Selling family home evoked memories
By Tom Gillespie
MY one time neighbour, the late Fr. Colm Kilcoyne, the former parish priest of Cong, and contributor to the now defunct Sunday Press, wrote an article for the 1988 Mayo Association Galway magazine to mark their 17 years a-growing.
The Kilcoynes resided at No.1 St. Bridget’s Crescent in Castlebar. Our house was No. 9 Marian Row - just across the road.
The two estates were a 1954 local authority development that consisted of 48 houses.
It was a state-of-the-art project which was constructed by McCormack Brothers - Jimmy, Joe and Ger - and today would be the envy of developers.
The two-storey houses, with cork-lined walls, consisted of three bedrooms, with a fireplace in two, and each had front gardens with a large back garden that, in those days, yielded the very best in vegetables.
In particular, I remember the gardening expertise of Jack McHale and Frank Brennan.
When the new houses were allocated and occupied in 1954 it brought to that area of the town new families, all with young children.
The undeveloped green, where the children’s swimming pool dedicated to Gussie Wynne later stood, consisted of an area where builders rubble from the housing development was dumped.
Fr. Kilcoyne’s article was headed ‘For Sale’ and centred on the occasion when the family decided to sell the dwelling after the death of their mother, Bridie.
He wrote: Someone has said that the essence of good communication is to speak simply about what moves you most deeply.
If that is true then this article stands some little chance of making contact.
I’ll start with the shock of seeming a ‘House For Sale’ sign outside my home in Castlebar. I knew it was going up because we had agreed as a family that it should. But I wasn’t prepared for the emotions aroused by the sight of the sign standing outside not just any house, but outside my home.
My mother had died almost a year before. All the family had their own lives and none of us lived at home. When she died the place was empty. We left it that way, postponing the inevitable. Eventually we decided that you have to be sensible. Sell the place. All good rational stuff.
We faced into readying out the house. It was only then that you glimpse the values by which your parents lived and within which you were formed. It was eerie to go through the rooms without her voice telling you to be sure to leave things where she could find them after you.
Everything dies in active service
The house was furnished like any other house of your average 89-year-old granny. Nothing in it that the man from Sotheby’s would be interested in.
Most of the basics - beds, tables, chairs, wardrobes - were the ones I had known all my life. People of my mother's generation only changed the furniture when it had done its job. Never simply because it was out of fashion.
A bed was replaced only when it had collapsed in the middle, a chair when a leg broke, a wardrobe when it was eaten alive with woodworm. Everything dies in active service.
While the basics were sparse and functional the ornaments and gewgaws were many and flamboyant. My mother was one of those people who would break Bord Fáilte’s heart.
She revered in Japanese rubbish. Ashtrays from Bundoran turned out to be Deanta sa tSeapáin. Little fluffy donkeys with genuine Connemara creels had journeyed from furthest Hong Kong. Vases with corpulent Buddhas on their curvature inevitably came from Scunthorpe or Burton-on-Trent.
With people like my mother alive I will never know why Woolsworths had to close so many shops.
What the ornaments lacked in taste they made up in memories. ICA outings were documented on mantlepiece and side presses. Holidays in Salthill, Bantry and Donegal were commemorated in wall plaques, holy water fonts and dolls.
She loved dolls. The value and the depth of our affection for her when we brought them home from holiday were measured by their size and their frilly knickers. The bigger, the frillier, the better.
It was only when we went through the rooms and looked at her possessions with our younger eyes that a picture began to form of her and her generation.
What money she had put food on the table, clothes on our backs and fuel in the fire. All her wealth was, literally, consumed.
Her legacy was not on the walls but in us and the start she had given us.
She was the tidiest of women, except in one well-defined area. The photos that chronicled our births, baptisms, Holy Communions, marriages and ordination were not only neatly packed in chocolate boxes, but put away in a corner of the press that she could reach easily. This was her library and frequently consulted.
Links with the past were snapped the day everything was either boxed, sent to the dump or heaped into litter bags. The home was then ready for the ‘House For Sale’ sign.
For 12 months her death controlled events. Now we, the living, had taken initiative.
A part of me said: “That’s it. That’s life. A thousand families a year face this, so get on with it.”
As for those who bought the house, I have two wishes for them.
The first is that they’ll be as happy there as we were.
The second is that they have a weakness for gewgaws and rubbishy souvenirs. If they have then whatever household spirits inhabit the hearth that once was ours will be secure in the knowledge that the owners may have changed but simple, genuine goodness is still mistress of the home.