Bygone Time in the Ritz Café in Lifford
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Lifford is a border town situated in the Finn Valley of East Donegal. Three rivers converge there: the Finn, the Mourne and the Foyle. Dressed in mini-skirt, stiletto heels and hair back-combed into a bee-hive stiff as a poker with lacquer, before I’d go to my work I’d lean over the parquet of the old stone bridge that linked Lifford and Strabane and watch the fishermen dotted here and there, waders up to their thighs standing in the middle of the river, casting their nets to catch salmon.
I hoped they’d caught plenty because that would mean the Porthall and St Johnston fishermen, The Browns, the Kees’ brothers and the Howards and the rest of them would have plenty of money to spend in our cafey on the Main Street, when Saturday night came around.
At the end of the bridge on the Lifford side there was a Customs Post manned by uniformed officers of the Customs and Excise. Huge cattle Lorries and their drivers lined nose to tail to have their paperwork check before they were permitted to transport their cattle across the border. On a busy day the wait could be long. In the general mayhem of cars and pedestrians crossing from north to south and visa versa the mournful lowing of the cattle filled the air and the smell of cow manure wafted over you as you passed.
Lifford town grew up around a castle in the 16th century. And it was a British garrison town until 1922. Later, in 1974, the Irish Defence Forces set up a military barracks in the town in what was known locally as the Prior School, an old stone building on Upper Main Street set up by monies bequeathed by Eleanor Prior from near Ballindrait.
I didn’t know it when as I pulled on my blue nylon overall just shy of my 16th birthday and exchanged the stilettos for a pair of flat shoes I was about to meet the man I would marry. Or, that years later, when he set out early one morning to join the Irish Army he would be stationed in the army base there as a cook.
The day I first met him is still fresh in my mind. It was a Thursday; a quiet day in the cafey. He and his friend (later I learned his friend’s name was Henry Mc Cabe from Townsend Street), heads bent, were scanning the list of records in the Jukebox and feeding handfuls of coins into the slot in the side. The automated arm hummed, and clicked as it releasing their chosen record onto the turntable and the voice of Buddy Holly singing the rock and roll song,’ I love you, Peggy Sue’ filled the cafey.
Working in the cafe was hard work compared to working in our village shop in Ballindrait. I was sure I was all grown up now that I was working in the ‘town’ and enjoying the freedom of being out from under my father’s eye all the time.
My mother, Madge, was in charge of the caféy. She sang along to all the songs. When she saw me looking at the boy with the curly hair, tanned skin and soft brown eyes, she nudged me. “Go on, go over and tell him about the new records,” she said.
Going over I pointed out the new releases that had just been added that morning. As the jukebox played in the background I learned his name was Fran – short for Francis. He was seventeen – a year older than me – he worked as a fish fryer in Cassioni’s Continental Cafe in the Back Street in Strabane since he’d left school.
My mother was delighted to hear this news. “We could do with a pair of extra hands here on a Saturday night,” she said half joking, half serious. Fran gave me a shy almost reticent smile. “Thursday’s my only half day off,” he said.
From the start there was something likeable about him. I thought he looked very handsome in an open necked three button shirt; cream coloured bomber jacket, jeans and black leather winkle-pickers styled Beatle boots which were all the rage.
As we talked he kept turning a gold signet ring on the third finger of his left hand. I wondered if he had a steady girlfriend and had she given it to him. No chance of him taking me to the pictures, I thought.
The Ritz cinema was on the Main Street right next door to the cafey. They got all the latest films. Two films were shown nightly with a matinee on a Sunday.
Taking your girl to the pictures was the thing in the 1960s. No fifty inch TVs or endless Sky channels then. TVs programmes were in black and white – if you were lucky enough to have a television set (which we didn’t), you only got ITV, BBC and RTE if you had a special aerial.
The Ritz got all the latest films. Walking down the street actors and actresses gazed out at you from every lamppost and shop window advertising the ‘coming attraction’.
Paddy Friel, a large man of some proportion was the cinema manager on the ‘soft ‘seat side. From early evening the punters started to gather. In no time at all, the queues would be snaked down the Main Street, past the Memorial, Hall, past Katie’s Café, Bannigan’s’ pub, and past the Gardaí Barracks on the corner of Main Street and the Diamond.
