Ballytarsna

When I left home to start boarding school in Cork in September 1940 I had no idea that when I arrived back at the end of the first term it would be to a new house situated a mile out of Abbeyleix on the Rathdowney Road in an area called Ballytarsna. It was one of four ex-servicemen's cottages that had been built for returning British servicemen from World War 1. I hated it and missed the spaciousness of Oldtown.

It had but two bedrooms between eight people and a kitchen where the family ate, cooked,and sat. A small front room was kept for visitors. In front was a square lawn and to the right stretched an acre of land. My parents cultivated a fair-sized garden and grew rows of potatoes, beetroot, carrots, onions, cabbage, lettuce and so on. My mother grew lots of parsley, too and she was very proud of the blackcurrant bushes which yielded good fruit in season. My father used the outside shed as his workshop. In the kitchen my mother cooked in a range but during the war coal was unobtainable, and home-produced turf or peat wasn't a perfect substitute.

My saddest memory of that house is of my little sister's death from meningitis in 1949 and my last memory is of standing by my mother's death-bed there in 1964. As I left to return to England after her funeral, Miss FitzHerbert said to me that she guessed that would be my last visit there as my mother had been my reason for visiting all through the years. She knew that it was to see my mother that I continued to visit over the years. Still, I have taken my sister, Helen, back there on the two occasions she came home from New Zealand.

The picture below is of my little sister, Margaret, in the garden of the Ballytarsna house, before her death of TB on the knee.

The below is a photo of Helen and I dressed to go to church outside of Ballytarsna. The garden stretched right up to the end of the trees and the haycocks were where my father let a farmer cut the grass in exchange for a load of manure dug into the vegetable garden.

The last photo is of Mom, dad and a girl Muriel took with her from London for a holiday in Ireland in the 1950s.