As I drove towards Thomastown after work last Friday week this is what I beheld just two hundred metres up the road from here.

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The sign had not been there that morning and its erection signifies the end of the story about the three people who lived in the house that is now for sale.

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To tell this story well, one would need the skills of Chekhov or maybe Synge.

It is a story that, if you did not know it to be true, it would be hard to believe.
It is a story in which there are chasms of missing information filled with rumours and surmise.

But, most of all, it is the story of three gentle people whose way of life will never be seen again.

Maggie Mylott, originally from Ballygub just south of Inistioge off the Inistioge to New Ross road, lived there with her uncle, Tom Keeffe.
Whether she, or they, lived there before she became the owner of the house in 1952, I am not sure.

They were visited from time to time by Maggie's 'Aunt Bridie' from America and speculation existed that Aunt Bridie was, in fact, Maggie's mother.
Enough to say that any mystery or uncertainty, let alone speculation, that surrounded her, including her origins, was not going to be dispelled by Maggie.

Uncle Tom had the dual afflictions of, what would today be described as severe scoliosis but was then more graphically characterised as being a hunchback, as well as a cleft palate.
Accordingly, Tom was so bent-over that he gazed at his navel and his speech was so impaired that he was only fully understood by those who shared their lives with him.

Maggie was a 'small farmer', a very small farmer, there being just five acres with the house, but when she could she rented land nearby.

Maggie took things in.
She did this in both meanings of the phrase.
She had an undoubted and sharp intelligence and little passed her by.
Equally, she took-in people, and animals, especially if they were damaged or in some way needy.

The sight of Tom and Maggie driving their mixed and motley stock along the roads, as they did more often than one would have thought could be necessary, accompanied by a collection of dogs of often extraordinary countenance, was something to behold.
The spectacle would not have appeared out of place in a Breugel painting or a scene from a film of a Thomas Hardy novel, where the director had not reined-in his imagination.

Much of their animal husbandry took place indoors - in the house that is....

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Note the teat on the Jameson bottle used for feeding suckling lambs or calves

And to complete the threesome that I mentioned at the outset, there was Mick. Michael Gainsford that is or, as we all knew him, 'the Gan'.

Maggie took Mick in and he never left.

Mick came from close by Oilgate in County Wexford.

Sometime in the 1960's I believe, he came to Ballyduff to work for Mrs. Pattie Gaffney, wife to Jim Gaffney the brother of John Gaffney off whom we bought our mill.
Now Pattie, Jim and John are deserving of a story in their own right, which may one day be told, but it is with Maggie, Tom and Mick that we are concerned here.

Like the Gan, Pattie Gaffney came originally from Wexford where it seems Mick worked, on and off, for her brother. This connection presumably accounted for him coming to Ballyduff to work for Pattie and Jim on a short term basis, and it was arranged that he would lodge with Maggie and Tom for the duration.

But, as I said, when the work for the Gaffneys ended Mick did not return to Wexford but stayed, and indeed he outlived both Tom and Maggie, off whom he inherited the cottage that is now, nearly six years after his death, 'on the market'.

Now the nature of the relationship between Maggie and Mick was the subject of further surmise, speculation and rumour, not least by the local catholic clergy who sought, it was said, to break-up the household on the grounds that their co-habitation presented a threat to a proper moral order.

Whilst we grew to know Mick quite well, he was as inscrutable as Maggie, and, as she did herself, he took whatever secrets there may, or may not, have been about the nature of their relationship to his grave.

But, whatever about Mick and Maggie, Mick formed another relationship in the locality that fostered further, endless and no doubt scurrilous, speculation and rumour.

Coolmore House, the nearby 'big house', (yes, the one that is now owned by the un-neighbourly Mellon) was, at the time the abode of Amanda and, her mother, Beatrice Cayley.

Amanda farmed the lands with the assistance of, who else but, the Gan.

Now the farming practices, especially in the area of animal husbandry, at Coolmore were not dissimilar to those of Maggie and Mick themselves. This because, it is reasonable to assume, as the greater authority on farming techniques the Gan imposed his methods on the Coolmore enterprise.

If, as we did from time to time, one entered Coolmore House by the side door, it was not unusual to meet animals, of any species, in various degrees of distress or decay in the rooms adjacent to the kitchen.

And in that kitchen the Gan also held authority for it was widely reported that he also performed the functions of cook and butler by delivering breakfast to his employer in her room and this, of course, led to yet more speculation of a nature that would be libelous if not proved to be true, so, as one of the protagonists still lives, though no longer hereabouts, I will not reveal its nature.

I do not insult the dead, nor the memory of the man, when I mention that the Gan, at that stage of his life, was fond of the drink for he broadcast this detail about himself, and tales of his drinking years, to the end of his life.
But, to the astonishment of all of us who knew him, he stopped drinking, on a day, and never touched it again.
And, as you will by have by now gathered was his nature, he never said why but it was a widely held view that Maggie had presented him with an ultimatum and, wise man that he was, he weighed-up the situation and saw where the greater benefits lay.

