Tipperary woman Christine Downey has enjoyed a life full of wonderful adventures

A brass plaque on the wall of Christine’s double-fronted house in  Clonmel's Irishtown proclaims ‘MISS C DOWNEY CHIROPODIST’.

I knock on the Victorian brass knocker and a petite bright-eyed lady opens.
“Thanks for coming on time, I'm a bit of a timekeeper. It probably comes from my job when we had appointments,” she says.

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I’m glad I’m not late. She ushers me into a large reception room with a high ceiling.
A heavy mahogany dining table is laden with accumulations of a busy life. Huge framed oil paintings of seascapes grace the walls. The fading wallpaper might have been hung before people danced the Charleston.
Beyond the window stretches an orchard garden, enclosed by a stone wall down to the river.
A fig tree planted generations ago towers over a dozen apple trees which were bearing fruit before her grandmother’s time. Christine still wraps the apples individually in newspapers the traditional way.

CHEEKPOINT
Christine sits in her favourite chair by the window, her white hair lit by the bare bulb of a standard lamp as she tells her story. She was born in Cheekpoint, Waterford, in 1935. Her father had spent much of his life working in Africa with the British government.

With the colonies collapsing, he returned to Ireland with the idea of going to Canada, but his plans were interrupted when “he met my mother who would have been timid about going to Canada. She was a farmer’s daughter from Ardmore. My father’s family were grocers and wine merchants; they were quite snobbish and saw the marriage as a step down. My grandmother was the businesswoman; her husband liked riding around on a horse most of the time,” says Christine.

CRICKET
Her aunt Bessie offered them accommodation in her town house in Clonmel near the cricket club in the “small castle” where Christine watched her cousins play.
“My father fell asleep during the matches and for the life of me I didn't understand the rules,” she remembers.
She enjoyed sports and was a member of tennis, hockey, walking and rowing clubs, and remembers summer holidays rowing on the Suir and tying up at the river bank to picnic.

LONELY
Christine was just 12 in 1947 when her father died. “I felt very lonely. It was like the end of the world. I adored my father,” she says. “I got on well with my mother but I was never as close to her.”
Her father’s pension died with him, so young Christine helped her mother earn a living by accommodating travelling business people in the family home.
“My mother was an excellent cook and housekeeper but things were very basic. There was a big fire downstairs but nobody had any heat in their bedroom so they just ran upstairs and got straight into bed.”

LORETO
Christine was educated at the Loreto convent where, she remembers, “The nuns were very good teachers. The school had an orchestra and a lovely choir which gave concerts. I played the piano, but I would never have been a concert pianist.”
Driven by an insatiable desire to travel, she spent her weekends walking with friends in the Comeraghs, wondering what her future would hold. The nuns expected her to do a degree and teach, and couldn't understand why she wanted to be a chiropodist.
“I wanted to do something I could make my living at, and I’d do what I really like in my spare time,” Christine says. “I wondered what kind of a job would I get in Ireland. I could have worked in a museum or something like that but there weren't many museums.”

CHIROPODY
She was influenced by her father’s travels, and Ireland was becoming too small for her. After school she left to complete a three-year chiropody course in Edinburgh. When she had passed her exams she worked in clinics in Liverpool and London. Then she started travelling beyond the hills of Ireland, going to France as an au pair and taking walking holidays in Wales, France and Austria with friends.

EUROPE
“Cycling was safe in the 1960s. They took your bike on the plane and I went all over Europe with my friend John Walsh who lived to 106,” she says. “We’d go on the secondary roads away from the traffic and stay in quieter family-run places. We walked in European forests and stayed in lovely timber houses. Travelling is in my blood. I suppose I got that from my father.”

INGROWN TOENAILS
Although some people may have misconceptions about working with feet, chiropody allowed her to follow her passion. When she saw a job advertised in Clonmel in the 1970s she came home and started working in the psychiatric hospital. Ingrown toenails can be painful, and men often fainted when they saw her prepare a needle to inject their foot with an anaesthetic.
Christine looked philosophically beyond the toes, knowing they paid for her travels. “We rarely get the chance to work at the things we really like,” she says. “Travel was my big passion. I like meeting people from different places.”
She extended her horizons beyond the cycle paths of western Europe, and, wary of visiting eastern Europe alone, she joined organised groups to attend musical festivals and operas in Austria, Budapest and Prague. She also went to India, Africa, China, the Canaries and Machu Picchu.
“Peru was the most interesting place. It had history, scenery, the sea and rural life where people were living as they did 80 years ago,” says Christine. “In Palestine I thought the Jordan would be massive but it was quite a small river. I'd always be with a group going to places like that, I wouldn't have the nerve to go off on my own.”
A love of travel, although in her genes, can bring its near misses. In 2022, one of her cousins with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was attacked by Hezbollah and only escaped death because they thought he was dead.

ROYAL FAMILY
With no time for airs and graces, Christine offers me tea in china cups. “I have great time for the Royal family,” she says. “It was great to see the Queen when she came to Cashel. I hope you don't mind eating the cake with your fingers? We’re a bit higgledy-piggledy here.”
Her health is good, but she uses a rollator because of the dystonia which sometimes puts her neck into spasms. She finds younger folk very helpful.
A lively and attractive girl, Christine had many suitors, but she rejected all offers of marriage in order to follow her passion to travel. She got close to marrying once but it wasn’t to be.
“My aunt was all for him but my mother wasn't. Mothers can get quite possessive of single children. I should have married one or two of the people I met when I was very young, but I suppose I wanted to keep moving around. There were plenty of nice attractive people,” she says.
“I liked my work, but I would love to have been a librarian because they have all kinds of things going on, but there weren't many openings for librarians. Now I love going to the Book Club, the History Society and the library. People give lectures and films and you can read or have a quiet chat. It's my kind of second home.”

YOUNG AT HEART
Christine's chiropody qualifications have allowed her to travel the world and kept her young at heart. She has seen so much. With her rich fund of memories she now contents herself visiting Ireland using public transport. “Clonmel isn't great for trains but the buses are good,” she says.

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Her next trip might be to renew her lapsed passport. Her eyes light up, saying, “There are cruises going out of Ireland now. I've done the Danube and the Douro rivers; I'd love another riverboat cruise. When you don't have full mobility you can just sit on the boat and look around.”
Perhaps Christine's adventures aren't over yet.