Review: Ballylin

Ballylin, Joan Comiskey, Personal Memoirs

If Ballylin didn't exist, Joan Comiskey would have had to invent it, writes Brian Byrne. But she didn't need to. It is really the village of Ballylinan near Athy, Co Kildare in Ireland, where the New Jersey resident of many years grew up. Her book 'Ballylin' is the people of the village, her family, customers of the bar and grocery operated by her much loved Granny, their friends, acquaintances, and other characters.

Joan Comiskey has not only a great recollection of growing up in 1930s Ireland, and later, but she also has a beautiful way of telling the stories that make up this short but enthralling book. It can be read at a sitting, or dipped into for vignettes of what clearly was a happy childhood and teenage years. Not necessarily easy ones, because times were tough in Ireland then. The Shortalls were luckier than many, they had a business to support them. But Granny Shortall had lost her husband young, and two of her children too. And Joan's mother had returned from America with three little ones after just a few years of marriage, leaving her husband behind. Joan's Granny held it all together.

Here I must declare an interest. Katie Agnes Shortall, née Byrne, was my grand-aunt, my grandfather's oldest sister. In the picture of her that graces the prologue to 'Ballylin', I can clearly see my grandfather's face, and therefore also my father's, and even my own at this stage of my life.

In Joan's account, there's a certain amount of detail about Katie Agnes, but there's much more reflection of her strengths in the description of her interactions with the other characters of the village, and with both the close and the wider family itself.

The weave includes encounters with dysfunctional doctors, postal thieves, and even a killer, wefted with assorted weirdness and wonderful traits in the extended family. Underlying it all is the undiscussed mystery of the breakup of the parents of Joan and her two sisters. A mystery which Joan herself resolves eventually, as much as it could be over the distance of their time apart.

Where the stories intersect with more direct members of my own family, my reading of 'Ballylin' sometimes brought a new insight, at other times triggered distant memories, a few of those transferred from stories told by my father's generation. So in part they are the collected account of an important part of my own heritage. But these remain Joan Comiskey's stories, and wonderful because they are a level separated from me.

Anybody who grew up in a small village in Ireland between the 1930s and the 1950s will recognise the situations, the people, and probably even themselves in the pages of this little book. And if nothing else, though actually far more, it is another example of how much community is really just another family. And how every community throws up the same kind of people.

Joan's sister Phyllis gave me this book as a birthday present when she came up from New York to Cold Spring last week, where I celebrated my 70th with members of my own family living there and others who had flown in from Dublin and Melbourne. The only better present I got was the fact that all my family was together for the occasion, including our 'global' grandchildren.

And in her own way from the distant past of the Byrnes, Katie Agnes was there too. Even though I never knew her, and nothing about her until recently, that made it even more special.

So I finish this piece with Joan's dedication of 'Ballylin', 'For Granny, who laughed with us, taught us to sing and to dance — who cared for us, prayed for us, and encouraged us to hope and dream'. There's still no better way to move our own to better places.