The years slip by like swallows of an Autumn day
Another charming instalment of Fr Jason Murphy's Let the Busy World be Hushed...
The light of the Autumn sunshine setting behind the hill of Carrickmore illuminated the room in which she sat in the quiet of the evening. The fresh wood crackled upon the fire to warm the chill of these late September evenings. It and the noise from the clock ticking on the wall kept her company above the low sounds of Daniel singing of the homes of Donegal in the kitchen without.
Her eyes were drawn away from the pages of what ‘Cassidy said’ in The Ireland’s Own to gaze into the middle distance betwixt her and the ebbing light of the sun, remembering its rays dancing on the waters of the Atlantic Ocean fado, fado as its waves lapped upon the sea shore.
In these moments of quiet thought her mind was drawn back to those days when she was but a child perhaps to shield her from the dawning reality of her failing health. She remembering those little thatched houses dotted upon the landscape of her childhood, oblivious to the want and hardship that lay behind every half door, cosseted by her mother from the harsh winds that blew as she yearned now for this same embrace of a mother’s love to surround her from that which lay ahead.
She sat in her living room all these years later a constant for those who passed by her home at Ellot’s cross not far from the One Tree, reading voraciously by the fire, occasionally glimpsing the tops of the cars whizzing by as she peered out the window of Maeve Binchy’s red bricked Tara Road.
Oftentimes she sat reading long after Bridgie Walsh had turned out the light in her house opposite, way into the wee small hours of the night, books piled high on the table fornent her, the pages of which drew her to a world far away. She had loved listening to stories as a little child sitting under the table playing on the floor as her mother and a neighbour woman talked in their melodic tones. They told stories of the past, of the sea and those who lived along its shore and, time and time again, there was talk of her father Hugh whom she had not known as she formed a picture of him in her mind - how he might have looked. She saw him in the strong faces of those she met twixt the sounds and smells of a fair day on the street of Carndonagh where she walked with her mother to sell eggs or in the faces of men cutting turf in the townland of Drumaville from where his people came.
All her life she loved listen to stories, listening empathetically with all of her heart and told only of own her life when prompted to do so, of the great mother she had known, one who had sacrificed much to make ends meet when she was but a little child and in the weeks that followed when her own life was ebbing to a close she recalled her mother as a ‘wee dote’ who ‘if she’d only two spuds she’d share them with you’.
At the age of 18 years, the pretty young Sally McLaughlin took the boat for England and was never to return to the sea or Donegal, albeit for a holiday.
She made her way to Birmingham where a number of her neighbours had previously settled and with whom she shared digs. In the early 1950s Birmingham was brimming with young Irish emigrants, who worked in construction, factories, hospitals and hotels and who thronged local churches where they found a sense of belonging and a connection with home.
These young people became the backbone of parishes throughout England in the decades to come. At night, it was off to the Irish social clubs such as The Harp, The Shamrock and The Emerald to dance the whole of the night long.
Sitting by the fire in Carrickmore all these years later, her mind was taken back to a night in the Four Provinces social club along Alcester Road, where she first was to dance with the young Reilly lad from outside of Redhills with the dark eyebrows and the quiff in his hair. She had met him by chance on his way to work on the buildings as she handed him a bus ticket in those days she worked as a bus conductor. He joked with her several mornings so that he’d stand out in her mind from all the passengers on the bus as she counted out his change, being bold enough one morning to ask her out to the pictures at the Kingsway Cinema to which she agreed but she hardly looked his way that night, as she sat in silence, enthralled by the stars of the big screen and so he abandoned that idea of returning to the cinema, instead asking her out the following weekend to a dance at the Four P’s.
He might have overdid it with the aftershave and brylcream that night, a new shirt and tie purchased from his wage packet but, as she walked in through the door of the club with her friend by her side, her hair tied up, in a pretty dress and a cardigan over her shoulders, he knew the extravagance of the new shirt was all worthwhile for she looked like a mirage that appeared in a sea ordinariness.
They danced that night and many’s the night that followed until they married in the summer of 1960 in a little church with an Irish priest and her family gathered around, in Birmingham.
After some years of toil and the building up of their lives, they returned to live with their family of four small children with English accents along the road to Ballyhaise. She longed for the comradeship of her friends and the busyness of life in Birmingham as life took on a mellow hue back home in Ireland.
As one year borrowed another and the years passed swiftly by, she found herself in these ebbing hours of the day all these sixty and more years later and wondered on all that had been in those years between, once young and full of life, never thinking that old age would be her’s. Now the thoughts of what the future held dwelt in the recesses of her mind and so it was she returned, after those moments of reliving, to what Cassidy said in the Ireland’s Own, as the sun sat behind the hill at Carrickmore and cars whizzed by in their passing.
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