Magical memories of growing up in a Tipperary town

Bridget O’Connor Bourke is a real Clonmel woman. She was born and reared in the town.
Bridget fondly remembers her childhood playing in the Boulick, swimming up the Green, the smell of the crushing and the showband dances where someone always knew someone who had a car. Bridget married Jimmy in 1971 and they now have five adult children and nine grandchildren.

When I first meet Bridget she is nervous (as am I). We don’t know what magic is about to happen, what kind of story will materialise from our conversation.
In her right hand is a shopping bag that clanks when she walks. As soon as we sit, she quickly spills the treasures of her bag onto the table. There must be twelve photo frames of different styles and shapes. Each one presents a black and white photo - the frame a doorway to special moment or time. When all the photo frames are assembled collage-like on the table, I realise I am looking at the picture book of Bridget’s life.

Bridget picks up a photo of herself as a baby in the pram outside King Street Flats and this is where her story begins.
“This is 1948, the year I was born…and my father, like most army men, was given a flat in King Street.”
As a child they moved several times, and her earliest memory is when after four years in Barron Park they moved to Cashel Road.
“I have such a clear memory of pushing the pram up the road with all our stuff in it. I was young, only four or five, but I remember.”

Bridget remembers a shovel in her hand, digging the garden in the house in Cashel Road and her dad sitting close by on the bench, unable to help. He got sick a few years earlier with TB and was getting weaker.
“My father died on Christmas Eve 1954 and I was six. He might have had cancer but that was not spoken about. At the time, Margaret [her sister] was about ten, my brother was two years younger and my baby sister was only six months.”
On Cashel Road “it was all fields when I was younger, nothing there and we loved it. When you pass the crossing gates you were in the country, all country, not a house until you went up to Ard Gaoithe and the bungalow on the side where John Kennedy motors is now.”
In the summer everyone went walking and Bridget smiles remembering the “sandals and small ankle socks and it was lovely.”

BOULICK DAYS
Long days were spent playing at the Boulick – a green field with “a kind of a pond and we would wonder where the water came from.” Bridget would sit on the wall for hours with her friends, making funny faces and ‘acting the eejit’. Sometimes they played “Queenie, Queenie who has the ball?” and spent hours singing Dean Martin songs.
Bridget recalls one day when a friend of her brother’s came to the house shouting “Come quick the aliens have landed up in the Boulick!”.

They all believed him, ran up and were so disappointed not to find one. At the end of a long day out playing, Bridget came home to enjoy the tartness of lettuce, scallions, and salad cream sandwiches.
When Bridget talks about her mother, she beams with respect. “She was great to work. We never saw bad times and she would find food from somewhere.” Some people really struggled financially but Bridget’s mother protected them from all that.
Though her mother did not have a lot, she was good to the people around her. She worked in the kitchen in St Luke’s and took on cleaning jobs. She always kept a lodger and if it was an older woman, she would keep an eye on the children. Her mother was also a great woman for making tarts.
“In our kitchen she had a black range and the kettle was always on. If she was making a tart, she would put a shoe in the fire.

It would heat up the oven, blaring up the chimney so we would all run out afraid for your life. But the tarts (apple tarts or steak and kidney pie) were gorgeous.”
At eight years old Bridget went swimming up at the Green by the Convent bridge. Those who could not swim paddled in the shallow water and the swimmers went to the diving board.
“My mother would pack a picnic but you couldn’t eat it because the cows were there and the flies, and you would be dying.”

At eleven, Bridget remembers getting on her bike and heading out the Wood Road (Ardfinnan way). She would throw her bike on the side of the road, run down a small pathway and with her swimming togs already on, jump into delightfully clear and pebbly water. One time Bridget had been given some red shoes with a bow – a pair she’d longed for. “I went out to the sandy banks, walked in the water with them and they were ruined. Probably got a good telling off but I wasn’t murdered!”

