Having changed trains for a branch line from Manulla Junction, as the main line continued on to Westport, a town on the coast past the city of Castlebar, it was a tired and grubby couple who arrived in Ballina that evening, hungry and badly in need of a change of clothing. It had been a long and arduous day. Patrick, who had remembered that his childhood friend Billy, had an Aunty Bernadette who had a hotel at the bottom of the High Street, carried their cases wearily, whilst Mel, looking with interest in the windows of the little shops, trailed along behind. There was a chemist, a haberdashery, a dressmakers and tailors, their premises darkened as the trading day was over, but earmarked for a visit by a curious Mel.
“Is it Patrick? Patrick Mayo?” The woman who was standing behind the reception desk in the foyer of the grey stone building named The Heaney Hotel said, as she came bustling around to greet him with a broad smile.
“We thought you’d gone to Liverpool. Freddie, Freddie.” She shouted to someone in the back room, who by looking through the door which was ajar, they could see was a man who was sitting at the table drinking from a glass of beer. The man rushed out in alarm, no doubt thinking that his wife was having trouble with these strangers who had just blown in through the door.
“What is it Bernie?” He asked, pulling his braces up around his shoulders and acting a little menacingly.
“Would yer ever look to see who’s come visitin’. It’s Patrick, Patrick Mayo, come all the way from England and this is ‘is –” She stared at Mel’s gloveless hand and continued, “His girlfriend.”
“Oh Patrick. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, where’s Jack? Where’s Aileen? We wondered. The last time I saw Jack we was having a beer in Flanagans, then a few days later I heard you’d all gone ter Liverpool, something about a run in with Father Cronin –Aye that was a bad business.”
“They’re dead, Mr. Heaney – a bomb got us a few weeks later. Dad was working on the demolition. As you’ll know, Liverpool got a terrible pounding. We were just sitting down to our tea when the siren went. The house got a direct hit and –” Patrick’s tears, which were never far away when he spoke about his parents, began to fill his eyes and Mel patted his arm in sympathy.
“God love yer.” The woman he had known as Aunty B, took him in his arms and gave him a hug. “And you’ve come back to see us love – Well our Billy’s up above in Dublin with Jessie. Do you remember she was in your class at school? They got married last September and me sister, our Mairaid, is over the moon as she’s going to be a grandma in the summer. Oh”. She suddenly looked at Mel, who had been standing looking on in silence
“I’m Patrick’s girlfriend – it’s a long story.” This was in response to Aunty B raising her eyebrows at Mel’s accent. “I’m dying to use your lavatory, could you show me the way?”
“Of course, of course, we’re so excited at seein’ Patrick after all this time; him and Billy were such good friends when they were little. We’ve a single room and a double room available and there’s a bathroom just down the corridor from there. Patrick, give yer bags to Freddie and he’ll show yer where and I’ll take Mel along to the convenience.”
*
It was late the next morning when Patrick and Mel walked hand in hand together down Tebley Street. It was a fine, crisp day and Mel, all wrapped up in her new coat and a woolly hat and mittens borrowed from Aunty B, felt warm and cosy and grateful that after a good night’s sleep, the floor wasn’t coming up to meet her as it had yesterday. Patrick, eager now to visit the place where he was born and grateful that he had achieved his dream, with plenty of time to spare as it was the last day of December, felt elated as they strode past the familiar buildings of his childhood.
They walked over one of the two stone bridges which spanned the sparkling river and its salmon weirs, then on along the street which would bring him to the same winding footpath which had been the route he took on his journey to and from his school. He spoke with pride, as he pointed out the little place that had been his seat of learning, the monumental church, its graves holding the remains of his ancestors and the ruins of a castle on a hill. He spoke of his friends and their mischievous ways when they were children in their Sunday school, about how it was always Brendan Hanley’s fault, the one who forever got the cane.
He’d felt angry though the night before, when even though he was dead on his feet, he’d picked up on Freddie’s words, when he had said that something had been “a bad business”. Leaving Mel to settle in her room, he had sat with the man into the small hours and learnt the reason for his parents flight to Liverpool. It appeared that Jack Mayo had felt he’d had a calling. From a child, when he’d first looked up and saw his Saviour dying on the cross in the Catholic church along the coast, to growing up and being a leading member of the choir, Jack’s only wish was to be accepted as a priest and train at a seminary. Visions of bringing the sinful to purity lasted throughout, even when he became a novice priest in one of Dublin’s parishes. Until one day when he was visiting a family in the area, he fell in love with the pretty Aileen Burns, who was working in the city as a shop assistant.
