DETOUR

By Susan C. Tunney

It's 1970 and Janey’s unpredictable father has decided to move his family back to his homeland in rural Northern Ireland. He had hoped to escape the mad jumble of the 60’s in suburban New York in search of a more tranquil lifestyle, but unknowingly arrived at the beginning of a thirty-year conflict known as The Troubles.

Thrust into a new world seemingly gone mad, Janey must find an uncharted path through life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wainui Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662901249

Book preview

1970 TULLYREEN, NORTHERN IRELAND

There was much chatty gossip about the American family who had moved into the dilapidated Railway House out in the country, about three miles from Tullyreen village.

It was a draughty old Victorian building dating from the 1860s that suited the simple needs of a bachelor stationmaster, but certainly not a family. Rumors abounded that it was haunted—which anyone would well believe, given some of the less than happy farewells and greetings there over the years it was in operation. The whole village wondered firstly why the family had left America, a very desirable place to emigrate if one were lucky enough to get sponsored to that fabled land of opportunity; and secondly, how they were ever going to transform the Railway House into a suitable home.

Back in 1969 the social norms in America were being colorfully redefined, even in the family’s seemingly naïve New Jersey town just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. The drugs, the hippies, the Pill, racial intolerance, anti-Vietnam protests, student revolts, and the nuclear threat of the Cold War bombarded the evening news daily. These events, along with the recent high-profile assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., made everything seem out of control, especially to an already highly-strung young father of six.

"Every savage to his native shore!" was the whiskey-sodden battle cry often heard in the Feeney home, more times than not to the sound of bagpipes blaring from the Victrola.

Mr. Feeney had been gifted the Railway House by his father as a wedding present, in the hopes he may return home one day and settle down and his owning property in Northern Ireland gave him a bigger rationalization for doing so. He reckoned there was no better time than the present, before Janey began high school. He thought more and more about making a plan, as the jewelry box he had recently given his wife taunted him with its tune: Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, Mavourneen; come back, Aroon, to the land of my birth.

But Janey wasn’t having a bar of it. She had lay awake many nights staring at the slit of hall light shining under her bedroom door, while listening to her mother’s pitiful accusations muttered through spasmodic sobbing and her father’s adamant denials of guilt.

"It’s NOTHING!" her father kept trying to reassure her over and over again, only to be met with more crying.

Well it’s something to ME! her mother Maureen would respond, finally finding the words.

A few days before, her mum had discovered that her husband was deeply in love, but not with her. While emptying his suit pockets at the dry cleaners, she had found a letter addressed to him filled with lusty proclamations of love, devotion and gratitude, the contents of which crushed her heart and rendered her completely helpless and alone. How could he do this to me? she asked Janey, the eldest, over and over again, when she got home and showed her the letter. Janey began reading the first page and felt something was deeply wrong. Thou shalt not commit adultery was one of the commandments she had memorised during catechism classes in second grade, though at the time she had no clear understanding of what adultery was or meant. This sudden adult knowledge taxed her moral compass at age 12, and left her feeling confused and burdened with a deep sense of shame at her father’s actions. She wished her mother had never confided in her.

A few months before the move, it both alarmed Janey and piqued her interest when, during their current events presentations at school, a fellow student talked about the protest marches happening in Northern Ireland to bring attention to the plight of the Catholic minority, who for the last fifty years compared to the Republic to the south felt they had been unfairly discriminated against in terms of voting, jobs and housing. The British Unionists, feeling threatened, were beginning to stage a backlash and it was making international news. It sounded rather ominous to Janey, even at her young age; but her parents assuaged her fears, promising that all the marches were taking place in the bigger cities like Derry and Belfast, far enough away from their future home in Tullyreen to not be of any concern.

Janey had listened many times to her mother recounting her story of being put on a ship not far from her hometown in Dublin when she was just seventeen years old, and sailing to New York to live with her older brother Billy in Brooklyn. Her grandmother’s parting words to her daughter were far from supportive: "Go now and make your own way, Maureen. For God knows there’s nothing for you here in Ireland."

