The Personals

by Brian O'Connell

  There are things he tells me he remembers that no one else does, such as dates. When he mentions a former priest in the area, he tells me not only how many years he lived locally, but the date he left, the dates he started his next post, how many years he has spent in his current parish and what date he started there. Dates are to his sanity what fixed rope points are to mountaineers. The other fixture in his life is his brother, with whom he has lived his entire life. Both of them were born in this house and continue to live in it beyond middle age.

  ‘We get on very very well altogether, Brian. With our entire lives living here, we certainly didn’t have any major bother between the two of us anyhow. There hasn’t been a single bit of hassle in any way whatsoever.’ He is lucid and speaks in a way that’s genuine. He really only falters and stumbles when I ask whether he was ever tempted to marry.

  ‘Well, ah.’ Long pause. ‘Sure, ah.’ Another 30-second pause. He looks down at the stained carpet, then out the window and he’s waiting for me to help him out with the question. I stay quiet. Eventually he says: ‘I’ve never married, Brian, sure.’

  ‘Did you come close to it?’

  ‘Not really ... There’s, ah ... Ah ... Well, how can I say it? For most of my life, Brian, there’s never really been an interest. I can get along fine like. I get out to attend Mass, though I may not be perfectly pious. I know people to see them. I don’t know people interpersonally. I don’t have those kinds of relationships with people like that. I know them to say hello to them. But it stops there.’

  He has never gone to a pub to have a drink with a friend in his life. He’s been in them of course, but he never goes out of his way to go into them. ‘’Tis only just the one day in the entire year that I take a drink and that’s on Christmas Day. I take a drink of Guinness. Just the one 500ml can.’

  As for some other people I’ve come across who live isolated lives, the act of putting an ad in the newspaper with a phone number attached is quite a public one, and somewhat at odds with their otherwise detached existence. At least that’s what it looks like on the face of it. But as I spend more time with him, it becomes clear that the DVD request was his limited way of reaching out and feeling the embrace of society, albeit fleetingly. And it turns out that this isn’t the first time he has used the small ads.

  ‘The last time I used the free ads was in 2014, and what was I looking for? Only the DVD of another film with Anthony Hopkins!’ he says. ‘It was a copy of Amistad, the film based around the lead up to the abolition of slavery. I got a reply and came across it on DVD so it was great. And then I did have an ad in the Echo free ads in 2005 as well. That was just looking for a video cassette copy of a music title by the rock group New Order. My three favourites in popular music were New Order, Rush and Bowie. I didn’t get a single reply to that ad in 2005 though.’

  Three times in the space of two decades he has reached out for some kind of human contact. Twice that has been successful, allowing him to continue with his preoccupations. He could have got the DVDs or the VHS tapes online, or asked his brother to pick them up on his way home. But that would have meant he was unlikely to have engaged with another human being during the process. It strikes me that while he was genuinely looking for a DVD when he placed his ad, he was also seeking to momentarily offset loneliness.

  He leaves the house for Mass and the odd table quiz. That’s it. Aside from some immediate family, he has no other connection with anyone outside these walls. He tells me that after I leave he will sit down and watch his new Remains of the Day DVD. He’s comfortable answering my questions, although I sense there’s a definite limit to how long he wants me to share his world. In total, I spend about 45 minutes with him before he decides it’s time for me to go.

  His face is beaming as we both inspect and approve the quality of the second-hand DVD that arrived in the post for him that morning courtesy of an Echo reader. Today’s viewing will be the first of many he tells me proudly as I walk towards the door.

  ‘It’s a pity they never got together at the end,’ he says, referring to the characters of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, who are clearly in love with each other but cannot express it. They’re both trapped by convention, destined to live out occasionally contented but ultimately lonely and isolated lives, bound together in the shadows of fulfilment by their intimate detachment.

  I reach out my hand to shake his and he thanks me for meeting him. As I walk away, I can hear him dragging the gas cylinder back to its position at the side of the house, where a large circular indentation in the grass, years in the making, was waiting for it.

  Giving a Doll’s House a Home

  Gottschalk Antique Gabled Doll’s House. Rare 1920s doll’s house in family for years. All contents included. DoneDeal, July 2018

  I’m in Meelick, a small village in east Clare, in a house off the Main Street, with two kittens on my lap and a cup of tea on the table. ‘My name is Bernadette Ballarin,’ my host tells me. ‘My father is Italian and he’s from Vittorio Veneto, in the north-eastern part of Italy. We lived in America and I was born and lived there until we moved here in 1977, because my mother is from the village. Basically, what happened was that my Irish granny got sick and my mother wanted to spend some time with her, because my mother had gone to America when she was 16 so she hadn’t really seen her in years.’

  Bernadette was 12 when her whole family moved to the small village in east Clare, and they lived in what was her grandmother’s house. ‘It was a huge culture shock,’ she says. ‘My parents bought this house which used to be an old shop and gutted it and refurbished it. I landed here from Connecticut, where we lived outside the town with very few neighbours, so on one level I was used to the quietness. I think probably the first thing to hit me was school, which was a really big culture shock. My saving grace was that I chose to go to school about 15 kilometres away in Shannon. This was the 1970s and I found a diverse student body there; a lot of Chileans fleeing the regime in their country had settled in Shannon and then you had people from Northern Ireland, so a huge influx of different cultures in the school, which suited me, but it was still a huge adjustment.’