His family, amazed at his decision when he brought his beloved back to Killala to meet them, could only give their blessing on their union and so did the local priest. Life was fine, Jack, earned a living rearing rare breed cattle, alongside Danny, a tenant farmer and family friend, who lived across the way. Until a few years later, when the old priest was replaced by Father Cronin, a zealot and upholder of the power of the Roman Catholic Church, who reprimanded Jack for failing in his vows. According to him, a mortal sin had been committed because if Jack had continued with the priesthood, then the land that had belonged to his parents, should have gone to the church when they passed away.
*
They’d made it. They had walked along the coastal path from Ballina and had reached the hamlet by the early afternoon. It had been a tiring journey, not helped by their need to rest after so many miles had been travelled from Australia and if it hadn’t been for Patrick’s determination to see his birthplace before 1957 had come to a close, Mel would have advised a few more days with their feet up before they ventured out so far. Though it was worth the blisters and the soreness of her soles, in shoes that were designed for pavements, not the wild and rocky muddy tracks that often wound its way through small dense copses, when she saw the joy in Patrick’s face, as they came across the small hamlet that he’d called home. The old stone farm, which was four square with a barn incorporated and a cobbled yard where a gaggle of geese honked and pigs grunted in their sty; the row of stone built cottages; the materials brought across from Foxford over a century before and the footpath which Patrick had said led to the place where his ancestors had lived their lives in turf roofed cabins. All of this had gone now, it had all been demolished when an absentee English aristocrat had wanted grazing on his pastures, instead of the lowly potato plant which had grown on his land before.
They sat for a moment on the wall that ran along the perimeter of the farmyard, looking across with pleasure at the fine row of cottages with their grey, slate roofs and walls of weathered stone, sturdy and attractive, with white, lace curtains at the lattice windows. The end one, which an earlier owner had knocked through to the dwelling next door, had a pretty rose bower in the middle of the picket fence.
“That’s where I lived” Patrick said, sounding choked as he gazed over, not able to believe that here he was, outside the place where he had been his happiest.
“And considering how old these buildings must be, someone has kept them in good repair” said Mel, thinking that the cute little cottages must be older than some of the settlements of Australia.
“That’s down to me” said the voice of a man, who had been quietly listening to the newcomers, as he had been standing just inside the farmyard gate. “Me dada decided to turn them into weekend lets a couple of years ago, said it wasn’t right to let good property like this go to rack and ruin. Don’t usually get people up ‘ere in the winter though,
if yer were wantin’ to rent one of ‘em.”
Patrick turned. He knew that voice, it had been part of his childhood from when his parents had helped out on the farm.
“Danny Douglas. It’s me, Patrick Mayo. You know me. I used to live across the grass in the old Dockerty place?” He smiled with delight, as the man, in his late fifties, grabbed him roughly in a bear hug and let out a cry of anguish as he did.
“Patrick! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is it yerself that’s come back here agin? Where’ve yer bin? Where’s Jack and Aileen? Jack said yer’d stay away a couple of years until the dust ‘ad settled with that tub thumper, Cronin. ‘E said ‘e’d write, get in touch and tell us what was to ‘appen to ‘is land and property. We never ‘eard, so me dada decided to do up the cottages, keep ‘em nice, do the gardens and keep the rent from the lets for yer daddy in the bank.” He stepped away, then pushed his cap back above his forehead, letting out a sigh, as he realised what must have happened with only Patrick returning after all those years. “E’s dead. Jack and Aileen are dead aren’t they? God Bless ‘em. I said as much to Dada when Jack didn’t come back to face up to old Cronin. I told ‘im it was a dangerous world out there before ‘e went, but would ‘e listen.”
Danny wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and shook his head mournfully.
“So all this land and property belongs to you then, Patrick. Passed down through the generations from Maggie and her brother Bernie Mayo, or so the story goes.”
He brightened when he looked at Mel, who’d been listening quietly at Patrick’s side, whilst she gazed around at the beautiful scenery. “So this’ll be yer wife then, Patrick. Well, come on in Alanna and I’ll brew yer a pot of tea. Yer can meet me dada. He’ll be very glad ter meet yer, so he will.”
This was the boy who had brought her home, back to the green fields of her hamlet, the sparkling river that ran down the side of the hill and the little church that overlooked the crashing waves of the sea. It had taken Molly a century, but now at last she could meet her beloved sister, either in her native Killala or in the spirit world of the dead.
A Distant Dream Page 22