The house with nobody in it

Let the busy world be hushed

Fr Jason Murphy

It stands there in the middle of a field, the little house with nobody in it, alongside the sheds and outhouses that were once part of McNamara’s farm on the banks of the River Erne. As a child, I used to walk along the railway line going to swim at a place they call the Bush in the balmy days of summer and look across the wide expanse of the open field where Freisen Holsteins lay beneath the shade of the whitethorn bushes in the heat of the summer sun. There I would gaze on the little house without windows or doors and wonder who once lived in it, this little house that was once a home from whose forlorn chimney smoke rose to the sky.

In times gone by, it was a place where happiness dwelt beneath the roof that sheltered a family, a little house without running water or electricity yet a place where love was known. For in the days before she died, in the midst of her suffering, Ann returned in her memory to this place where she once knew deep contentment; where, as a little girl she could retreat after the cares and worries of the school day. It was to here, when she closed her eyes, she could take leave of her suffering and feel the warmth of a love she had known.

In those hours before death, she told us that she could feel their presence all around her, the people from that time and place who as a little girl she had loved. She told us that the memories of those early days in that little house came flooding back and comforted her and they were as real as that which she was experiencing in the here and now.

It was here her granny and grandad lived - Emily and John O’ Donnell - in this little home that they had raised their own family. John, a tall lean man who wore a hat and moustache, worked as a farm hand in McNamara’s of Erne Vale. His son John Joe met and married a young lady from Manorhamilton, Agnes McSherry, and the two settled on Kilconny street in Belturbet. They raised their family of seven here but, from a very early age, Ann became the constant companion of her granny Emily, a quiet and gentle lady who lived in the little house down the pass and across the field from the Railway line.

It was an idyllic place for Ann and her sister Kathleen, a place of warmth and love, with its large open hearth fire on which everything was cooked over the coals hanging from a crane. Here she enjoyed the peace and serenity with only the sounds of River Erne to soothe the mind or the hoot of the passing of the Narrow Gauge engine on its way to Ballinamore to disturb the silence.

Her life followed a routine each and every day as her grandmother waited at the convent school gate on Bridge Street, as she ran to meet her and the walk along by the wall of the Church of Ireland Rectory, in the farm gate of Erne Vale and across the yard of cattle and poultry to reach the back door of their little house.

Sometimes after her dinner she would walk up the town to trade her granny’s eggs in Allen’s shop on the Diamond for the necessary provisions needed for the tea and then it was away home at night time across Kilconny bridge to join her family before bedtime.

It was an idyllic time in her life, a time that was to shape the person she was to be, quiet and reserved, shunning the attention of others. After she returned to Belturbet in her middle years, Ann used to walk her little dogs along the railway line by Straheglin and o’er the Railway Bridge and there she would stand and stare, across the fields, to the little house standing forlorn and unloved, where once an open half door beckoned her home. There standing, as strangers passed her by, she recalled a different time, a time when she lived in the shadow of a loving grandmother who indelibly touched her life and to whom she returned in her mind’s eye in the midst of suffering.

And so it was in the very early hours of the Eve of All Hallows, Ann took leave of this place that she called home with her husband by her side, and somewhere beyond the veil of our hearing she heard the voices of those she loved, the Hallowed Ones, calling her onwards down the pass and across the field to the little house beneath the Railway line, not now standing sad and forlorn but now with smoke rising from the chimney pot, net curtains in open windows billowing in the breeze.

There, as in the days she ran across the field from school, her grandmother waited to greet her not now in Straheglin but in a little house, a welcoming house, a house built for her on this the Feast of Saints in the Eternal dwelling place of God.

‘The House with Nobody in it’

by Joyce Kilmer - lines altered

Whenever I walk out to Putigan along the railway track,

I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.

I suppose I’ve passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a minute,

And look at the house, the little house, the house with nobody in it.

This house on the road to Putigan needs several panes of glass,

And somebody ought to weed the walk and take a scythe to the grass.

It needs new paint and shingles, and the ivy should be trimmed and tied;

But what it needs the most of all is somebody living inside.

Now, a new house standing empty, with staring window and door,

Looks idle, perhaps, and foolish, like a hat on its block in the store.

But there’s nothing mournful about it; it cannot be sad and lone;

For the lack of something within it that it has never known.

But a house that has done what a house should do, a house that has sheltered life,

That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife;

A house that has echoed a baby’s laugh and held up his stumbling feet;

Is the saddest sight, when it’s left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.

So whenever I go to Putigan along the Railway track,

I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back.

Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters fallen apart,

For I can’t help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken heart.