Together Again

A well-known Irish radio presenter in Coventry ran like a golden thread through a very special few days of meetings and connections.

I was in Dublin for the Global Irish Civic Forum. It was the first in-person gathering since Covid and the theme was 'Together Again.' It truly was so good to meet people in the flesh once more. At the opening reception at EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum I bumped into Simon who is Manager of the Coventry Irish Society and who I'd met for the first time at the previous Forum in 2017. He introduced me to Kay who is one of his Board members. Kay grew up in Cork and came to Coventry in the late 50s. She told me that she lived on the Holyhead Road and I explained that my parents had bought their first house two streets away from there and that I'd lived there till I was three and that my mum had ended her days in a care home just off the Holyhead Road.

Kay told me that two of her children had sadly died in 2021. She went off for a minute and returned with the service sheets from the funerals. Both had been held at Christ the King, where my mum's funeral had taken place two months ago. Kay's daughter, Paula, had been two years below me at primary school. I was also excited to hear that Paula had once been engaged to the brother of Bob Brolly. Bob, originally from Derry, was a presenter on BBC Radio Coventry and did a hugely-popular Irish music show. My mum used to love it. There were many other fascinating details given by Kay. She had been a maternity nurse at Coventry's Gulson Road Hospital, where I was born. She might have delivered me! And anyone who was interested in the '2-Tone' music scene that centred on Coventry for a heady couple of years from 1979 might like to know that Kay lent her van to The Selector when they were doing their first gigs, and her son Robert worked for twelve years with Madness! There was a picture of Robert with the members of Madness on the back of his funeral booklet.

The pleasant encounters continued during the following day. I had a long chat with Rachel who recently finished a four-year stint at the Irish Embassy in London and who, like all of the team there, was always very supportive of our work at the Irish Chaplaincy. I told her about meeting Kay and how I'd been tickled to hear that her daughter had been engaged to Bob Brolly's brother. "Oh, I met Bob Brolly," Rachel exclaimed. She'd been attending a dinner in Birmingham when she was very new into her London posting and had sat next to a very friendly man who someone pointed out to her later was the famous Bob Brolly!

I had a most touching encounter with Karen from Leeds Irish Health and Homes. Her accent was very familiar and she told me she'd grown up in Dromore near Banbridge. "In Banbridge town in the County Down," I replied. I went on to tell her that I'd sung to my mum just before her recent death and that I'd realised later that the very last song I'd sung to her had been The Star of the County Down. Karen began to cry and she explained to me that her dad had died just before Christmas and that she hadn't been able to cry at the time.

After the couple of days in Dublin I took the train down to Kilkenny and was welcomed there by my old friend Peter. He and I had met in 1989 on a retreat for new assistants in L'Arche. It was a silent retreat and although we were sharing a room we didn't say a word to one another through the whole week. We both took the silence very seriously! We did, however, play music together in the daily services. And we played together many times over the years at L'Arche events, including the Alps retreat. On this occasion we did an hour of busking on the main street in Kilkenny. It was good fun and we even earned enough for a glass of Guinness or two in the evening.

Prior to Peter and I going off to spend our musical earnings in one of the bars in Callan, the local town to where he and his wife Mairéad live, there was the most extraordinary visit to their house. Peter had told me that the Director of L'Arche Kilkenny was from Wolverhampton, and a musician, and that through reading my first book he had discovered that there was a Coventry connection via his wife Maria. They came through the door and sure enough it was Maria who is the sister of one of my best friends from school, Sean. He had ended up in Madrid where he'd met a Spanish woman and we'd sadly lost touch many years ago. We'd been though infant, junior and secondary school together and our Irish parents were part of the same parish and knew each other well. The last time I'd seen Sean, and indeed Maria, had been in 1992 at the baptism in Coventry of his daughter.

Sean and Maria's parents had moved back to Tipperary in the 90s, and Maria and Chris had decided as well twenty-five years ago to settle there with their then-young children. Maria told me how she loved going on family holidays every July to Tipperary and how one year when she was about eight she had announced to her mum that she would stay there and go to school with her cousins! She has ended up as a teacher at that very school. Another story she told really touched me, after I'd reminded her that my mum had worked in a Co-op near their house in Coventry. She said that her aunty Mary, mother of another of my best friends from school, had developed very bad dementia and used to leave items in the Co-op. My mum would phone Joan, Sean and Maria's mum, and she would come and collect the forgotten articles and deliver them to her sister-in-law Mary.

I told Maria and Chris the story of Kay and how her daughter had been engaged to the brother of Bob Brolly. "Oh, Bob Brolly sang at our wedding," Maria announced, "together with his band Calvary." What's more, they had been married at St Osburg's, where my parents were married. And which is just off the Holyhead Road!

Maria had left me with Sean's phone number in Spain and I duly sent him a WhatsApp message from Dublin airport. And I received a lovely reply from him saying that we had a lot to catch up on.

Together again? It's like we were never apart.