It doesn’t take much effort to imagine how frightened and vulnerable she must have felt heading across the Atlantic, naive and all alone; this her first time out of Dublin city, never mind Ireland, and desperately seasick in a ship full of disorderly strangers traveling Third Class. She thought she might die as she felt the waves rolling through her body, inducing extreme nausea with severe headaches, rendering her immobile and dehydrated in her cramped stuffy quarters for over five days. Luckily, her bunkmate had the good sense to summon the ship’s doctor. When Maureen finally did surface, she was teased for being a stowaway, as no one had seen her cavorting and dancing the night away with the other immigrants on board.

Janey’s father Timothy, on the other hand, told a very different tale. He ran away from the family home in County Fermanagh of his own volition at age seventeen. Apparently, he had had enough of digging turnips on the family farm; and one day grabbed a loaf of bread from the scullery, popped it on the back of his bike, and cycled all the way to Dublin to join the Irish Army. After a night of whiskey-fueled rage, his father Patrick sent word the next day to Timothy’s commanding officer that he was in fact underaged, and kindly requested them to send his arse back up north to the family farm as soon as possible.

But Timothy had no notion of returning home. He jumped on a ferry to England to join his older brother, Philip, in Birmingham, and worked hard and long hours at a butchery. The lure of a better life in America tugged at his being, encouraged by an uncle willing to sponsor him and with the suport of his brother, he managed to save enough to purchase a one-way passage from Liverpool on a ship headed to New York.

It’s a familiar story for many Irish of the 1950s, as the country had not experienced the post-war economic boom that many other European countries were enjoying at that time. Ultimately, there was little encouragement for any young man to stay in Ireland, outside the prospect of perhaps inheriting a hardscrabble family farm if they happened to be the eldest son. Being the youngest in his family and having little or no interest in farming, Timothy had few options.

Unlike her mother’s cross-Atlantic passage, marred by violent seasickness and isolation, Janey’s father made the most of his days at sea, reading the history of his soonto-be adopted country during the day, and come night charming the damsels on the dance floor into the wee hours of the morning.

One fateful evening, Janey’s parents met at a dance in Brooklyn, the then exciting urban hub for many young native arriving Irish. It was to change the course of her mother’s life, as she had recently become a novice nun at a local convent. The Mother Superior wisely surmised that loneliness, rather than a deep and serious religious vocation, had been the fundamental reason prompting Maureen to take her vows. She encouraged her to go to the local Parish dance that evening, suggesting it would be good for her to socialize a bit and meet some new friends. It was almost an order.

There was no other word to describe Maureen other than stunning, further enhanced by her humility and modesty. She wore her mid-shoulder-length blond hair pinned in a round curl down the side of her face, framing her flawless porcelain complexion and glacier blue eyes. Her tall lithe body did justice to any dress she wore, and her shapely legs turned many heads. It was often suggested she resembled a blonde version of her namesake and a famous actress of the time, Maureen O’Hara.

Maureen was barely in the door when she caught the eye of Janey’s very handsome, charming, and engaging future father. She stared at him a moment then turned to her friend and whispered with confidence, That’s the man I’m going to marry.

She accepted his hand to join him on the dance floor and waltzed away the evening with him. It came as no real surprise when Maureen asked permission to leave the convent shortly thereafter and became engaged to this man from the north.

After a brief and passionate courtship (with the blessings of the local priest and the Mother Superior), they married within a year. And surprise, Janey was born seven months later, evidently two months premature as were quite a number of Catholic babies back then.

Many times during their subsequent turbulent and fruitful marriage when her parents argued, and argue they often did, her mother would scream in her thick Dublin accent, I should’ve bloody well stayed in that convent, so I should have!

Yeah, and I should’ve bloody well married that sweet Sligo girl, Mary, from the ship, retorted her erstwhile Prince.

* * *

Janey was shocked when she firstly arrived to the century-old Railway House in the summer of 1970. You can’t be serious. We’re not really going to live here, are we? She begged her parents. This place is a dump. What were you thinking?