If you wanted one of the plush red ‘velvet’ seats at the back of the stalls you waited patiently in line linked arm-in – arm with your boy – or if you were sassy with his arm around you, until Paddy had his daughter Gloria safely ensconced in the small glass ticket booth before he open the double glass door with their gold trim with a flourish and issued a stern warning to, ‘Keep an orderly line’.
A good crowd of punters for the pictures usually meant good business for our cafey and for Katie Mc Cosker’s cafey further down the street. There would be a big demand on teas, chicken and meat sandwiches, soft drinks, pastries and fish and chips when the cinemagoers got out all buoyed up by the romantic film and a stolen cuddle in the back seats where the ushers light didn’t reach.
In the days before the technology explosion, Cinema film came in reels. Each reel came in round silver canister which were numbered to show the running order of the film.
Hughie Mc Cormack (and his assistant Terry Porter) –up in the projection box high above the punters heads did their best but things didn’t always go to plan. Sometimes the film would break down. Or, wherever the film had been shown before – Letterkenny or Ballybofey – they hadn’t winded it back to the start.
The youngsters would go wild when the film started at the end instead of the beginning or it broke down halfway through. There would be the thundering sound of protesting feet beating on the cinema floor like a herd of elephants. Down in the ‘pit’ at the “hard ‘seats, Phil Gillespie, God rest his soul, the floor manager, would hastily bring up the house lights and threatened to ‘bar’ the troublemakers. The longer it took Hughie, the projectionist to rewind the film the worse it got. Howls of disappointment would steadily increase in volume until it could be heard through the cinema walls into the cafey.
It was like the Wild West in there at a matinee. The younger punters would hurl crunched up paper missiles at a girl they fancied. Manys a courtship started with that crunched up ball of paper hitting them in the back of the head and manys a fight too. And under cover of the pandemonium some would sneak past the red cord that separated the ‘hard’ seat from the more expensive seats and be sitting quiet as a mouse when the house lights were dimmed and the film came back on again.
In a two-storey house opposite the cafey, George Gallen, and his wife Iris – who was a Sion Mills woman – kept lodgers. My friend, Anne Gallagher’s mother kept a lodger too. He worked at the Custom and Excise on the Lifford side of the border. The broad brown leather belt he wore around his uniform was fit to bust but we minded our manners and didn’t giggle because he gave us a lift to the pictures on a Sunday.
Labouring men working on the roads or harvest workers took lodgings while they tarred the roads or tended to the threshing mill at the cutting of the corn. They drank a pint or two of stout in Harte’s bar and played ‘a hand of cards’ to pass away an evening when they were away from home.
But the lodgers who lived across the street from the caféy were nothing like that. They were glamorous females from far flung parts of southern Ireland whose name places I had only seen on a map on the wall in Murlog National School.
These were girls who worked in the County House, County Library and the Telephone Exchange in the Donegal County Council administration in the Diamond. In their stylish skirts and dresses and high heels with their hair and their make-up done to perfection, and with their lilting down-the-country brogues (accents), to me they were like beauty queens – like something you’d see on the Rose of Tralee Beauty pageant on RTE Television which we used to watch standing outside Arthur’s Television shop window.
From my place behind the counter in the caféy, wearing my buttoned down the front blue nylon overall, my face sweaty and shiny from frying fish and with the smell of chips clinging to me, I couldn’t help watching them enviously as they came out to go to their cushy jobs.
That day, Henry looked out the cafey window and saw them too. He gave a low whistle of appreciation, forgot about the songs on the jukebox and headed out the door as three of the girls stepped out of George’ Gallen’s front door, talking and laughing.
I couldn’t blame Henry for staring but in his tight washed out frayed jeans I thought he would be out of luck. I imagined they’d be looking for guards or custom officers as boyfriends and husbands. “They’re the girls who work in the County House,” I said as if that explained everything.
Henry wet his hands and slicked down his blond hair. “The cat can look at the Queen,” he retorted, not in the least bit perturbed.
“Tell your mother I’ll be over to help her to pre-cook the fish,” Fran said to me as he followed Henry out. I noted the nice watch that was peeping out from beneath the cuffed sleeved of his jacket as he pulled the door behind him… It looked like the one sold in the Lizzie Thompson’s shop across the street.
“See you, next Thursday, then,” I called out hoping he didn’t take a fancy to the any of the lovely clerical ‘Roses’.
Gemma Hill © 2021
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