Time travelling in Image magazine

I was thumbing through an Image magazine from March 1980 — one of a number of old periodicals lost in a drawer for many years, writes Brian Byrne. More intent on the design of the 44 years-old publication than anything else, my attention was suddenly caught by a picture of my wife, Viv, making a phone call at one of those open air American public kiosks. Then I realised that I had written the article for which the photo was an illustration. And I had provided the photos, taken the year before while we were on an American holiday. All of which explained why the magazine was still around. 

The article was Keeping In Touch by phone, American style. Against the background of one Michael Smurfit having recently vowed to bring the Irish telephone service properly into the 20th century, as chairman of the new state agency Telecom Eireann. The agency was established by the then Minister for Posts & Telegraphs, Albert Reynolds TD, to run the service on a commercial basis. At the time it was still taking months, sometimes even years, for people in Ireland to get a phone installed in their homes and the waiting list stood at 160,000 — in America they could get a phone the same day they ordered it. Plus a lot of phone-based services. Smurfit was promising to make the improvements here over five years. We were, though, still a long way from achieving the performance of American telephone companies, where at the time there were 150 million private telephones, their owners talking to each other nearly 800 million times a day. 

After all these years, my Image piece still reads well. Though against today's then undreamed-of plethora of communications underpinned by the internet, there's a quaintness about it. It even made me nostalgic for more innocent non-social media times. 

But the magazine also jolted other memories. As I browsed other articles in the 96-page issue, names and connections jumped out. Tom Savage, whom I knew from his occasional tutoring in the Catholic Communications Centre where I had worked, and later that year was to become a colleague when I joined the RTE It Says In the Papers panel, was writing book reviews for Image. Muttering darkly about doing so in the era of the spy novel. “My problem with spy fiction is that I can never understand the plot,” he wrote. “I've read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and watched it through twice on television and the only thing I'm sure of is that the boy soprano had a lovely voice."

The books he was reviewing in this 1980 month were much more to his taste, though. Whip Hand by Dick Francis, a writer with the ability to leave his reader stay the race to the final page, “and stand sweating at the cleverality of it all.” He also had Brian Moore's The Mangan Inheritance on his list, a writer he described as 'unrivalled' in developing a sequence of events that "leave the hero or heroine in quicksand up to the lower lip." Tom also had a profile feature on author Richard Llewellyn, who penned the classic How Green Was My Valley about life in the Welsh coal valleys of the 1930s. The accompanying picture shows Tom writing his notes while interviewing his subject, reminding me that he always hand-wrote his It Says in the Papers scripts. I used to bring my own portable typewriter into RTE for mine, because the newsroom machines were in such an atrocious state of repair and clogged with cigarette ash. Tom is no longer with us, but he was both a colleague and friend during my early RTE days and someone I had great regard for. 

Still flipping the pages, I came across a Motoring feature written by rally driving legend Rosemary Smith, previewing an upcoming Irish Motor Show. It was to be towards the end of that decade before I became involved in automotive journalism, and some years after that before I actually met Rosemary. A wonderful, no nonsense woman and a lot of fun with some wicked stories about her life and the people in it. Over time she also became a friend with whom I and others enjoyed lunch several times a year. Rosie passed away just a year ago.

Another feature in the Image issue was Till Death Us Do Part by Lavinia Greacen, about grief and how people don't always deal with it well. The connection here, I was to get to know her husband, Walter, during the late 1990s when I used to design the twice-yearly brochure for his Curragh Travel business, its office based in Newbridge.  Walter, a most genial man, died in 2013.

Magazines generally get thrown out when their next issues come on the newsstands, and today the print periodical is in fact in almost terminal decline. But going through this particular one was a time machine journey. Not just for my own — sometimes tenuous — connections in it, but things like the advertisements: Over the years your face will say thank you — Ponds Cold Cream; When was the last time a man said you had a great pair of jeans? — Pretty Polly tights.

There was an interview with Cliff Richard, The Holy Roller, by Geraldine Swarbrigg — the very Christian singer told her one of his favourite past-times was playing old rock and pop tunes on his personal juke box. A 13-page fashion spread shot on Cyprus highlighted the work of Richard Lewis, who had trained at the Grafton Academy of Dress Designing — coincidentally where Rosemary Smith had trained in her first career as a dress designer, and where she got first place in her cohort. And Miranda's Diary in the back end of the magazine may have published only black and white photos, but it was the place to have your picture featured if you were, or wanted to be seen with, the social great and good. I never made it there ...

