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Pat Smyth, a civil servant with the National Assistance Board in West Tyrone from the 1930's to the 1950's, recalls his memories, experiences and the larger than life personalities he encountered on the way.
We played cards a lot in the digs, especially on wet weekends. Once we established a record, playing 'solo' twelve hours to midnight Saturday, out to Mass next morning and at it again on Sunday for another twelve hours. No money changed hands until a session ended.
Tommy Kernan was a wizard at cards and he kept the tally sheet. He could have picked up the fifty-two-cards and rehearsed a game which had just ended, then demonstrated how player x could have won if he had played his cards in an alternative sequence.
Pat Higgins was a keen golfer and the last time we met, around 1985, I learnt that he had married the proprietor of Sweeny's Oughterard Hotel and was the owner of Oughterard golf links. Sadly, he was then in frail health and unable to lift a club. When I called at Oughterard in 1992, I learned that he had died.
Gerry O'Neill used to tell the story of a shocking experience which he had had when his father died suddenly on the steps of the Sacred Heart Church before Mass, one Sunday, about two hundred yards from the Dolphin.
Gerry had been keeping house alone when there was a ring of the doorbell. He answered it and the dead body of his father was carried in. In the commotion those involved had assumed that word of the tragedy had reached Gerry. In fact Gerry had heard nothing.
By a sad coincidence while Gerry was still a young man, he also hurried up the same steps, collapsed and died just as Mass was about to begin. From the altar the celebrant later prayed for Gerry's soul and as he did so, Cissie, Gerry's sister, staggered from a front pew dazed and collapsed.
She died some years later, at home, while seemingly in good health. Another brother Joe went the same way. Gerry had been High Chief Ranger of the National Foresters and his funeral was one of the largest seen locally. Saint Eugene's brass band headed the cortege and it was a most impressive procession. As was the custom, the clergy led it, a score or more of them walking in pairs.
In her day Cissie Tierney was very widely popular especially with the grocers. When food was rationed she had at least ten ration books because of her running a boarding house and her custom was very much sought after. In the digs, only sugar was rationed. Omagh wasn't a thousand miles from Lifford and there were ways and means of picking up extra rations.
Each weekend we made an excursion to Hugh McGrane's general stores at Lifford. Sometimes we lost our purchases of rationed goods but mostly the Customs men only made random searches. As well, there were regular excursions by train on Wednesdays to Pettigo. Sweets, butter and cigarettes were the chief attractions. Occasionally it was a case of 'All out' when we came to the border and 'The so-and-sos' confiscated everything, but only occasionally.
On one occasion Pat Donnelly and I were able to drop our loot into the hollow frame of the dilapidated railway carriage where there was a piece of tongued-and-grooved timber missing. We fished the Fry's cream, Players cigarettes and Liquorice Allsorts out again when the search was over.
In many ways, food rationing provided more craic (joking) than hardship in the war years at Omagh. Earlier, when I lived at home on the farm, I had been able to keep some of my Belfast city colleagues supplied with margarine. We had our own supply of butter on the farm and we got more margarine than we needed.
Brigid Kearney ('Dodo') our elderly nursemaid gave us a lesson in smuggling when she was more than eighty years of age, at Lifford. One day, although Hugh McGrane the grocer warned her not to buy butter she ignored him and set off for the border checkpoint. As McGrane had predicted we were all ordered into the hut for a search by the Customs men.
'Dodo' quickly spotted the absence of female searchers and rammed the butter down her bosom. When we all emerged bereft of groceries, she quietly transferred the butter to her shopping bag.
Pat Smyth, 2001
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