There was a time when everyone knew everyone else here. You were
Dan Brennan’s son, or Jim Nolan’s daughter or Brownie’s young lad or
Little Nipper, and if you got into a verbal conflict you were told to
go home to your auld fella, or to hide behind your mammy’s skirts. And
when a young man or woman came home from England or America they stood
out because of the different way they dressed and spoke, and the way
they carried themselves.
Some had found a whole new way of life and it came through in
everything about them. They had been where the money was big, where
the neon lights lit up the streets, and people went somewhere
different every night of the week.
And when fellows came home in uniform — as I remember the
Harte's from St. Fiacc’s Terrace — well, it was like the pictures come
to life. If I closed my eyes I could hear the Halls of Montezuma
played by a brass band. And there were Irish officers too — Captain
Ned Price and Sgt. Major Denis Moran, resplendent in his leggings,
shoulder-strap and cane.
To some, Graigue was all football in those days. But best of the
football years had passed before I came along —~ one of a runner
family which only dated back to my grandfather coming to the Post
Office. What I inherited in the football line were legends, or rather
legendary stories of great footballing men who still stood at the club
corner or walked about the village streets in the evenings.
There was Joe Hennessy’s grandfather, Barnie, in whose house
there were pictures of former Graigue teams on the walls — men with
moustaches and of military bearing, wearing dark hooped jerseys and
wearing ordinary boots. Later teams hung on the walls of McDarby's in
Maryborough Street where I bought my first blue and white hat to go
off and shout for Laois. In those pictures also was Tommy Murphy, the
man with a casual way of walking and
One or two of these former stars came along to give a few tips
to the schoolboy team of around 48/49 and breathed enough life and
heart into us to beat the CBS in Carlow by twenty-two points and the
brawny Tullow lads by about eight. I remember spending several
evenings watching Tom Moran in Fennell’s field where he showed me how
to send frees over from what we then thought were impossible angles.
We went on to beat Crumlin on the same field and after that I
started trickin’ around at playing soccer and one of the club
organisers said at a public meeting that I was a disgrace to the
village. That shows how serious football was then!
Near Fennell’s field was Jack Kelly’s house, which frequently
smelled of the embrocation he rubbed on the hefty seniors. Who was the
trainer who used to come down from the Curragh around that time and
put the lads through leap-frog exercises and canters around the field,
and who told them about the wonders of whisked eggs mixed with a small
drop of sherry?
We would sit on the sticks outside O’Neill’s old houses in Henry
Street and talk about the football stories we had heard or the games
that were coming up, and Breezer Hogan or Tommy Proctor would turn up
with a bouncy sock-ball and we’d start a game under the street lamp.
Only we had to be careful of Ned Hogan’s windows because he was a
decent old man who didn’t like too much noise and a few years
previously he had made “steam-rollers” for us out of cocoa tins and
pieces of twine.
Just around the corner from there in Church Street, which was
always called “The Burrow,” there were enormous slides down the centre
of the road when the frost came. At times they were so dangerous that
the women would come out of their houses and sprinkle salt on them so
that some of us wouldn’t break our necks.
Christmas, snow and slides are all tied up in my mind with that
corner and although I didn’t see it happen, I think it must have been
at that time of year that a horse ran away with a milk-cart. down the
Barrow, and hitting the slide, rapped the cart around my grandfather’s
railings at the top of ‘98 Street.
The other gang were from The Numbers, which always boasted, in
the days when it really meant something, that it was the only part of
Graigue really in Laois. It was there that I got the first two books I
ever read from Jim Moore’s wife, who was a friend of my mother’s
family; she lived in the first or second of the Numbers houses
opposite the school. And I read a lot of the first book in Moore’s
sheltered brick-walled garden - Captain Marryats “Midshipman Easy.”
The other was “The Coral Island.”
There was a chap lived up that street too called Billy Moore who
was so fond of reading that he used to spend a fair bit of his
lunch-time reading the newspapers wrapped round his lunch in the
school shed and the teacher Sean O’Leary said he was one of the
cleverest chaps ever to come out of Graigue - and he was no bookworm
either.
Michael Corcoran, who lived near Moore’s, was the first lad I
can remember who had a football made from a pig’s bladder and to play
Gaelic football with that, made handling a rugby ball (Old Gaels will
shudder at the very mention) seem child’s play.
There were some families on and off the Numbers that, compared
to most of us, lived a slightly different sort of existence in those
days - the O’Hanlon's, the Delaney's and the Flynn's. In behind the
high walls and tall colourful trees bordered on two sides by fruit
trees and flowers that were carefully looked after by the warm-hearted
and diminutive Mrs. O’Hanlon whose lovely Cork accent was music to the
ears and who made the most delicious tarts from apples and
gooseberries.
The sound of laughter, and the sound of the crows that gathered
in the Poor Clare trees after lunchtime, ready to swoop down and pick
up the crusts of bread in the school-yard, the sound of the
ever-present rumbling weir, all part of the treasure of memories many
of us still carry with us.
Memories of when everyone knew everyone else there. And there
were good times then as well as bad. I think most of the times were
good. The memories tell it.
P.S
I would like to add to this list of people
who lived in Graiguecullen during this period of the 1960's and 1970's
John Hogan son of Ned Hogan was born in 1894 in Graiguecullen,
and died 30 June 1961 at St Fiacc's Terrace, Graiguecullen. He was
married to Mary Moran who was the daughter of Denis Moran of
Graiguecullen. Mary Moran was born in 1892 in Sleaty Street,
Graiguecullen, and died 8 January 1970 at St Fiacc's Terrace,
Graiguecullen.
Most of their son's and daughters went to England. Some
stayed and some returned. A number of them worked at one time in
Corcoran's Factory, Carlow.
Willie Hogan played football and Dinny Hogan played in the
Killeshin Pipe Band. (son's of John Hogan).
Across the street there was another branch of this family,
albeit distance cousins, they were the Lawlor's who also featured well
in local football and there are still descendents of the Lawlor family
living in St Fiacc's Terrace today.
Michael Brennan c2006.