Located as it was by the side of a narrow isolated country road, densely shrouded with scraggly growth and fuchsia vines, the Railway House sat far from the commercial centers of Belfast and Derry. All rail services had terminated in 1957, and it had been allowed to fall into rot and disrepair.

The renovation workers were being paid an hourly wage and, with no active supervision, they spent more time making tea and talking about making tea than they did on the actual work at hand.

It would take awhile to appreciate that the downside to all this was that at least three more months of construction was needed before it could be considered even a legally certified dwelling. The fuzzy warmth of the recent goingaway parties in New Jersey, along with the giddy anticipation of creating a new life back on Mr. Feeney’s native soil, faded all too quickly when faced with the unexpected reality of the half-renovated property.

I can’t believe this. Where are we going to live? Where will I be going to school? We’re living in the middle of nowhere. I can’t walk anywhere like back home. Janey cried. And even if I could, there’s no place to walk to.

So with no house to move into, the children were scattered about the countryside like refugees, shifting from relative to relative until either their welcome wore out or a row erupted, fueled by too much whiskey and too many deep seated memories from a disruptive childhood and sibling rivalries.

How come we can’t take a shower when we want? It’s so weird with this hot water thing. You’d swear to God I was asking for gold. Janey asked her father one day.

Well my dear, here the energy to make hot water is very expensive, and in a sense treated like gold as in not everyone has the luxury of endless hot water. We’re very spoiled in America.

Well I thought this was supposed to be a better life? It really feels as if we’ve gone back to the stone age. Janey lamented.

They had never spent so much concentrated time with relatives in the past, and it took some adjustment for all parties. Since they had only been there for summer holidays, the children weren’t used to being expected to participate in house routines, and couldn’t understand why the houses didn’t have instant hot air and water like back in their American home. They had been doted upon in the past, but now that holiday sheen was fading fast, much to their dismay.

The unexpected upside to the stalled renovations was that it gave Timothy the freedom to take a different tack as to design. Originally planning to modernize the exterior, once there he decided to keep the architectural bones intact, and endeavored to source as many original Victorian artifacts as possible from the various auctions and farmer’s markets in the area. Sometimes he was even lucky enough to find brass lamps from the Tinkers selling their junk from the side of the road when he was down south across the border.

Maureen mostly had her hands full with trying to keep the peace between the children and relatives. But once the kids were off at school in the morning, she would drive over to the Railway House and walk around the grounds, trying to get a feel for where the gardens should be planted in relation to the direction of the sun. She would look down the gully, where the old railway tracks were still barely visible under the thick foliage and tall grass, and could almost imagine the lonely sound of the whistle blowing as the train neared the station. One day after walking up the tracks, she was startled to stumble across an abandoned landfill. It looked to hold old artifacts of former glory days, including wrought iron light fixtures and lamps, fire grates and other random items. She carefully collected different pieces every time she was out there, and tried to restore some life into them with a little Brasso and a lot of elbow grease.

Timothy was delighted when Maureen produced three wrought iron gas lamps, which most likely bordered the drive up to the Railway House back in the day. These were carefully restored and wired for electricity. The new extension was a mirror image to the front of the house, giving it a sense of symmetry. The renovations attracted much curiosity among the locals, who would now make a point of driving by it slowly on their way to town, to fuel their chats over a cup of tea with other neighbors.

1

Janey considered herself fortunate to have been placed with her Uncle Joseph’s family, in their cozy home above the butchery and grocery he and her Auntie Bridget owned in town. There Janey could be party to the local news, where scandal and gossip were the fuel that stoked the fires of the town’s social conscience, as well as being quietly observed by others for the same purpose. And there was so much to gossip about in Tullyreen and its environs. Janey would listen to the observations as cars whizzed up and down the street with an exaggerated sense of non-existent urgency. Tittle-tattle comments from local quidnuncs— Whadaboutje? And who’s that driving yonder car? Young Eamon McCaffrey is it? And who’s that in the seat beside him? Where do you suppose they’re off to now? And with a good feed of drink in them too, no doubt! Plastered.— provided more entertainment and needed distraction, surely, than watching her parents