Two sisters, two different paths

It stands there the house along the road before you come to Treehoo, a house that has stood for perhaps 150 years and more, a single-storey stone dwelling, typical of the houses that dotted the countryside in years past. At the centre of the house is the kitchen with a Stanley range that stands where once an open hearth used to be. And around this range, all life is lived, and one can safely say that blue smoke has rose from this chimney every day for all the years the house has stood on this spot along the road next Treehoo Cross. It was into this kitchen that the young Eddie Walsh took his bride Mary Kate Philbin in 1934 to make their home not long after returning from America. They had met in New York, the young lad from the townland of Coolcandis and the girl from the townland of Laherdaun near the village of Pontoon in County of Mayo, young emigrants in New York, escaping those early impoverished years of the Irish Free State in the 1920s.

Here in this quiet corner of County Cavan with her West of Ireland accent she settled down, looking out on the rolling drumlins that she came to love. It was below in the lower room of the house that the eldest of their family was born on the second of April, 1936, in the midst of the economic war as Dev’s comely maidens danced at the crossroads and cattle starved in the fields. She was christened Mary as her grandparents brought her on an ass and cart to be baptised in the chapel at Killoughter some two days after she was born.

She was followed by her siblings - Margaret, Eamonn, John, Anne and Eileen - all as happy as Larry there in their home next the cross. Mary loved the outdoor life, following her father around the farm, and from an early age she came to know well the rhythm of the seasons, from the sowing of the potatoes and oats in the field to the calving in the biar and the making of the hay. She watched her father as he harrowed in the Spring and then made turf in the bog and broke the teeth on bonnifs just a day after they were born. This was her world - these fields along the road and the turning of the seasons each and every year.

Life was how it ought to be for children growing up in those years, simple and without worry until that New Year’s Eve in 1951 when their beloved mother went into St Felim’s hospital to give birth to a baby, a time of great excitement for little children as they wondered whether it be a boy or girl. But, unfortunately, their poor mother haemorrhaged and no doctor could be located on that night of festivities as the young Mary, at 15 years of age, cycled into Fr Maguire in Ballyhaise to read an office for her mother but something told him, as she met him at the door of the Parochial House, that both mother and child had, by then, turned the road for God and she was best turn her bicycle for home to be with her father.

It near broke her father’s heart to see his wife of 17 years taken from him in childbirth at the age of just 42, and in those days and months that followed the poor man fell to pieces.

Mary stood in her mother’s place at the open hearth, cooking and cleaning and easing the loss for the little children. She worked both inside and out and, with the help of Margaret and Eamonn, though still at school, keeping the house warm and putting food on the table for the little ones.

For the youngest three, she became all the mother they ever knew, and it was her selflessness that kept them from being divided up among relatives. She ensured that this house was a place of warmth and welcome, a place of love where each of the children could call home. She recalls the day well that the Sisters of Nazareth came to the house in the wake of their mother’s death, collecting as they done, for year on year, and the offer to educate Margaret beyond primary school.

It was in the September following that Margaret packed her case of her few belongings as her father brought her by ass and cart into Cavan Town to catch the train to Dublin that would thereafter bring her to Cork. Mary and the children stood at the door, the tears falling from their eyes, as they waved goodbye to their sister, quiet and softly spoken, who had to face the long journey before her and all that life would bring.

For Mary, the years that followed were dedicated to the children who turned to her for their every need but she remembers well the night at a dance in Bunnoe, when she was asked to waltz around the floor by a young man by the name of Jack Tierney from the townland of Drumcairn below the cross at Treehoo. It was to be the start of a romance that would last the whole of a life.

As time passed, Jack became a regular visitor to the house as he sat with her father forneth the hearth in the evenings talking on the land and all things as he endeared himself to the children.

They watched for letters in the post with news from Margaret below in Mallow and looked forward to her return at Christmas and Easter. It was in the Summer of 1953 that she told Mary that she had received an offer of a scholarship in a private grammar school, called the Manor House school, far from home, on the East End Road in Finchley, London. Though she would be farther from home, it was to be an opportunity that would give to her an education she could only dream of and so it was in the fall of the year, the young Margaret, though shy in nature, at just 15 years again said farewell, this time taking the boat to England.