Thomas Henry Greene (1871-1956) by Esther Oakley

He was about seven years older than my mother. He died 20 March 1956 aged 85 years old. His mother died on his birth; she was a teacher in the Pike of Ballingary School in County Tipperary . She was a Roman Catholic, whereas my father was brought up Church of Ireland, like his father who was also called Thomas Henry Greene. I know nothing about him: I believe that he came from County Cork. He was R.I.C. sergeant in Thomastown barracks at the time of my father’s birth. My grandmother’s name was Mary Nolan and they had a little girl also called Mary, aged three at the time, who was taken to Australia by an aunt. She never returned from there. I heard that she married a Presbyterian clergyman there, but did not have children. My father for a while was looked after by an old woman who worked in the barracks called Joanie ; and afterwards by a family named Fegan. They lived on a small farm and were poor people. They were at the time of my father’s birth grown up family – I can remember one old lady: Eliza Fegan, but she died when I was a child. I think that my father was fond of them and they of him. They left him the small farm when they died. He did not ever have much contact with his father, who remarried, but he did have some contact with his step-brother, William Ruby Greene. They both joined the R.I.C. William thinks he must have had a very solitary childhood. The Fegan family were very poor, when poverty really meant just that. I never heard if there was a father, or anything about the mother either. I know the names of a few of the girls: Isabella, always in the U.S.A.; Hannah who was married to George Baskerville; Nancy who married a man called Shaw. They were only names to me. Eliza, who never married, lived with us for a while and I barely remember her as a small woman, dressed either in a tweed suit or a grey shawl. There was a boy, John, but he must have died before I was born. My father had a long walk to school in Eglish and he was a Protestant boy in a Catholic school. I never heard him talk about it, except once when my children were complaining because there were only plain biscuits left in the tin. He slowly shook his head, remarking as if to himself, “And I walked to school, with a lump of bread in my pocket for my lunch and I’d have eaten it before I got there.” Ballinaguilsha, where he was brought up, was a very isolated little farm, so did he ever have a playmate, or own a dog, or ever have a toy, I wonder? When he was a teenager he did visit a sister of his mother: a Mrs. Colville, who had two daughters and lived in Portnoo, and he escorted girls to dances, and learned all the popular dances of the day. He was not a singer, and did not play an instrument although he liked music. He liked poetry. I used to wish that his big book of poems had survived. He had carefully covered it in a cloth cover: not a book for us to play around with. The other day, walking down town, bits of a poem called “Phil Blood’s Leap” came into my head and I was so annoyed that I could not remember it – it started

There’s some say Injuns are poison,
And others call ’em scum
And night and day
They are melting away
Right into Kingdom Come

Some white man got stuck over a cliff. There is a line “With lolling tongue, he clutched and clung – to what – ah there’s the rub.” I think that Phil Blood was an Indian and made a tremendous leap and rescued the white man who was his enemy. My father had very good handwriting, and could not tolerate spelling mistakes. My brother Harry was not good at spelling, but always wrote home, and my father wrote to him, but would remind him of the words he had misspelled, which I thought was rather an insult. My parents were not alike. My mother would have liked the bright lights, the cinema, concerts, outings; she was not interested in politics. She had clever hands for doing anything from crocheting, knitting, sewing, baking, or bandaging a cut on an animal’s leg. My father loved the outdoors: walking and swimming. He was interested in politics was tolerant and orthodox in religion and for years did the finances for the Church. His black suit and bowler hat came out every Sunday, shoes polished and the [shoe] trees put in every Sunday night until the following Sunday. Every Saturday he walked to my sister Ida’s grave in Clonallen, with flowers. Mother could not bear even to pass the cemetery. All the same they lived happily together and she was desolate when he died.