TIPPERARY REFLECTIONS: When are you going back?

It is that time of year again. Pretty soon, we shall be meeting our townspeople, who are now in distant places from London and Manchester to New York and Houston, Texas. Some for nigh on 50 years or more.

And no sooner will we lay eye upon them than we’ll ask:

“When are you going back?”

And that‘s the essential difference between an exile’s holiday and that of a visitor from abroad.

My first memory of emigration was as a boy in the 1950s going up from the Watery Mall to the railway station in Thurles to meet my uncles, aunts and cousins coming back home for a couple of weeks.

One of the reasons, at seven or eight years of age, I enjoyed their coming was because they were such lovely people.

Decent, down-to-earth plain people who had worked hard to be able to come home for their holidays.

And they, in money-scarce times, would bring home comics, like Rupert Bear and give me chocolates and money for the pictures in Delahunty’s Cinema down the Mall (‘The Wan Below’)or McGraths Capitol Cinema( ‘The Wan Above’) or a spin in a motor car they would hire out some days to go to Holycross Abbey, Killarney or my relatives in Cavan.

A car was a scarce enough commodity in Thurles in the hungry days of the 1950s.

Remember, there was no television only the radio( with the dry and wet batteries we bought up in Donoghue’s electrical shop in Friar Street.

But there was the Sunday Coordeek(house visitation)in my uncle Mick’s house in Fontenoy Terrace where Mick, who worked on the Council, played the accordion and songs such as The Rose of Arranmore; Irene, Goodnight, Irene, Let Bygones Be Bygones, Forever.

I can picture my father, John Joe Ryan (and a bed in Heaven, to him, as the old folks say) in his white shirt and peaked cap and dark trousers leaning up against the kitchen door in my uncle Pakie’s House in Cabra Terrace, Thurles, singing his perennially favourite party piece, The Rose of Mooncoin.

And it was only on my father’s death that I realised why I hum the Kilkenny hurling anthem every morning.

My uncle, Danny, who lived in Caterham Surrey and worked with British Rail lived in Caterham, Surrey, and used to bring all the suitcases up to the nearby Cabra Terrace from the station on a fine strong high nelly of a bicycle belonging to my father. It was a ritual he insisted upon. No taxis for Danny Boy like his brother, Tommy in Caterham, also an ex-RAF man.

Then (for all exiles, I think) a quick visit to quench the thirst in those hot summer days after the train journey to Bowes bar for a refresher before facing into the real re-unions at home.

I remember the joyful laughter, camaraderie and the rousing music of those days quite vividly still and the trips hither and yon in the leather upholstered motor car.

I thought my uncles and aunts must have been all millionaires. And that England must be a great country entirely.

But whatever envy I might have had in that respect faded on the night before my relatives departed for England again.

On the night of the ‘American Wake,’ we would be up above in Leahy’s Field Not Farfrom the Thurles Clonmel railway line where kids who must have had no problems with money put pennies on the tracks to be flattened by the wheels of the trains approaching from under Cabra Bridge).

And I recall my uncle Danny a bit of a joker, always trying to get some folks not in the know about it to grab with their fists the electric wire fence for keeping the cattle in their place.

But not on this evening…

A terrible loneliness would descend like a mist on the rich hay-scented fields as I would sit on the wooden plank spanning the cart and holding the reins of Jenny The Jennet (pronounced jinnit), which I used to drive up and down from Cabra Terrace to Leahy’s Field.

It’s strange how some of the most defining moments of my life featured a field.

And even on his death bed in 1990, my father lifted his eyes from the pillow of his bed in the Hospital of the Assumption in Thurles towards Semple Stadium and said quietly:

“They’re all over in the field now.” An old Sarsfields hurler and ex hurley- maker and ex steward, the field meant a lot to him.

Up in Leahy’s field, which was at that moment in eternity my whole world, I felt like bursting into tears at the terrible unfairness of the end of the idyll.

I would miss my aunts and uncles and cousins. And I would not really know why until many years later.

Emigration for those who did not wish to go was definitely an evil. And in all the homes of the terraces, roads, streets, avenues in Thurles and all over this land.

There are similar bitter-sweet memories of our dearest summer visitors.

But our hearts are in a hurry again for their coming. And please God, come next summer, God will be in his heaven sure as water runs and grass will grow.

There will be dust on the roads again.

And we will look forward to meeting our Ould Townies, the Rale Ould Stock once more.