Family, friends and travel beyond Tipperary made for a happy life

Elders of Clonmel

RITZ CINEMA
At thirteen, Bridget went to the Tech school and at the same time got her first job at the Ritz Cinema two days a week.
At the side of the cinema was a little sweet shop that had a hatch where cinema-goers could buy ice-creams. Bridget remembers going to the Ritz in a large group and this is how she met her husband at fifteen.
Back then, the boot factory provided much employment for Clonmel town. Bridget got a job putting the bows on the shoes with a machine while her mother also worked there making tea.
“On the top floor they cut out the leather for the shoes, then that was sent somewhere else then the bows went on, after that they were boxed and sent out. The bows had to be just right or you can’t sell them.”
One day when Bridget came home for lunch her mother said, ‘‘You are not going back, you are going to work in Bulmers.’’
Her mother took her down to Bulmers that day on the back of her bike and she worked there for nine years. She remembers “the bottling and the noise and all the women singing. I was there one day, and they said be careful of the boxes – there could be anything in them. And a rat came out and went up a man’s pants and oh God almighty if I was going to die!”
At Bulmers in a building called the Rope Walk, you would start by decanting the bottles and then move up to crushing the apples in Dowd’s Lane.
“The lovely smell in September would be all over the town,” she recalls.

LUNATIC SOUP
At the time they made Triple Vintage, a bottle with a handle on it that the locals called lunatic soup because it was so strong. Bottles were washed in a vat with caustic soda and gloves used to prevent burns. From Dowd’s Lane, you could progress to a washer or a filler.
At that time, “Bulmers was a nice job, well-paying and it had a canteen.”
Bridget loved being a washer and was amazed at how the bottles went around and got washed. Someone would need to sit there (they called it sighting) to make sure the bottles were coming out clean. This was not always easy especially if it was Monday morning and you were at the dances that weekend.
“One day someone at the end of the line asked me ‘How come you didn’t see them?’ and when I looked again there were six bottles with little soldiers in them. Some little children had put them in there!” It was good times at Bulmers.
Every Friday evening, Bridget would leave her wages on the mantlepiece for her mother. One of her friends tried to convince her to “go home and tell your mother you will give her so much a week.” But Briget said, “I couldn’t tell her that, I would be killed!” Her mother was very good to her, even making her clothes and the extra money came in handy. However, a year later she did say it because she was saving up to get married.

COLLINS HALL
If she could have, Bridget would have gone to the dances seven nights a week. It was the time of the big showbands, Dicky Rock and Joe Dolan. It seemed like each of the towns had their own dance night like Collins Hall on a Saturday night in Clonmel. They thumbed on the road to get a lift and they always seemed to know someone who knew someone who had a car.
“We used to go out to Cahir and my God we would dance all night and didn’t even have a drink!”
When Bridget thinks of Clonmel, she thinks of the quay and how lovely it was and still is to walk along. She thinks of summers that smelt like tar when it was so hot that the road would melt and “I was afraid to walk on it in case my shoes stuck.”
Her mind lingers on the Fair Day on Wednesdays with everyone selling their wares and the blue and yellow cups that she wished she had kept. She remembers the long line of people waiting outside the phone box to get their important phone call (especially if the boyfriend was away).

There was a time when everyone had a bicycle and would say ‘hello’ as they passed by. There are parts of Clonmel that bring her back there again – when she passes the gap for the sandy banks or the built-up areas that she remembers as green, green fields. Bridget can still taste the flaky pastry of her mother’s tarts in her own baking.
Last year, she entered the Applefest apple tart competition and at the contest she said to a woman “are you going home with the winning apple tart?” and she said “no, but you are!”
And as our magical conversation comes to an end, Bridget surprises me by describing herself as a real Clonmel woman. When I ask her what she means, she takes her time to answer, to find the words: “It means I know this place, am of this place. I know the people and they know me.”

Author

Dr Marie Walsh is a Lecturer and Researcher with the Technological University of the Shannon (TUS), Ireland.
Her specialty areas are the study of Post Traumatic Growth, the psychology of teams and leadership. She has two amazing children and she expresses her creative side as a singer/songwriter. Marie sees herself as a cat person - curious about everything and enjoying the adventure of life.