But, as I say, during his 'farm management' years he drank.
And I fear that the impact of his drinking will not have been of benefit to the wellbeing of the livestock, or Amanda's bank balance, because of the nature of Mick's drinking.
His habit was not to over imbibe on a regular but manageable basis. Instead, and not infrequently, he would go on binges that could last for days or even weeks during which nothing would be done but drinking, and recovering sufficiently from drink, to drink some more.

There are legendary tales of his drinking exploits that I will not reveal here other than to say that, on more than one occasion, my offers to him of a lift home, when I came upon him sleeping by the roadside in winter, were rejected out of hand as no more than an interference to the job on hand!

There is one that merits telling and shows just how times have changed.

Mick was a good and reliable driver. He drove very slowly and very carefully. Accordingly, he was from time to time engaged to do deliveries for a particular trader in Thomastown. And on one such occasion he was sent off for this purpose to Wexford. Perhaps because he found himself on home territory, Mick went 'on the beer', as the saying goes.
After a day or two the disgruntled Thomastown trader contacted the guards in Wexford and in due course they found both Mick and the missing vehicle.
A replacement driver was despatched from Thomastown and, with the assistance of the guards, the comatose Mick was loaded into the back of the open, pick-up truck and driven back to Ballyduff where he was off-loaded at Maggie's door. No charges were ever brought against him: not by the guards anyway.

I do not remember the details surrounding Tom Keeffe's death and, sadly, Sue and I were out of the country when Maggie died in May of 1997.

Men of Mick's ilk and generation were not given to showing emotion but it was evident that Mick never recovered from the loss of Maggie and shortly after her death his own slow decline began.

Amanda Cayley was long gone from Coolmore and its subsequent owners had dispensed with Mick's services and his own farming fell slowly away too.

He lived on in the house with his dogs, Rover and Magoo, in ever diminishing circumstances.

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Rover. Mick described him as 'the cleverest dog in the world'.

There had never been running water, let alone sanitation in the house and, while they were all personally clean people, domestic order, not to mention being house-proud, were concepts that had passed them entirely by.

He existed in small oases of space as the detritus of life slowly built-up around him.

It is more than likely that Mick had never cooked a meal in his life and, whilst many neighbours kept an eye on him, I fear his diet consisted of little more than tea, sandwiches and Dairy Milk bars that he bought in Thomastown.

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One of Mick's sandwiches. Its best before date reads 26 October 2002.

Towards the end of his independent life Mick sat at the corner of the table.....

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.....this corner where the salt pack is lying, from where he could keep an eye on both the window and the front door for he was becoming increasingly anxious about being attacked.

He slept upstairs under the roof: there was no ceiling, not even rendering on the underside of the slates.

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Mick's bedroom

Mick smoked, copiously. And Mick smoked in bed. And beside his bed there was a heap of empty Silk Cut boxes that he had tossed from the bed which almost occluded the window.

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Mick's bedside

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This was his wardrobe, with his 'Sunday best' to the left.

I will not dwell further on the Gan's decline.

The end came, the end of his time living at Ballyduff that is, two days before Christmas in 2002.

As I drove home that evening I noticed that Mick's car had not moved from where I had seen it the day before. We discussed this over supper and afterwards, just to be sure, we went up to check on Mick.
The house was in darkness and Rover the dog was making so much noise barking at us that we could not hear if Mick was answering our calls. In the end we did hear his voice but he was not responding to reason and certainly not letting us in.
So I decided to break down the door.
And there he was, with Rover cowering beside him, lying on the floor.
Hannah was with us and she ran back to the mill for a duvet while Sue and I called an ambulance, which duly arrived and removed Mick to hospital in Kilkenny.
He had had a stroke and it was thought that he may have been lying where we found him for a day or two.
It was further thought that Rover may have kept him alive by licking his face and lying on him to keep him warm: it was, after all, late December and it was considered that that he would have died of hypothermia had something not intervened to keep him awake and warm.

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It was here that we found Mick.

He recovered his pysical health over Christmas but never fully his clarity of mind and thereafter he moved into St. Columba's in Thomastown, where he died in August 2004.
Nobody knew his age for certain.
A group of his friends and neighbours, but no relatives, assisted at his burial in Thomastown Cemetery.

Post Script

In the days following the Gan's removal from his house to hospital Sue and I fed Rover in the house thinking that he would protect the property because of his reputation for ferocity.
But this was obviously not sustainable.
But could you have a dog, that may have saved his master's life, put down?
I certainly couldn't.
So we took him in.
Now, as I said, Rover had a bad reputation and whilst he knew and liked Sue, as she would call in on Mick when she was out walking, we were unsure how an old dog that had been encouraged to be fearsome, would fit into our home.

With my hand on my heart I can state that from the moment we brought him down to the mill Rover never once growled, let alone chased or bit anybody.

Rover died during the summer of 2006, and I miss him until this moment.


(All the pictures in this post, except for the one of Rover the dog, were taken last week.
I took the same photographs just days after Mick was removed to hospital and, therefore, before the house had been ransacked by intruders. Sadly they were on my PC on which the hard drive failed. Needless to say they had not been backed-up and I will regret their loss for ever.)

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(In those original pictures there was a most beautiful shot of Rover coming towards me, through this gate, still in search of his true master, no doubt.)

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