Wexford author takes trip down memory lane with new book release

“I can see him now. He’s eight years old; completely fearless, walking out the front door of our house on Hantoon Road, Maudlintown, down the garden path with Mam’s neatly trimmed lawn on either side. He closes the small iron gate behind him, then is off down the road, past the Daley’s, Duggan’s, Bergin’s, Byrnes’s and French’s houses, to jump the low wall. Then down into a wide ditch and up a dusty, bramble covered gravel path to the railway track.

Left; the trains stopped at Wexford’s south then north stations; then continued northwards along the coast to Dublin – where Uncle Fran and Auntie Eileen lived; in Finglas. Right; the trains went to Rosslare, from where folks caught the ferry to Fishguard, and then the boat-train to London, where Uncle Paddy and Auntie Marbri lived. The Line we called it; the railway track.

The sea beyond the track was a deep blue and glittered like diamonds beneath the glorious morning sun. To the right of the long, effluent-discharge pipe that pointed like a long finger into the sea, there was a man-made rock wall; low and broken. The rock, smooth in places, and warmed by the sun, was easy to sit on. I had my own place there. I had my own place everywhere; to sit, to stand, to watch, to hide, to think, to feel, to dream, to be:

In the fields, follies, boardwalks, towers; rocky outcrops, streams and bowers; abandoned pillboxes, ferny arbours; from Maiden Tower the distant harbours; water-towers, crab-pools, ponds, and bridges; signal ladders and hidden ridges; crumbled arches, hidden follies; ferny hide-outs, thorny hollies.

Yes. I had my own places all along the shorelines, among the flatlands and uplands of my childhood.

My broken sea wall – the remnant of some ancient building, was on the edge of a rectangular half acre of grass-covered clay that pushed out seaward. On the track side of the rectangle was another, higher dry-stone wall, covered with ivy and yellow lichens, but just wide enough for a small boy to walk along the top; a boy brave enough to risk a fall into the thorny briars that lurked beneath like some Charybdis waiting for an unwary Odysseus. I never did. Fall. And walking that tightrope, I always looked down. Seeing the grass and the briars speeding beneath on either side brought on a giddy excitement; a sense of danger.

Opposite my ivy wall, across the track, was a taller cemented stone wall that formed part of the rear boundary of the Celtic Laundry, which our house almost backed on to. At its far end was a tubular steel gate. Set into the wall as it was, you wouldn’t know it was there until you were almost upon it. Every time I passed it, I expected to see it open. But it never was. It was obviously an enchanted gate; one that could only be opened by magic.

One summer day during school holidays, I was sitting on a long, straight stretch of railway track, on the warm steel rail, not far from the magic gate. I had cut a stick with my penknife and was absorbed in peeling away the grey outer skin to reveal the white, sticky bark beneath. I was slicing off the black notches along my stick, when I heard a shout from a long way off. I paid no attention. Then I heard the shout again, louder; nearer. Dragging my attention away from my stick, I looked in the direction of Wexford town and saw a man just removing cupped hands from his mouth and starting into an agitated run towards me. He was gesticulating wildly, pointing behind me, back up the track.

I had not heard the fast-approaching Rosslare train, which I instantly knew must have already blown its whistle several times. The man probably saved my life. It would have been a shame for young Odysseus to die on such a glittering Summer’s Day. “

The foregoing passage is an extract from a new book by Wexford man Patrick C. Meehan (who was known locally as ‘Con’ Meehan). At age 12, Patrick relocated from Wexford to Dublin in the late 1960s.

Now a long-time resident in the UK (and having recently stepped back from a career in the financial services industry), he eventually found time to put together his account of a visit to the USA in the fall of 1982, when he was a guest member of a South Dublin amateur ‘soccer’ team playing exhibition games against selected colleges and universities across New England.

In an incident-filled journey played out across New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters in this scandalous, dangerous, and often quite risqué voyage of discovery, from an era when ‘soccer’ was young in America.

The book is called Pork Chops On The Left Hammer (Remembering America) and is available on Amazon both in paperback and e-book format: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1036961419

More information is available on Patrick’s website: https://patrickcmeehan.com