Welcome to the Website of Mrs R Carr

The hard time after the funeral was over was eased for me by the presence of people who were able to stay on with me for a while: my sister Mary and her daughter Brenda, my youngest sister Rosemary with her husband John, and especially an old friend, from the days when my mother made sure that some rather lonely girls had a place where they could feel at home, Lucy McManus, who chose to remain for a month or two until I could settle on my future. John and Rosemary brought with them a Spanish priest-friend, Fr Alfonso Mateo, whose cheerful presence was a big help. Lucy, retired in the Scottish seaside town of Girvan after a life as a nanny to various prosperous families in the States, had a managing, practical side to her which ensured that I became well-prepared to see to myself and my home in the years ahead.

I had never moved from the decision to stay in Donegal, though my ties there were not as close as Jim's had been. This had been where we had decided to spend our retirement, and this was where I wanted to stay. The fact that Jim was buried there bore little weight in my decision. I had faith to know that what was laid to rest beneath the stone we put up to James McIntyre of Doaghbeg and Airdrie, Scotland, was not Jim but the mortal part of him; and for all the dark moments of doubt that can assail any of us I held and hold to the certitude that he is one of the living blessed, and I speak to him and ask his help when problems come along.

So began the last period of my life which I can try to tell you about from my own memories. For six years I was one of the Donegal people, seeing to my house and garden with the help of good friends and neighbours, like the Kellys I have already mentioned and of course the other Kellys, Johnny and Rosie, the original owners of our house-site, who had built their own new house just beside us. It was a time of housebuilding, with the next generation of McAteers setting up their own family homes as neighbours to the older Doaghbeg houses, and there were losses as well, like that 'Upper House' which Jim said dated back to his grandfather's grandfather's time. But the one we had built, now that the hedge Jim had set right round the grassed area had reached the height of the surrounding wall, could compare with any other; a place where I could be a good neighbour yet keep myself to myself - for I was past the age for having flocks of small children in and out of my door at all hours - and could entertain the surprising number of visitors who appeared at different times.

If time began to hang heavy on my hands I could always turn to my painting or to the crochet-work and embroidery in which (did I forget to tell you?) I had some degree of skill. Only in the months immediately following Jim's death were there really hours when I felt desolate. I went to Dr Loughrey, who had been so kind and gentle with Jim, and said I found myself weeping with no obvious cause. 'You know,' he said, 'there is a thing called depression, and it would be surprising if you did not have a touch of it. Is there anywhere you can go and stay over Christmas?' So I spent Christmas in the lively home at Reading where Frank and Rosaleen were bringing up the Famous Five, and wrote with Rosaleen's help my letters of thanks to the many people who had known Jim and sent condolences.

The happiness I experienced staying with Rosaleen's family did not turn my thoughts to the idea of living with family permanently in old age. Problems of space apart I really had too much living of my own to do and too many personal 'ways of going' to fit comfortably for long with even very loving and considerate relatives. In Ireland I went back to painting, perhaps not with the sure style of student days, but in ways that pleased me: the unusually snow-clad landscape viewed from my back window; a group of fishermen, black against silver, carrying a curragh over the tide- flat in the late gloaming - a memory, that one, inspired partly by a faded and fogged photograph John had taken years before; and when the family was there and I could get a 'hurl' to a viewpoint near the Swilly, the old struggle to make something of sand and waves and near rocks black against the lough and hazy hills.

I became very friendly with the assistant priest in charge of the lower area of Fanad parish, a small, hardworking, prayerful man called Fr Con Cunningham who had a cheery word for everybody and who tried to introduce me to the ecumenical 'charismatic' movement which was strong in the neighbourhood. I'm afraid I was a bad subject for this: I did not doubt the earnestness of those concerned, but the speaking in tongues and swooning back struck me as very odd, and I had a strong feeling I was watching middle-aged and middle-class folk indulging themselves.

I think it may have been with the same Father Con's encouragement that I used my creative energy in ways beyond watercolours and crocheted coverlets. An enterprising local group was producing a 'Fanad Magazine' to encourage the community's self-awareness and help on the process of making the place the tourist area which it ought by rights to be. They were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the building of our local church at Ballynacrick, and since I knew something of its early history from Jim I was able to write a page or two about it for the magazine.

The story I left out was the personal part he played in the origins of the church, and I'd like to tell it now. Jim was holidaying at home on a summer's morning in 1929 when Bishop McNeely of Raphoe came to say Sunday Mass for the Fanavolty congregation, and afterwards addressed the people - who packed every space and overflowed outside - with the offer to open another church somewhere in lower Fanad. He invited anyone of those present to come and speak to him after Mass about possible locations. Francis Friel, a schoolmaster and father of the Fr Tommy Friel we have met some time ago, stopped Jim outside the church and said - 'You knew the Bishop at St Eunan's, didn't you? - Would you come in with us and we'll try to get the chapel for our side?' The Bishop recognized his former pupil and listened to their arguments for a church in the bottom of Fanad, and was good enough to say that since they were first comers and had made a clear and reasonable case, their suggestion would go forward. And so Ballynacrick church came to be built, 20 years before a further chapel was put up at Ballyheerin to serve the needs of the 'Far Side' people, whose claim was really quite as good.

So life took on a simple and regular rhythm, broken or rather relieved by visits of members of my family. John especially came at every school break from Blairs, and I have a vivid memory of the night he arrived just as our new Polish Pope was to be seen on the televison screen coming out on the St Peter's balcony for the very first time. At other times I had a sense of becoming a part of the world of retired gentlefolks, judging local children's art competitions and joining an occasional cultural excursion with my friend Miss Norwood.

