Our mysterious neighbour whom we loved from a distance

Fr Jason Murphy

The whirr of the rotary blade of a push lawnmower is an enduring sound of summer that re-echoes in my mind from childhood days before the proliferation of petrol engine lawnmowers.

There was a certain melody to the turning of its blades as it trimmed the grass from behind the high fuchsia hedge of my neighbour’s back garden. Grass that was cut each year at the end of May by Charlie Donohoe with his sharpened scythe and for all the weeks of summer thereafter, the mower, taken from its green corrugated shed each Monday morning was pushed up and down the lawn in straight lines until it resembled Centre Court of the All England Tennis club that we watched John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova play on each summer for the weeks of June.

She took great pride in her garden, rows of neatly planted lettuce and cabbage plants, dahlias and roses, dead headed and pruned with care. Lying back of a sunny summer’s Sunday in an old-fashioned striped deck - chair, still in her wrap around apron a clad, she read a book or the Irish Independent unaware of the little eyes peeking through the hedge, watching the woman resting in sunshine, with her white hair contained within a net, a figure, mysterious in ways, of whom we were all afraid.

She didn’t speak when we met her along the road, only nodding, wondering to ourselves did she recognise us, as she walked along the footpath to Gillick’s shop, pulling her tartan pattern shopping trolley behind her or, as we passed her in our running as she walked to mass, dressed in her wool coat, a faux fur cap and her missal in hand.

Living quietly behind the fuchsia hedge, her windows gleaming, her snow white net curtains, wafting in the breeze of an early May morning, the enduring sound from her house with its cardinal red polished floor, was that of a wireless set, which she had turned up to full blast, the jingle announcing Gay Byrne’s radio show to be heard the length of the street and back.

For she was profoundly deaf, caught up in a bomb in December 1969 on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, losing her hearing but for vague muffled sounds. A housekeeper in the Castle Hotel on Denmark Street in Dublin where she garnered her neat and tidy ways, but the bomb put pay to a life lived along Dublin’s streets before she returned to live and care for her mother.

She called on my father an odd time when something went wrong and conversations with her were had through written notes on blue writing paper, which she would answer in turn with speech and so it was the conversation would continue the whole of the evening long when my parents each in turn began to call on her in the evening as she grew older with the years.

There were times when she used to put the hair standing, come long winter evenings telling of visits she would have from people long gone who would spend a while talking to her, there beside the range in her kitchen, for whom she would pray constantly in her rosaries that would be recited over and over.

But for us as children she was our neighbour, though aloof and forbidding, whom we came to regard with deep affection though somewhat from afar, part of the everyday of our childhood years. We dared not enter through her gate though many times, our footballs, as we played, strayed across her hedge but only the boldest and the bravest dared to venture in.

Over the years of our childhood and well into our adolescent years we lost manys the football, footballs we never did retrieve, for she never once threw them back, having squashed a head of cabbage or knocking the flower head of a rosebush that had the potential of a prize winner in the agricultural show. Indeed, we used to wonder where it was they all went to, perhaps there was a room filled with coloured children’s footballs of every size, marking the progress of the years.

When it was that the phone call came telling of her passing on the last day of February in my first of college years, a deep sadness overcame me, having to let go of one who had always been there. She had returned from her usual walk to town that day and sat in her chair beside the fire without taking off her coat or knitted cap and there, with Rosary beads in hand, passed away.

When we knelt at her bedside to pay our respects after the nuns laid her out, we peeked around every corner and even under the bed but nowhere was a football to be found in our cherished neighbour’s house.