  For some, Shannon in the 1970s was a community for people from diverse backgrounds who, for whatever reason, had had to leave their own communities. While somewhat lacking in facilities and green spaces, it made up for that with an international outlook, and it was this exposure to other people and their beliefs that made school life at once fascinating and foreign for Bernadette, compared to high school in the US.

  Among all the change and upheaval in her life, the one constant which accompanied Bernadette from the US back to Ireland was her beloved antique doll’s house. Now what I know about antique doll’s houses could be written on the back of a postage stamp, so not for the first time, I relied on my interviewee to take the lead, but not before I’d used my experience to mask my ignorance by teeing up the interviewee.

  ‘So what’s the story with this doll’s house?’

  ‘Well,’ says Bernadette. ‘The doll’s house was in my grandmother’s old house. She came from Italy and she moved to Connecticut. She was in a rented house first, and then they bought a big old farmhouse, and in the attic after they moved in they found this doll’s house. I figure they would have moved in the early 1920s. This doll’s house is a Gottschalk – he was a German doll’s house manufacturer, and this is one of his original houses. He had many houses, but this one is one of the rarer ones.’

  The house is so rare in fact that Bernadette thinks there are maybe only two or three left in existence that are exactly like this one. I wouldn’t be admitting this to the lads in the golf club, but it really is a beautiful piece of art. Gottschalk created a series of townhouses as well as country houses and because people threw them out over the years, Bernadette believes there are not many left in their original state. There was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when they weren’t in vogue.

 
It’s the kind of item you could imagine Antiques Roadshow assessors getting teary-eyed over, which end up on YouTube clips. They’d prod and poke with gloved hands and give a high valuation, to many oohs and aahs, with the owners saying they would never sell, although in their minds they are already walking on that beach outside an exclusive resort in Bali.

  Bernadette’s grandmother found this house and kept it from the 1920s onwards. The previous owners had also been immigrants to the US. She knows that because her granny often said that the people she bought the house from couldn’t speak a whole lot of English. The doll’s house was left in the attic most of the time, until it was passed down to Bernadette as the youngest grandchild, and it has remained with her since.

  For something that has criss-crossed continents, it is remarkably well-preserved; everything from the miniature stairs to the small curtains hanging in the windows are original, and date back possibly to the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth at the latest. For years, Bernadette had kept it in her bedroom. It gave her a sense of home after she left the US, and it took her back not only to Connecticut, but also to her grandmother and those family ties she had left behind.

  ‘It contains lovely fond memories for me, but I don’t have any kids, so what do I do with it?’ she says, holding the house up for me to see the craftsmanship underneath. ‘I just think if I die tomorrow there will be a skip outside that door within five minutes and someone will either sell it or dump it, so this way I get to pick and choose how I want to leave it and where I want it to go. It’s time it got a new home and another generation can enjoy it.’

  To give the doll’s house another lease of life will cost any prospective buyer just shy of €2,000. That’s a lot of wedge for something which has heritage and is an antique and a slice of history, but if bought for a child is still essentially a toy. So, who exactly is going to buy it? ‘I’ve had two calls from a museum in Switzerland that want to take it,’ she tells me. ‘I’m kind of thinking though: do I really want it to be in a museum? I think I would prefer it to go to a family as opposed to a museum. I also had a phone call from two boys who were going to a college in Tralee and doing some kind of film-making project. They wanted the house to blow it up! Their plan was to take it and put it in a field and they were going to do something weird and wonderful with it. But they really just wanted to blow it up, because it was exactly like this house somewhere down in Cork they spotted.’

  Having kept the doll’s house all these years, surely she was hardly likely to consider handing it over to two students from Tralee to blow it up in a field? ‘Yah, I know!’ she says, laughing. ‘I said, “Lads, I’m really sorry, much and all as I would love to help you with your project, but I am not giving you the house to blow up.” They said, well look, we can pool together a load of us and we think we can come up with about €400. I said, “Lads, it’s not happening ...”’

  Apart from the museum and the students, no one else has phoned about the doll’s house, so Bernadette says she will keep the ad up and hold out until the right buyer comes along. As we both imagine who that might be – a family perhaps, or maybe someone trying to reconnect with their own childhood, Bernadette tells me more about her family circumstances. Life hasn’t been easy for her in recent years. She was living in Ennis in her own home, but events meant she had to return to her childhood home at very short notice.

  ‘My mother had an aneurysm in her tummy and went in for a routine enough operation and didn’t come home,’ she says. ‘It was a genetic issue – her brothers and sister had the same, and they all came out of it fine but she didn’t. Then the day of her funeral, Dad got a stroke. I didn’t have a chance to grieve; my mum had been caring for my dad, as he had had a stroke a few years earlier. And then, boom, this happens; suddenly I had to cut my hours at work, move back in here and plan my life around him. But I did it because that’s just what you do.’

