Free Maeve Binchy by Piers Dudgeon

Innisfree’.
    As well as the Central there was another hotel in Maeve’s day, the Castle, both establishments owned by the McCarthybrothers, William and Paddy, whose father had managed the Lartigue Railway in the town – a little eccentricity in this far outpost of Eire, which somehow doesn’t surprise. The Lartigue Railway, named after the French engineer Charles Lartigue, who invented it, was a monorail system that ran to and from Listowel, little more than ten miles to the east. There were only two ever made, one in Africa and the other in Ballybunion.
    The house on the Sandhill Road which the Binchys used to rent from a dentist in Listowel is located on the bend in the road as it leads out of town towards the town’s famous ‘pro’ golf club. Maeve used to say that it was so close to the sea it was like having your own private bathing place. As soon as they arrived, the children would leave everything and rush down to the beach to see who else had arrived. It was at that point that summer officially started.
    There are two main beaches in Ballybunion, the Men’s Strand and the Ladies’ Strand, to the north of which the large cliff is scarred with caves reminiscent of Brigid’s Cave, the ‘echo cave’ of Maeve’s novel, where if you wanted to know whether you’d get a fella, you’d call out and wait for the reply. The castle ruin stands on the cliff between them.
    Back in the late 1930s, Ballybunion had a parish priest called Father Behan who on a Sunday, when there were a lot of visitors about, used to stand by the castle ruin and insist upon the segregation of the women on the one strand and the men on the other. Few took much notice and he would retire in the end to his own section of the men’s beach where the rocks are known as the Priest’s Rocks. In the evening, after Father Behan’s partyhad left, children would scamper down and look for any coins that might have fallen out of their pockets.
    Times were hard in the ’30s, but there seem to have been quite a few children with their eyes glued to the ground looking for a few bob even twenty years later. Aged twelve Maeve had thoughts only for rides on the bumper cars – there was a travelling fairground in summer as well as fixed rides. She was forever scanning the pavement just in case someone had dropped a coin that would pay for the next ‘go’.
    Gangs of girls and boys hunted in packs at Ballybunion. To Maeve and thousands of others, here was unbridled excitement and anticipation and freedom, unlike anything they’d experienced all year.
    At fourteen or fifteen, as her thoughts turned to boys, she would go to her first dance here, and anticipate her first kiss and perhaps have a taste of alcohol at a picnic party down among the sand hills, as she described in
Echoes
.
    As she reached adolescence, the big-city teenage rock ’n’ roll revolution was just beginning to happen. Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ was released in 1955. Little Richard charted seven No. 1 hits in less than three years around this time. Theirs was the sound that gave way to white rock ’n’ roll – Bill Haley in 1955, Elvis in 1956 with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.
    At the Central Ballroom, Maurice Mulcahy was the resident orchestra. The band had a line-up of five saxophonists, two trumpets, a guitar, a squeezebox, double bass and drums and was one of the famous Irish show bands of the time. It provided akind of transition between the big-band sound of the ’40s and early ’50s and the dawning era of rock ’n’ roll. Mulcahy’s playlist was pretty conservative but it was quite possible to dance the waltz to ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’ one minute and jive to ‘See You Later, Alligator’ the next.
    Except that jiving did have its own set of obstacles at the Central. If you were caught doing it, you were out on your ear. The only chance you had was down on the right-hand corner of the ballroom. The ballroom