When John McEntee’s sisters bought back the family house in Cavan, he found the place unchanged – except his friends are in the cemetery
My Irish home is a ghost town
R
eturning for Christmas for the first time in 40 years to my home town, Cavan, was a curious experience. My sisters, Ann in Boston and Grainne in Brazil, had joined forces to buy our family terraced house in Church Street. They were coming home – so why not me, too? Nudging 70, I’m afraid many of my friends are no longer alive. The town is mostly alien to me. It remains much the same architecturally, just with new people occupying all the familiar bars and shops and homesteads. But nearly everyone I grew up alongside is gone, resting in Killygarry or Cullies cemeteries, whose serried boulevards replicate the streets where I grew up. Paddy Elliot, John Sullivan, Baby Whelan, Margaret English, Mollie Soden, Tommy Brides… There are too many memories. Church Street, where I was raised, still, in my memory, retains the Surgical Hospital, Paddy Maloney’s palatial house, Gheoghan’s, Gough’s, Phil Gargan’s Ritz Bar, the post office, Whelan’s. Further afield, there are the ghosts of the old market in the square, Foster’s newsagents, Murray’s garage, Mrs Cullen atop the Town Hall, Woolworths, the Ulster Arms, the County Hotel on the corner opposite McDonald Hub Bar… Down Bridge Street, long-dead soldiers still chuckle over Fanta and chips with girlfriends in Sean McManus’s Central Café. The Congo, the Blue Moon, Mick Crosby’s butcher’s shop astride the Cavan River. Phelim Coffey in River Street hiding after breaking Tilson’s window and blaming Mickey Breslin. Onwards to Railway Road’s Rivals Inn – later the Lakeland – within earshot of phantom steam trains departing for
32 The Oldie March 2022
Clones. And the town where I nudged my Avis long-gone wall car down a rainswept College opposite, where Street to meet my sisters, Ann Edward English showed and Grainne, and brother me the finger imprint in Desmond in the Abbey Bar. I wet cement where pointed the hired motor his sister memorialised towards Main Street and a her finger kebab shop next to the road shortly before she leading to the peak of Cock drowned in the Hill and the reservation adjoining river… housing Ireland’s Swerve to upper dispossessed travellers. Main Street. Wishing the Turkish and Hourican’s, Edward Croatian kebab-providers a O’Gorman’s, Smyth’s merry Christmas, I clambered pub turned electrical into the car. Suddenly the First Holy Communion at shop, opposite Fay’s, passenger door opened and a Cavan Cathedral: John Cooke’s and Eugene young man clambered in. He McEntee, aged 7, in 1960 Monaghan’s, long closed said, ‘I’ll give you anything to since the day my uncle take me up the hill. My mother is sick.’ Frank Conlan recorded the visit of two In tandem, the back doors opened. farmers who, on Fair Day, were told by Two easy-on-the-eye girls and two Eugene, ‘We’re stocktaking – come teenage boys piled in. My travel bag was back tomorrow.’ perched on one of the back seats. My new And there, atop Farnham Street, female traveller simply lifted her elegant resides the old De La Salle primary legs and placed them over the bag, either school, where long ago my favourite side of the headrest. Fait accompli. Brother Francis tickled my privates, I started the car and turned left exhorting me to join the football team towards the sick mother’s home. ‘Left, and the recorder band. right, left again,’ declared my navigator All is the same but different. My head next to me. ‘Pull up here!’ fills with the laughter of growing up. He offered me money. I declined. As Stealing golf trollies at Cock Hill and they evacuated the car, I declared, discovering that the buckled wheels at ‘Consider this a festive gift from the the bottom of the hill belonged to McEntees of Church Street.’ Surgeon Maloney. The garage proprietor I finally arrived at the family home, known for his profanity, ‘Double F’ gloriously bought by my siblings. Ann Donoghue, trying to sell an Austin A40, asked, ‘What took you so long?’ farting oil, to my cousin Michael and me. I explained, telling her about my We were trying to buy a staff car for parting exhortation. our dance-hall empire – neither of us had ‘Thanks, John,’ she replied, drily. a licence. We auditioned go-go dancers ‘Now they know where we live.’ for our disastrous disco in a hall behind the Rivals Inn. John McEntee edits the Ephraim At Christmas, this was the haunted Hardcastle column in the Daily Mail