This was a Protestant lady from Belfast who had settled locally and entered into the social life of the neighbourhood after a career which (it was whispered) included a period as secretary to one of the Prime Ministers of Northern Ireland. Miss Norwood was an energetic sightseer and very amateur photographer: one had to weigh the pleasures of being whisked off in her car to look at Martello towers or Lady Leitrim's gardens at Manorvaughan against the ordeal of evenings spent jammed between projector and screen, seeing dozens of Donegal landscapes with never a horizon totally on the level.

There were many kindnesses I could record from those years, and many joys as I watched another generation of children grow up. There is a special place in my memories of this time for Billy and Ann McAteer and their children. Billy's father Jim was the closest in age and in friendship to my own Jim among the family of cousins with whom he was brought up.. They were 'Wee Jim' and 'Red Jim' in an extended family with so many similar names, and in his early days in veterinary practice Wee Jim had visited us at our home in Airdrie. Billy followed his father's profession, working for the Irish Department of Agriculture, and it was my good fortune that he was living in Letterkenny for most of my solitary years in Fanad. He often dropped in on his journeys around the county, and on my occasional jaunts to Letterkenny I would call on the little family - Ann his wife and Maeve, Iain and Conor, and baby Claire. Little Fiona arrived later, when they had moved to Dublin, and I was able to go and stay with them on one occasion.

That was one connection I was specially glad to have kept up, because it reminds me of the times when 'Wee Jim' with his wife Peggy and their children would sometimes be on holiday at Doaghbeg at the same time as ourselves, as well as the pre-war times when we were young together and there were so many cousins of my Jim's around Doaghbeg. There was a day in the high summer of 1939 when three of them - 'Red Jim' and 'Wee Jim' and Paddy Richardson, happened to be on holiday at the same time and were walking along the strand at Doaghbeg, no doubt talking about war-rumours and the doubtful future. When they came to the jumbled rocks at the north end of the shore they took three pennies and hammered them into a rock-crack, making a pact to come back if ever they found themselves together again and rescue those small offerings to fate. As it happened they never met as a threesome again in this life. Kathleen (Ward) McAteer, who had been a very small girl-cousin staying at Doaghbeg at the time, once told me that forty years afterwards you could still see the coins, green with age in their crevice, if you knew where to look.

But time was going on and I had only a year or two to go before my eightieth birthday. The generation Jim and I had felt part of was passing away: his older cousins, Richardson and O'Briens whose non-Donegal surnames were a reminder of the McAteer habit of marrying RIC men from the Doaghbeg barracks; dear Johnny Kelly who had done so much for us through the years; and Ignatius, the last of Jim's immediate family. Increasing deafness brought its own difficulties and annoyances, though thank God I could still hear well on the phone. I became more and more conscious of the blackness and solitude of a country place on winter nights, between the early dusk and the small hours when car-noises told of neighbours back from a dance or the bingo.

So I made the decison - it had to be my own, though I talked to the family and Rosemary and Lucy McManus about it - and put up for sale the house and garden Jim and I had built for our retirement. There was an anxious wait of many months, for with the troubles continuing in the North the market for Donegal holiday-homes among ex-patriates was not exactly booming. In the end it was a lady with local connections, but living in Letterkenny, who gave me the price I needed to set up home in a modest way back in Scotland.

I had passed my eightieth birthday when I left Fanad and went to Girvan to look for a little place that I could manage and which was within my means. It could seem a daring enough venture at that time of life; but God has been good to me all my days, and he gave me the gift of willing helpers and advisers when I most needed them. Rosemary had come over to Fanad and borne most of the burden of clearing out the house and seeing to getting things put in storage in Scotland. My brother Tommy's widow Marie kindly let me stay in the family holiday home in Girvan while friends already settled there, Lucy McManus and Rosemary's sister- in-law Betty McFadyen, helped with the house-hunting.

And so in march 1984, in my eighty-first year, I came to 45 Ailsa Street East in Girvan, one of a row of converted fisherman's cottages, the home where please God I will see out my days. There is something of coming full circle here, for originally this house could not have looked so very different from the home in Clyde Rows where my parents Tommy and Rose Callaghan brought their bits and pieces in 1900, the one which shamed my mother so much she could not bear to invite a visit for her kind Manchester mistress. But it is fully modernised, with a kitchen extension and bathroom and a neat attic bedroom where the fishermen once stored their nets, and numberless improvements in detail made by the young couple who owned it before me. The Church is a walk away; I have a fine parish priest and good neighbours, like Mary Williams who never fusses but I know keeps a quiet eye on things to make sure I'm all right.

Here too there are links with the past. There is Lucy McManus, whom I first knew as a young girl left to her own resources before she went off to the States to be nanny to all those children whose photographs adorn her walls. And Rosie Graham, my companion at Art School and during my early teaching years, settled here many years ago to run a boutique, and now in her turn lives in retirement only a few hundred yards from my home.

I am snug in winter and have pictures of mine on the walls and books of Jim's on the shelves. And it is here that I will draw a line under my memories of things past. Someone else must write the conclusion, when that day comes. But perhaps I could put in as a kind of final chapter the article I wrote some years ago during my Donegal days, when I was a bit more 'at myself' than I am now, and had little thought of ever leaving Fanad again.

To read that article now , and an Epilogue click here To return to the top click here.