PART 2
BY JOHN FITZGERALD
In 1958, when she was 77, Nell Dooley-Monahan wrote to Callan’s newspaper correspondent Peter Roughan to share some memories with him and his readers. Nell was a daughter of Jim Dooley who worked with Ben Thompson, a gamekeeper in Desart. Last week, I recounted her visit to Desart Court and her precious memory of a childhood meeting with Lady Desart.
The Pattern of Ballyline was another significant event in her schooldays. She remembered the Durneys, Bergins, and Walshes of Callan erecting tents in Killaloe in the early part of the day and then moving across to Ballyline in the evening.
At the pattern, she recalled, you could “buy a piece of sugar stick long enough to beat a lazy ass out of a sandpit for the enormous sum of one penny!”
She also remembered the Races of Graiguehayden, and in particular the misadventures of a well-known character in Kilmanagh who was too stingy to wear his best trousers to the races. Instead he always turned up wearing one that had as many holes as a cabbage strainer.
His wife held the purse strings and refused to allow him to buy a new trousers until he “really needed one”- meaning until the one he had disintegrated completely. The man dreamed of travelling to Kilkenny to acquire a new pair of pants and thus shake off his “ragged-trousered” image in the community.
For the first time in his marriage, he stood up to his wife and demanded the price of a trousers. She promised to think about it. A fortnight later he arrived home to find her towering above him- she was much taller he was- and holding a large pair of second hand trousers she had bought at a cheapjacks sale.
He complained it was “two miles wide” for him, but she threatened to “flatten him” if he didn’t wear it. Meekly, he called to Jack Bergin, the tailor in Kilmanagh, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind “taking in it in a bit.”
Jack said he was too busy and advised him to buy a card of safety pins so he could “take in” the spare tweed himself. Unfortunately, the well-intentioned man had no notion of how to adjust the pants as required, so he ended up sticking the big safety pins down the outside of each trouser leg.
This gave him what fellow spectators at the Graiguehayden races seemed to consider the most outstanding and original set of “pin-striped trousers” they had ever seen.
Nell Dooley found him hilarious…yet she recalled such characters with a mixture of sadness and nostalgia. “All that poor fellow wanted was a paper hat”, she told Peter Roughan, “for there were more people looking at him than were watching the races.
“I know we had some hard chaws, and eccentric individuals, kicking about years ago. But many of them were harmless poor devils that just gave us something to laugh about. At the time, we took them for granted, but looking back I realise they were grand old chaps that maybe we didn’t fully appreciate. Some day, we will, when there’s none of them left.”
After leaving school in Callan, Nellie went to work in Portlaoise. While there, she met and married a man called Monahan. The wedding was in Kilmanagh church, where Nellie had been baptised. She and her husband settled in Stradbally where they lived happily for forty-five years.
She was thrilled to find a Callan connection in her new neighbourhood: Mick Doolan lived just a few houses from her own home. He was a son of stonecutter Peter Doolan of Bridge Street. Mick had served his time at the bakery near the Little Bridge, and then, when he left Callan, followed in his father’s footsteps as a stonecutter.
Nellie re-visited Callan whenever she could, and one of her first ports of call upon arrival in the town was the Hotel in Green Street, where she would spend hours chatting with old Mrs. Callanan and Mona Callanan, who later married Sean Feore. The three of them would converse over endless cups of tea and cake.
Mona was a sprightly, good-humoured young woman who loved to share news and gossip with Nellie. She filled her in on the all the latest developments in pre- First World War Callan, and Nellie spoke of married life in County Laois.
Nell Dooley-Monahan kept up to date with events in Callan through the Kilkenny People, which in those days carried a detailed weekly report on the town’s comings and goings.
To be continued…
(Callan in Words and Pictures is available from Amazon)