  Bernadette has come through that interesting point on the circle of life. When we are infants our parents care for us and ensure we make it to the next stage, and sometimes at the end of their lives we get to return that favour. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way,’ she says.

  I ask Bernadette if she had had children of her own, would she have kept the house? ‘Absolutely, I would,’ she says. ‘I was married. Not any more. It’s a good thing I’m not married any more as I’m too odd! I didn’t have kids and now I have this beautiful doll’s house and no one to give it to.’

  She’ll be sad to be parted from it, but with both her parents now dead, she’s surrounded by enough memories having moved back into her family home, and maybe doesn’t want to be burdened with any more.

  ‘You know what, it’s life,’ she says. ‘I’ve let go of lots of things. I’ve come to a time in my life where I can say this was a beautiful piece of furniture in my life and now I have the memories and it’s great, but I really need to let it go ...’

  Part Six

  COLLECTORS

  ‘We Are Collectors ... and We Will Die as Collectors’

  Wanted: any GAA-related material pre-1975. Very good prices paid for good collections of same. Evening Echo, August 2018

  I’m fairly confident in saying this is one of the longest-running classified ads in the Evening Echo. It runs every week and has done for the last 15 years or so. The person behind this ad also publishes several others on a weekly basis. One is more specific and is looking for 1930s and 1940s Munster hurling and football final programmes, while another is looking for old Wavin hurleys, the type used in primary schools to stop fellas getting lumps knocked out of them in the name of sport. He’s what I would call a semi-professional collector, and one of dozens who pop up from time to time in the small ads.

  Throughout the classified ads, from eBay to DoneDeal, the Farmers Journal to the Evening Echo, you’ll find private collectors. Generally, these are people who have become fixated on their subject matter and are hoping to chance upon items people may have in their attic without realising their value. Alternatively, collectors will use the ads to sell and trade their excess stock.

  Few of them I’ve met down through the years are as obsessive and committed as the man behind this ad. For security reasons he prefers not to be named or have his location disclosed. He describes himself as one of the top 15 private collectors of GAA memorabilia in the country.

  I met him at his home in the west of Ireland where in the middle of the kitchen table were piles of folders, boxes full of medals and some very old hurleys. Some of the programmes are just one page, tattered and frayed at the edges, and covered with plastic sleeves so they can be carefully filed away. He works a regular job, has a college-going family and is a big GAA fan. I get the sense that he’s thrilled to have someone to discuss the collection with.

  I’m keen to know how someone goes from attending games to obsessively collecting related memorabilia. What are the impulses that lead someone to putting an advertisement in a newspaper regularly for 15 years in the hope of finding a 70-year-old programme from a long-forgotten Munster final?

  ‘I started going to matches in 1980,’ he tells me. ‘I was 11 or 12 years of age. I also had a natural collector’s instinct. I collected stamps from the age of five and collected coins from the age of six and then I started collecting newspapers at the age of eight – the Irish Independent mainly. A lot of collectors like paper. I know one, for example – a GAA person – who has been cutting out newspapers since 1949. It’s a total collector mentality. I firmly believe that it is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. I know a lot of collectors, mostly GAA people, and we’re all on some kind of spectrum, I think. I collect very specific high-quality items which sometimes cost me a lot of money. I am doing this to have the definitive collection of, in this case, Limerick GAA-related material.’

  I find the idea that collecting is some form of early therapeutic intervention fascinating. As I spend time with him, the int
ensity of his passion for collecting becomes clear. It’s juxtaposed with his regular life, and maybe collecting keeps a part of his mind occupied that might otherwise find a more destructive or unhealthy outlet. The deal he has struck with his wife is that items can only be kept downstairs for a few weeks, then they need to be stored somewhere out of the way. He’s a very private man and putting advertisements in the classified section of the Evening Echo every week as he has done for the past 15 years seems at odds with his desire for confidentiality.

  ‘The advantage of the Evening Echo to me is that it hits Cork city. It’s also free and I can put in that ad every single week and hit my demographic, which is a sports-mad GAA-supporting audience in Cork. And aside from publishing my number it’s relatively anonymous.’

  In the decade and a half he’s been putting the ad in the paper, he reckons he’s met people and bought their full collections at least a dozen times. In one case he met an older woman whose husband had recently died. This man had gone to all the Cork GAA matches, both hurling and football, and his box of programmes was stuck in a corner of a room. ‘She pulled it out a year or two after he died and was wondering what to do with it,’ he tells me. ‘Then she sees my ad, gives me a call and I go see her and pay, I think, about €600 for the full collection. I took it away, broke it up and kept what I wanted and then tried to either swap the rest or sell it.’

  He takes pride in telling me he is now one of the largest private collectors in the country. When he began going to games in 1980 he collected all the programmes, and so had a full set of programmes from games he attended until 1997. This was the kick-start for his collection. Of course, like any good collector he couldn’t stop at that. At a small collectible shop in Dublin in the summer of 1997, he saw the 1963 and 1965 All-Ireland final programmes for sale, which happened to have a Limerick minor team playing. ‘I said to myself: I have all the programmes from 1980 and Limerick don’t get to too many All-Irelands, so I bought the two All-Ireland programmes for a total of £36.’