A Wee Chat with P.J. McNally from A Glimpse of A Bygone Age
I took it into my head one time to join the Army Air Corps and cross the border for the duration, as they called time and another guy from Sion Mills, and he did go on and join up. We both went up for the medical to Dundalk, but the doctor didn’t arrive. He stayed over and waited but I decided I wasn’t going to wait for some doctor to come from Dublin and I just came on home again. He was the grandson of the woman who owned the Farmers Home.
The Farmer’s Home was always the place to go, apparently. I never was a drinker so I don’t know. I know it was a great place for doing business. A lot of business was done there on Market days and Fair days. I suppose that why it was called the Farmer’s Home.
Oh, sure, God, Strabane was full of characters. Honest and dishonest. Did you ever hear of Dick Parker, the Lord Major of Strabane? He used to go up and down the Main Street with a stick with a pin on the end of it picking up the cigarettes and shouting, “Walk on your heels to save your souls.” He gathered up all these cigarette butts and saved the tobacco out of them.
He kept a lodging house in the foot of the Main Street and they said he had the rooms –there were no walls as such – divided with netting wire like chicken pens. Women and men in different rooms.
When Dick died apparently he left a fortune of money and a niece appeared out of nowhere and claimed all the money. It was rumoured to be five or six thousand pounds and that would have been an awful lot of money then.
This short conversation was first published in Reflections by Strabane and District Writers (2000)
Gemma Hill Writeyou Writeme 