24-08-2018, 01:52 PM
9786
Re: Leisurely Scribbles (part 5)
Thank you all kindly for your lovely words of consolation, much appreciated.
We buried poor Tessie on Wednesday morning, a good crowd turned out for the church service, she was very popular in her own area. She would have been proud of her husband for the wonderful wake he gave for her back at their house, well done John me lad.
She had breast cancer 20 years ago and it seemed to be gone when she had a breast removed back then, but late last year the cancer returned with a vengeance and finally took it’s toll. What a cheerful woman she was, always looking at the bright side of things, she was a real joy to be with, I’ll miss her terribly and Wexford, lovely County that it is, will never be the same to me again without me oul pal Tessie,, she was 69. God rest her cheerful soul.
Sorry about this long post but I just have to give you some idea of what this wonderful person was like, I had 11 S.I.L.’s and she was by far my favourite.
Tessie, who was my brothers wife, was more than a sister in law to me, she used to work in the office of a jewellers I worked for when she was young, it was me who introduced her to my younger brother, they hit it off straight away.
She was a country girl working in the big city and when they married they lived for a few years in Dublin, but then her mother died in Wexford and they moved into her house down there. He was with the electricity board and managed to get a work transfer. She was always asking Phyllis and me to move down there, but I wasn’t a driver and all my work contacts were in Dublin, when I retired Phyllis said it was too late to change so we never did.
We went down there twice every year and they often came to Killarney with us when we went to Kerry, they in turn would spend some time with us here in the city, we were never short of a laugh when Tessie was around.
She was involved in amateur dramatics and could master any accent in a short time, she was very talented, good looking with a terrific figure that she kept all her life, she could have went far in the acting game had she wanted to, but she was too modest and too wrapped up in her four kids.
I remember on holiday one year the four of us went into a pub in Gorey, it was afternoon midweek so there were only a few regulars in there, we had a few jars and then she took out a script from her handbag, it was Heno McGee’s play “Hatchet”, all about a tough inner city family involved in dodgy dealings, they were putting it on locally, I had seen the play twice and told her so, she then asked me to do the husband who was rowing with his wife in the pub scene, fairly violent with lots of colourful language.
I studied the husbands dialogue for a while and off the pair of us started after giving the barman the nod and the wink. By God she was brilliant and the faces on the locals who thought we were for real, was something else. That gave her more pleasure than an Oscar.
You would have to travel far and wide before you’d meet another woman like Tessie, I miss her already.