Thumbed over and over during their months in homes and hair salons, magazines like Image were the social media of the day. Immortalising life on that best of archival medium, paper. The instant and soon-gone stuff streaming by on Facebook et al today will never have the same romance.

But the phones did get better. 

Photographs use Policy — Privacy Policy

Be careful what you ask for - a Christmas story

Many years ago, talking to a friend, he told me his son was ‘feeling the breeze’ in his business, writes Noreen Dowling. He said, “You know, Noreen, the worst thing about it all was that himself and his family had to resort to living over the shop.”

This made me think, as my husband, myself, and our three young children were living over our shop on Main Street Kilcullen at that time.

Living over the shop to me were some of the happiest times of my life. No two days the same, lots of ups and downs, but we always managed to see the fun side. How we loved the Christmas buzz, selling all the Christmas things and helping Santa Claus to deliver the very latest toys. I recall on one occasion a phone call at 4.30am from a very upset mother, who told me the dog had just chewed both legs off the Sindy Doll. A quick replacement and all was well.

One Christmas Eve I will always remember. My children were appointed to help in any way they could in the shop, sweeping, cleaning, etc (along with eating the profits). My son’s duties required him at front of house, carrying boxes, bags etc to customers’ cars and bicycles. He was helping one country lady with her purchases, filling a large box on the carrier of her bicycle and hanging numerous bags on the handlebars. It was certainly a complete load.

Suddenly she said to my son, “hold the bicycle, I forgot to get a message from the supermarket.” He, being eight or nine at the time, had great difficulty balancing the bicycle and, seeing they were getting nowhere, the lady said “here, you go into the supermarket and get the message”, handing him cash and telling him her order. He obliged and returned with a brown paper bag which she placed very securely among her groceries. Everyone happy, my son received his reward, and with a ‘Season’s Greetings’ proclaimed, the lady headed for home.

The day came to a close and, everyone feeling tired with the pressure of the day, we all sat down to a well-deserved evening meal. Out of the blue, my son piped up: “Mam, do you know that lady who comes in from the country for her shopping?” I replied, “yes.” He then asked me, “does she have a lot of babies?” Not knowing where the conversation was going, I said, “why are you asking me that?” He replied, “she asked me today to go into the supermarket for three tins of baby powder.”

Being a long time in the world myself, and knowing the lady was past child-bearing years, and also that she had a little fondness for a ‘drop of the cratur’, I realised that the order was meant to be three ‘Baby Powers’. It was not going to be a merry Christmas in that house!

When I remember that Christmas I smile, and always think of the Christmas song, ‘The Little Girl that Santa Claus Forgot’. Living over the shop was life’s university and I feel blessed that it was such a large part of my life.

ED NOTE: Noreen is a contributor to The Bridge magazine. This seasonal piece arrived too late for the current December issue, and we're delighted to publish it on the Diary instead.

Photographs use Policy — Privacy Policy

Remembering the mutts of Mongrel Park

The Diary understands that this morning's Memory Monday session in the Library discussed Mongrel Park, writes Brian Byrne.

For those residents of Kilcullen who are either too young or too new to the town to recall the initiative, here is some more information straight from myself and my family's involvement.

READ: Mowing through Mongrel Memories 

READ: Mongrel Park - The Movie 

LISTEN: Mongrels in My Grass 

Photographs use Policy — Privacy Policy

Pathways through memory — Frances Moloney time travels

On the far bank of the river, pathways of memory are hidden in development and nature's growth.

Following on from my post about the 'Domino Trail' yesterday morning, I received the following memoir from Frances Moloney, writes Brian Byrne. Quite apart from being a splendid recollection of the Kilcullen of her own childhood, it provided memories that are very akin to my own, maybe in slightly different places — I was a 'the other side of the bridge' kid, though I certainly did regularly cross over and follow many of the trails she describes — and on slightly different paths and time. Frances kindly gave me permission to post it here.

Your conversation about your laps of the garden was brilliant: instead of moaning about limitation, you have come up with a workable strategy and shared it. 'Cocooning' presented as a life affirming activity and dominoes as were never used by old Italian men, drinking bitter espressos in Italian cafes that may be visited when this is over ... 

My initial reaction to your piece was to remember the path in the grass from my back door in Logstown to the back door of my neighbour, Maura Dowdall, patted out one short doggy leg after another by Ruby, the brown corgi-labradors mix who was the dog of my children's childhood and a dog, who though unequivocally loyal to our family, could always share her largesse with anyone who would give her a tasty tit-bit. Breakfast was shared upstairs with Dolly Lynch in her bedroom, and Pat in the kitchen below always put on an extra rasher for Ruby. No physical evidence in the landscape but in the shared anecdotes of neighbours. 

