Saluting an aunt who raised two families but no child of her own... For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to No Great Expectations by John MacKenna above.
I was coming through Heuston station on a wet, miserable Wednesday afternoon when a man sitting on one of the seats near the coffee shops called me. He was a man I knew and we hadn't seen each other in more than a year. The conversation travelled down sidings and then, just before we parted, he said: 'Lal MacKenna was your aunt, wasn’t she?’
‘She was,’ I said.
‘I remember her from when I was a boy,’ the man said. ‘I remember her walking out with (and he named a man I’d never heard of). They made a lovely couple. I’d see them down the line or on the Square. I could never understand why they didn’t stay together. She never married and he never married, either. He was mad about her. What a shame.’
On the train, I thought about my aunt Lal, my father’s sister. The quiet woman who was a constant fixture in the kitchen of her sister and brother-in-law’s shop; the woman whose life was a continuum of service to others; the woman who raised one family and then another without ever having a child of her own.
When Lal was eight her mother died and she and her three brothers and younger sister were taken into care by their grandmother. A few years later, the children returned to live with their father, a railwayman, in Athy. By then, he had remarried and the five children looked forward to a more stable life together, in their new home in the railway cottage on the edge of the town. Within a short time, their step-mother died, leaving Lal to look after her siblings. She was thirteen years old. The year was 1915. She was responsible for cooking and cleaning and running the house for her father and her siblings, who ranged in age from fourteen to seven. Her teenage years were spent in looking after others, getting them through school and out into the world. She continued to live with and look after her father until his death in 1948.
Listen to more from Sunday Miscellany here.
