One day when I was not at home and our mother was helping Mrs Jeffrey gather wild strawberries in the cow pasture, Sally and Mary Ann watched closely as a large shaggy dog came trotting leisurely down the road from the South.

Soon after our arrival in Canada, my father and Barney Quinn got a job with a local farmer, clearing bush from his land. Chopping away one day they spotted what they took to be a wolf eyeing them warily from a distance.

 

Bridge Street, Newry  1914

1 William Hardy

1a Mary Neary

2 Margaret Fisher

During those ‘washday’ trips to the local river, which we turned into a picnic/day-out, the baby was placed in the care of my sister Mary-Ann. She tended him on the grassy bank while Sally and I helped our mother.

I will transport you now to the other end of town – the South-East – at the outbreak of the Great War. Who lived there?

Canal Street used to have its own Police Barracks and its own Picture Palace.

 My father once worked for Joe McCullough of Number 19 who was a carpenter. 

When we arrived in Canada way back in the early Twenties, our house in St Bride’s had not yet been built and we were assigned a house on a farm in Sunnyside – about fourteen miles north-east of Edmonton.