When Ruby died, we held a wake, and she rested overnight in her bed in the corner of our kitchen for one final night before taking up her final place of rest, in the back corner of our garden. 

As the weeks passed, her path disappeared, and it was only when it was gone I realised we had no photo of it, but it is forever in my head, a testimony to ten years of shared canine love and an indelible connection between neighbours. 

And now, with my brain free to wander, as I am detached from the normal quotidian tasks that no longer have me running up and down the dual carriageway to deliver my own brand of education to the lads of Dublin 12, and restrictions prohibit me from physically visiting the homes of my family members, I find myself with time to remember and think. The pathway that may or may not be in your garden has brought me to so many pathways: 

From the back of Sunnyside, my grandparents' house, there was a path worn out by my Grandfather's cattle, that meandered across in front of Kinloch Brae, Aunty Mary and Uncle Bernard's house, through the Long Field, across the Five Acres, turning right at the ruins of the cottage at Logstown. Straight ahead would lead to the Meadow Field, where haymaking has gone on for my entire life, originally by my Grandad (Tom 'The Boss' Berney) and after him, my cousin Howard. The path continues across the top of the Inch, where through a gappy hedge lay Mrs Brennan's inch, which was another land (in which there was by repute a fairy fort but never in childhood did I go there) and finally down through Berney's Inch, past the marsh that in spring is full of frogspawn, to the water's edge, where the imprints of the cows in the mud captured the cool river water such that it was warm when we as children walked through it, to get to the river to paddle or swim.  

At the river's edge, the path diverged. Fishermen went left, we tended to go to the right, liking to sit high on the river bank, where the rapids catch the glint of sunlight and create a pleasant cacophony of sound. Slightly further along, beside a hawthorn tree, was the place where my Grandfather swam, the water deep and dark. In our family album, there is a picture of my Grandfather in his late seventies, mid dive into the water, a precious moment in time captured by my Uncle Bernard. The image is all the more precious to us because of the absence of the beloved man who was captured in the photograph and the beloved man who knew enough to capture it. As I follow the path in my childhood head, heading back towards town, the graveyard — then innocently empty of any I loved —would be across the river to your left, while in front, the massive edifice of the Church of the Sacred Heart and St Brigid. There are some who find this grey, forbidding, and reflective of the Catholic church's involvement in their lives. For me it is simply part of home and fond memories of time spent in the girls school behind it.

Leaving the Inch, I arrive in my mind's eye into Lawlor's field, where there was a hidden spring coming out at the river's edge, channelled by unknown hands through a piece of guttering, sticking out of a moss-covered leafy bank. The next field was O'Connell's, where the kids from our end of town were taught to swim by older children, and finally away from the River, back up past the John F Kennedy Hall, where Geraldine Clifford ran Saturday morning dancing classes for a very small fee, paid weekly. The final leg of the journey went past Lander's house on the left, and the side of what was 'The Shamrock Bar' or 'Uncle Patrick's' or 'The Sinking Ship', subsequently Berneys and now Fallons. I have an impression of walking into sunshine as I rejoin the living town.

As a child of the town there are also paths through town in my head. Along the side of the bridge before it was widened, there was a little trail in the dust. Depending on the time of the year, occasional weeds would poke their heads up and the memory can be provisionally dated, as a young child, by size and company. Young children would have their hands held, as the bridge was being crossed, the young child always placed between the wall and the adult for safety, until old enough to go to school alone and one could finally see over the top of the wall. (I was very small so I actually don't think I could ever see over the wall of the bridge, in its original form.) 

Great adventures were had in the old Valley, when there was just a single path through the 'Jungle', entered at Molloy's farm gate. Some adventurous did stray far from the path. This path through the Valley led to the Mass Path to New Abbey, a path that goes straight from today right back through centuries. 

Further adventures were to be had in the 'Crocks', a patch of land behind the Ball Alley, where, if you knew your way through the jagged metal, there were cocoons of safety: a tiny path in the middle where one child could sit on soft grass and look up at the sky. For me it was 50 yards from home and yet a universe away. If you made your way through the Crocks, there was a patch of grass about six feet wide, overlooking the stream of water, diverted to turn the mill wheel, the edifice of the Mill on your left. 

