Welcome to the fifth and final week in The Kilkenny Observer’s ‘2025 Christmas short story series’. We invited five Kilkenny based writers to submit a short story or poems each week, which we hope you have enjoyed. This week we welcome Catherine Cronin and The Kilkenny Involvement Centre. The Observer wishes to thank all contributors for their creative work.
That lost photo from Christmas morning 1988
By Catherine Cronin
Buttoned up in a blue cotton robe with bowl-cut hair,
I looked shook. This was the shot Dad wanted –
little me, seeing for the first time, the doll’s house
Santa spent months building out of a Hi-Fi timber box.
Haloing overhead, concertina foil garlands
(all the rage at the time) reflecting the glow of the big light –
switched on early so we could see every inch
of what the old man laid out on the kitchen table
at some secret hour us children didn’t know.
Doll-less but decorated with plastic West German furniture,
candy-coloured mid-century pieces I’d grow up scrapbooking
then Pinteresting for a big-girl home of my own someday.
I don’t remember the camera or the flash only my first sight
of the box that would domesticate me, teach me
how to imagine rooms of my own. I do remember
Mam pointing out the elves’ hard work, how they cut out flowers
from the same wallpaper hanging in our actual sitting room
to paste them to the walls of my 9×9 inch sherbet lemon kitchen.
I am six then when magic is at its most convincing.
I couldn’t know that for the next few Decembers I would wrap
gifts for the ghost dolls of this two-up, two-down –
thimbles for vases and scarves plaited from found ribbon.
Or that, one day, the rooftile-patterned paper would peel off
and I would paint a cat with some balloons on the stark white pitch
to distract from the loss. I couldn’t know that, decades later,
during a global pandemic when I had grown tall and moved away
to live with my real-life happily-ever-after prince,
my parents would ship this handmade artefact
from their attic in Kilkenny to me in Zurich, wishing
they could also send the picture as a reminder of Santa’s success.
Catherine Cronin, a Kilkenny native, currently lives in Zurich with her husband, Ivan. She has written for Irish and Swiss theatre. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including, The Honest Ulsterman, The Ogham Stone, The Storms, Zwischentext, The Kilkenny Observer, The Kilkenny Broadsheet, and The Waxed Lemon.
Christmas morning 1982
A poem from The Involvement Centre Kilkenny
Christmas morning 1982
Phone ringing,
Same time every year -10.30 am
Her eighty year old frame makes its way
to the phone nervously
And picks up the receiver
Hello? Hello is that you Tommy? Tommy?
Happy Christmas Tom.
Tommy hangs up.
Tears well up as he strolls down Shepherds Bush,
content in the knowledge that his mother is still alive.
He has made that same silent call every year now since 1974.
That was the year of the Birmingham bombings,
the year Paddy was no longer welcome in town.
Go back to the bog Paddy
Irish pig, f*** off back to your sty.
Hard to blame them. 21 dead and 182 injured
The ‘Mulberry Bush’ was where he supped porter
-now a scene of destruction.
The IRA cost him his life too.
That makes it 22.
He gathered what he had and moved to the ‘Bush
-from the frying pan into the fire.
No Irish need apply!
He fell in with a few decent skins and settled.
Still kept the head down
and minded his own business.
Worked with big Ivan from Tyrone and Charlie Chaplin from Dundalk,
and a few Welsh and Scots also in the crew.
Shovelled clay and mixed cement eight hours a day.
Six o’ clock every evening and they ended up in the ‘Crown and Sceptre’.
Eleven o clock, and enough drunk to help him sleep,
He often thought back to Brother Doyle in the home
You’ll get nowhere Grace. The only thing ahead of you is a wheel barrow.
Sent to reform school in Longford the first time for robbing apples.
Six apples in his geansaI when he was caught
– a month for each apple.
Twelve years of age and locked up,
sweeping horse manure and hosing down a yard.
Next spell was six years for robbing a car.
Then he robbed his brother’s birth cert , and
headed for Birmingham to work in the Dunlop factory.
New name, new start.
1974 was the explosion.
The beating in the toilets of the Crown was brutal
White tiles turned red.
How do ye like that Paddy?
The second beating left him in hospital with a wired mouth
And a damaged eye that would never see the light again
A serious break at the Thoracolumbar junction
Was how the coloured Doctor described it.
He said something stupid like was there at tube station at that junction?
He didn’t laugh.
This is serious he said!
It was.
Thirty eight years of age now
and a cane to help his limp where a size twelve
boot left him partially paralysed.
Drink has been his friend for years.
Couldn’t go back home now
Never made it
Shame covers his life
Over here they don’t judge or comment.
Or care.
He remember a few lines big Ivan recited
About a navvy going up to the pearly gates
“What did you do on Earth enquires Peter,
I worked a shovel and mixer for McAlpine
I did another ten years for Murphy on the Kango as well
Come in said St. Peter, you’ve served your time in Hell”
A one room filthy flat to call home
Habit makes him shave every morning
Face lathered with soap
Eyes staring into the mirror.
Hello. Hello. Anyone there?
Body on the cold damp tiles in a foetal position.
Ma. Ma. Are you there?
Kilkenny involvement centre is a warm, welcoming place where people with mental health difficulties can go to socialise, relax and simply have fun. Our vision is to have a base where people who have, or have had, mental health difficulties, their families or friends, can drop in at specified times to meet other people who are on their recovery journey.
