'Living next door to Alice'
The other week, Alice Coleman told somebody visiting her in hospital that she 'must write the book'.
At that stage it was clear she wouldn't get to do anything like that. But she had the title picked anyhow. 'Living next door to Alice'.
It would have been a great book.
Alice Coleman died just a week short of her 90th birthday. And up to recent months, she was still enjoying herself as she had always done.
I photographed her last Christmas Eve in The Hideout, out for the festive season with her longtime pals Laura Lynch and Patsy Halloran. Enjoying herself. That's how she'd want to be remembered.
You only have to look through back issues of The Bridge and see how often she features in photographs at any celebratory event in the town. Alice would always be there.
She was a woman who had worked all her life, been a businesswoman in many enterprises for most of it, and a woman who never let life pass on without being herself an integral part of its extraordinarily complex matrix. For several generations of Kilcullen, she has been part of the mosaic of memories of us growing up here.
Kilcullen today is a much different place than it used to be, with many new people, who won't have any knowledge or her, or even of the kind of Kilcullen she helped to forge.
She didn't start out here, though. Alice was -- as Nuala Collins profiled her some years ago -- a 'Hollywood Star'.
The real Hollywood, in Wicklow. She had lots of childhood memories of growing up in the time of the 'Black and Tans', some of them documented by Nuala Collins in the Bridges of February and March 2001.
She was also a child of the generation when you went straight to work at the leaving of Primary School. At 14 she went into what would have been then known as 'domestic service' in a local house.
From there she moved to work in Bray in a B&B at 7s/6d a week. It was money that was earned, because the hours were a heck of a lot longer than would be normal today in any job. It was to be a fortuitous experience for her later business life, though.
It also gave her the opportunity to socialise, which included particularly cycling to afternoon dances in Bray and Greystones on her Sundays off.
After coming home for Christmas at the age of 20, and deciding not to return to Bray, she subsequently took a position as a cook at Tulfarris House under the direction of Thelma Harnidge. Here she learned other skills which were to be useful in her later career, including cake making and icing.
It was also a move which brought her to her first marriage. A carpenter working at Tulfarris, Paddy Dowling, won her heart and in 1939 she married him. He was involved in the building of houses on the Harristown Estate near Kicullen, and they set up their first home in one of them. They later moved to Ballymore where Rita and Marie were born.
But just when their construction business was going well, Paddy died in 1950 at the age of 38.
Alice was never the kind of woman to wilt under difficult circumstances, and she continued to run the business herself. She even drove the lorry used to supply the sites, which was to lead indirectly to her coming to Kilcullen.
Buying her building supplies from Brennans of Kilcullen, she met Sean Keegan, who was later to build his own very successful business in Newbridge. At this time though, he worked in Brennans and one day when Alice was in he mentioned that there was a streetfront house just up the road for sale and advised her to buy it.
She did so. And in 1954 she married again, to Kilcullen man Noel Coleman. They had two daughters, whom we all know today as Pat and Ber.
Alice was still the quintessential country businesswoman, and over the next few years she opened a shop in the front room of the house, selling general goods and drapery. She also made cakes and specialised in providing wedding fare.
At the same time she bought a pub in Ballymore -- now Paddy Murphys -- and ran it with Noel for a couple of years.
She took out a hackney licence and was the means of getting home for many Kilcullen pub regulars for very many years (I called on her services for my customers many times in the years that I was in The Hideout).
Alice also ran the County Pound in a yard behind her house, where stray horses and sheep would be brought by the authorities to be lodged pending payment by their owners. None of those people, some of whom could be tough enough cases, ever got away without paying the statutory headage.
She was the kind of person who didn't like to leave opportunity or space lie fallow, and in addition to the shop business the Main Street premises, she had set up a guesthouse.
Not the tourist kind, but one to meet the needs of single people who had moved into town for their work and needed long-term lodgings, and for the commercial traveller who in those days required various overnight stops on his route.
They included, not in order of importance or chronology, Eugene Gilsensan, Sean Keegan, Jimmy Blighe, Dick Dunphy, Mick Hillery, Austin Egan, Pat O'Donnell, Billy Hughes, Tommy Lacey, and Brian Keyes. And that's just the shortlist.
Anyone who has lived in Kilcullen in my generation will know the part many of those played in their own ways to make the town what it is today.
Noel died in 1996, but Alice lived on to enjoy her life as she always had, to the full.
Alice's favourite tipple was a Powers whiskey with Schweppes ginger ale. This weekend, we've all raised our glasses in some way to salute an extraordinary woman. To celebrate, in a way, having 'lived next door' to her.
It is how she would have wished it.
Brian Byrne.