At the back of Miss O'Kelly's Liffey Bank, there was a very little-known path that started through a door in the corner of her garden, that led past the old sewage works, through the field across from Castlemartin, and the swimming place called 'The Rocks' to a place in the woods called Poolmoorish (as Miss O'Kelly called it in her very Anglo-Irish way). I suspect it was possibly Pol Mor Usice, and was in fact some vestige on the landscape from Ice Age times. 

There was also another path through those same woods, called Brennan's Woods by my parents, accessed through Jim and Anne Byrne's farmyard, (where there is still a stile though access is no longer available). But as children we often never went further than the woods because there was such magic in them.

Pathways, life ways, links to our past, links to our future. My life is a tapestry of metaphoric and real pathways, a safety net that has always kept me where I needed to be. 

Thank you for a morning spent in fond reminiscence, with the Mass in Irish from Cul Aodh in the background, 

Regards, 

Frances Moloney.

Beat the Virus: Stay At Home. 

Photographs use Policy — Privacy Policy

The Pope's visit: A memory

An Garda Síochána: Media preparing to leave Dublin Castle for Dublin Airport in preparation for the arrival of Pope Francis.

This brings back memories to your editor from 1979, when I was a younger journalist covering the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland, writes Brian Byrne. I was bussed from that same place in the early hours.

I was covering the visit for the Catholic Communications Centre's Network Productions, and also stringing for the Sunday World.

It was a frenetic couple of days, as in addition to attending the Phoenix Park mass from the (somewhat rocky) journalists' tower, I was at the audience for media in a northside Dublin school, and then covered Knock and his final event in Limerick thanks to lots of special trains laid on by CIE.

My photo above is one I took at the media audience. JP2 was healthy then.

Once of these is enough. Glad I'm not covering this one.

Kilcullen Diary Policy on Photographs. Kilcullen Diary Privacy Policy.

About the swimmers again ... or none

I was struck during the current spell of hot weather how the use of the river in such conditions has changed since I was a boy, writes Brian Byrne.

For instance, the area I picture above, just over the Jockey Stile (probably better known today as the path to New Abbey Graveyard from the top of the Valley), would be full of groups of young people and families on weekend afternoons through the summer holidays, sunbathing, swimming, and socialising.

The families with small ones would be ensconced further along, on a grassy headland with a small 'beach' and paddle-able water at the mouth of the Mill Stream, accessible on paths through the low green rushes, which now simply can't be reached.

Back at the first bank, though it was steep there were plenty of spots to lay out towels — or, but rarely, more posh rugs — and sit to watch the goings-on, as the local young lads and girls swam in the deeper water, and dived off the board helpfully erected on the bank by the then owner of New Abbey Stud, the late Ken Urquhart.

There were other regular swimming spaces in the area too, on the opposite bank of the river below Castlemartin, and also at Carnalway.

Myself, and most of my childhood friends, learned to swim at one or all of those places. These days it seems that nobody does. And the only young people who find themselves swimming in the river are members of Kilcullen Canoe Club who have capsized, either by accident or deliberately in training.

Of course, I've written about all this before … exactly 13 years ago. So rather than do it all again, here's a link to that 'Where have all the swimmers gone?' piece, still as relevant as then.

The National Heritage Week this year has a focus on telling stories of our past. Have you any like this?


Kilcullen Diary Policy on Photographs. Kilcullen Diary Privacy Policy.

Good Friday in The Hideout

Not Good Friday, but a memory from the Hideout in the 50s: Vanessa Liddy, George Speirs, Monica Byrne, Myles and Bobbie Murphy, Jim Byrne, Tommy Wallace and Jim Kelly.

Good Friday was always a special day in The Hideout, writes Brian Byrne. It was the day when there was a chance to get things done that couldn't easily be managed during the rest of the year when the place was open from nine in the morning until 11 in the evening every day except Christmas Day. While there were no customers on the Friday commemorating the Crucifixion, the place was always abuzz with activity.

It was the day when cleaning and painting could be done. When the artefacts that filled the walls and shelves were taken down, to be dusted and cleaned in whatever way was appropriate. It was the day when tiles on the floors of the bar and kitchen could be replaced, when new carpets could be laid. When, occasionally, even walls could be knocked down to change the layout of the place, or expand it into a new lounge area that might have been built out the back. Paddy Bathe, who had done most of that building work, was a mighty man with a sledge-hammer on those particular Good Fridays.

It was a day of scrubbing, painting, papering. And since there was generally more work to be done than might be easily managed by those of us who normally worked there, it was a day when there was always a call for volunteers from amongst 'regulars'. There was never a shortage of answers to that call.

