him, gave him bed baths, and read the newspaper to him every day. My grandmother, Mary Kate Walshe Earls was also cared for in the house until she died a few months before her 91st birthday.

“Sounds like the house was a refuge for old people who needed care,” said the priest.

Later that night, when I was in bed, more scenes of my childhood came flooding back. When I lived in Bagenalstown; my home was mostly with Jim and Christina Fitzpatrick in the Soldier’s Cottages. But I often stayed with my mother at 3 Main Street.

During the first years, the storefront was a tailor’s shop. Later, it was a sweet shop. Tommy Cosgrove, the poster man, came in every day to buy peppermint sweets. After the sweet shop, it became a toyshop, which lasted just one Christmas.

Then for years, it was a second-hand clothes shop. When I was sixteen, all I wanted to do was go to dances. It was the custom for young men to offer to escort girls home. Often, before I left for the dance, I removed the ugliest clothes in Ireland from the window. Sometimes, when I came home, I was mortified to see a mannequin dressed in outlandish clothes smiling at me out of the lighted shop window.

The 1950s was a time of scarcity. The flourmill closed, and so did Dooley’s Hotel. It was common to see shopkeepers standing in their doorways, smoking cigarettes, and hoping for a customer. Every day, Dottie went by train to Carlow to work in Molloy’s as a trousers’ maker.

Around that time, the Irish government sent linesmen from Dublin to install telephone and electric light poles in the rural areas of County Carlow. The linesmen needed digs. Mother saw the opportunity to have lodgers and bought three beds and put them in the big front room upstairs. She papered the walls with heavy paper that had robins singing on the top of a holly bush. She put two beds in the smaller front room and put up wallpaper with little poems on it. Dottie built chalets out of cement blocks in the back yard, and mother grew flowers and herbs in pots.

Around that time, workers went on strike at Keenan’s Foundry in nearby Kilcarriag Street. As the strike continued, some workers crossed the picket lines, and emotions escalated. Gardai descended on Bagenalstown to keep the peace. They also needed to sleep. The Gardai and the linesmen took turns sleeping in beds, armchairs, and on mattresses on the floors of the robin and poetry rooms.

With the coming of electricity, phones and television, business in Bagenalstown improved. Dottie built small tables with red Formica tops and mother put a sign that said “Teas,” in the window. The customers were farmers who wanted mugs of strong tea and hefty ham sandwiches. People who worked in shops became regulars. Traveling sales men and tourists were frequent customers. Late night suppers were served to musicians performing in show bands.

One day a young couple came in and said,
“We heard yous keep a great Aten House?” Mother looked at them, their red curly hair and knew they were itinerants.

“We do,” she said.

“Could yous make a weddin’ breakfast for us and about a dozen kinfolk this Saturday?” asked the groom-to-be.

“We’ll ate anythin’ bar biled eggs,” added his soon-to-be-wife.

“Right,” said mother.

She ordered a tiered wedding cake and pink roses. The day before the wedding, she saw caravans, pulled by piebald ponies, full of itinerant women wrapped in plaid blankets, rolling down Main Street towards the Barrow.

“Oh! 12 is the most I can cater to!” she said and panic set in.

The next morning, exactly 12 people arrived at the restaurant. She served them a wedding breakfast fit for the royal family to the bride and groom, their parents, brothers and sisters. She took their photographs. In return, they read her tealeaves, told her she’d live a long life, and each of them paid her ten shillings. Then they walked down to the river and celebrated around blazing fires they lit at their campsites.

The restaurant was the first on the street to have a refrigerator. Martin Duffy, owner of the pub beside Connolly’s, sometimes ran over with a bowl in his hands.

“I’ve a group a Yanks beyond in the pub and yous are the only ones that can help ‘em ruin their whiskey with ice cubes.”

Mother cooked and presented meals as if she were trained in haute cuisine. But if customers smoked while eating, her green eyes flashed and they did not get their cheese and crackers’ course. With hired kitchen help, she cooked, Dottie washed dishes, and the little restaurant expanded into three rooms.

Then, Jim Butler, the house painter, asked her if she would cook a turkey dinner for the fireman’s banquet. There was a piano in the dining room. The dinner and sing-a-long lasted until morning, and the men went straight to work. It was the beginning of many annual dinners.

There was always a light in the window and a welcome at the door at 3 Main Street. In the evenings, locals dropped into the restaurant, sat in clouds of smoke, drank tea, debated what the priest said at Mass, coaxed Dottie to sing “The West’s Awake,” or listen to mother recite a poem she made up.

Dottie died in 1983. Forty-one years had passed since she came to work for him. By now, her nut-brown curly hair had turned to silver and her hearing was poor.

She gradually closed the restaurant. Noel Farrell was her last customer and when a long-time lodger left the house for his wedding, she made the two front rooms into a suite for herself. She sublet half of the downstairs to a Mr. Fisher who turned it into a bike shop. Brambles grew over the chalets in the back of the house. Just the same, she loved to sit in the wilderness and feed the songbirds she could not hear.

Over the years, many people in Bagenalstown helped to take care of my mother. Because of their kindness, she was able to live in the house by herself until one day before she died in hospital on May 5th 2006, six weeks past her 90th birthday. One of her friends said she couldn’t help but note that Eileen Breen came to the old house to take care of the wife of the tailor. And at the end of her own life, in the same house, Nell O’Riordan, wife of another tailor, cared for her.

I’ll never forget the old boardinghouse, where many of the lodgers were treated like sons. I’ll always remember the old people who were well cared for, happy, and died within its crooked walls.

When mother died, the 99-year lease on the house ended, and the property passed back to the landlord.

My heart is grateful the Connolly family didn’t knock down the old house, or rush to rent the prime location. It gave me time to return to Bagenalstown. In the words from The Old House,

‘Lonely, I wandered through scenes of my childhood. Now, it’s time I was moving. It’s time I pass on.’

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Photos: 1. Mother shows bride how to cut her wedding cake.

2. The fern under the skylight

3. The bike shop at 3 Main Street, Bagenalstown

This story was published in the Carlow Nationalist, Ireland on July 2, 2008 and will also appear in CelticLife Magazine, Nova Scotia, Canada in the fall of 2008.

Story ID:	4116
Written by:	Veronica Breen Hogle (bio, contact, other stories)
Organization:	Irish Cultural Events
Story type:	Family History
Location:	Bagenalstown Co. Carlow Ireland
Year:	2008
Person:	3 Main Street