Some of the most unlikely among the regular customers claimed skills with paint-brushes, carpentry tools, and more for Good Friday. Some of which claims proved not to be well-founded as the day wore on. A number of these 'volunteer workers' became 'supervisors' at the bar counter rather quickly. Funny thing, we always knew which ones they'd be, yet their bona fides were accepted each year anyhow.

(Oh yes, I do remember the names. But we will be kind with anonymity.)

There were jobs that no one particularly wanted. Among the worst was scrubbing the ceilings with sugar soap to remove the nicotine of a year, prior to repainting. If that wasn't done, the nicotine would burn through the new paint within weeks. Which maybe was one reason I never smoked, figuring that it wasn't doing the lungs of the smokers who caused the brown staining of the ceiling much good. Scrubbing it was dirty, wet, eye-stinging if you didn't wear goggles against the splashes from overhead, and hell on the arms.

The next least popular task was cleaning the artefacts — the heads, ancient tools and weapons, the extraordinary bric a brac which had accumulated over the decades and made the pub such a fascinating place. The solid surface items were OK, probably polished up several times during the year in quiet hours anyhow. The animal heads were less so, full of dust, a lot of which was likely cigarette ash in those days long before the smoking ban. Then there were the carpets. If it wasn't one of the years they were being changed, they had to be deep-cleaned. There was a machine brought in for that, but lots of embedded stuff — tar, grit, gum, and god knows what else — often had to be laboriously lifted off with a putty knife. In the kitchen area, a fundamental scraping of the deposits that couldn't be reached without taking out all the cooking machines was also one of the seriously nasty necessary works of the day. Especially horrible was dismounting the extractor fan and cleaning it, a job that Billy Dowling always took to himself and completed with his customary great humour.

If Paddy Bathe was in action against an old wall that year, we tried to make sure that was done first, and preferably early in the morning or even after closing the previous night. The amount of dust through the whole place was multiplied, making the cleaning and painting even more awkward. No matter how much the back bar and kitchen areas were covered, it percolated onto, and into, everything.

We tasted that dust too even in the lunch organised for all concerned by my mother and Carmel Kennedy. Always fish, it being Friday, and a special Catholic Friday at that. But it could be washed down with the beer that wasn't available to everyone outside. That did help. Enormously.

Work continued through the afternoon. The 'supervisors' getting less attentive to the work and more talkative on their usual interests, mostly involving golf, horses, dogs ... and all those again. And again. (I've just remembered how boring it often was in the years I worked behind the counter, listening ad nauseum to the multiple replaying of a particular hole of golf, or the rehash of the final furlong of a certain race, or the arguments over the pedigree of a greyhound. A barman does his Purgatory during his lifetime.)

By teatime — another, lighter, meal provided by Carmel — much had been settled. The tree-trunk tables with a new top coat of varnish. The embedded cigarette ash and other detritus of the previous year now gone. The sawing of carpenter Ned Maloney and the hammering and plastering of Paddy Bathe done. Most of whatever additions or renovations they had constructed ready for revelation to the punters the next day. Refurbishment of parts of the electrical system — always on a knife-edge in my recollection — completed as far as was possible.

Dad, who had put in as hard a working day as those who worked with him, would settle with the 'supervisors' for a well-deserved Crested Ten or two. Their number likely diminished, as the A- and B-button public phone behind the fireplace would have rung a number of times, spouses wanting their partners back home. It wouldn't be a late night for any of those left — my mother would make sure of that, making her own call at an appropriate time. By eight o'clock or so, the place would be back in the darkness that a Good Friday night in a pub was supposed to be.

I was reminded of all that with the recent calls by vintners — mostly Dublin-based — for a revision of the law that closes a pub on Good Friday. I'm long out of the business, and have no particular interest either way. But I do remember how important it was in our own busy family pub, allowing a brief if hectic interlude. In its own way, it truly marked the transition from winter to spring, with the pub offering a refreshed face to all the next day, ready to start the whole wild roller coaster, that The Hideout then was, all over again.

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.

How Kilcullen shoeboxes crossed the galaxy

A shed that was out of this worldShoeboxes were important to us youngsters in Kilcullen growing up in the early 50s, writes Brian Byrne. Of course, for their original purpose they had no interest to us at all. It was what they could become.

It was before television, at least in Kilcullen. Radio was where we got our serial programmes, and DC comics and the weekly 'follyer-uppers' in the cinema our visual inputs from stuff that was only dreamed of, like space travel.

But because they were in the realm of dreams, we could dream big. MORE>>