Mary Hoban

At the funeral service for the late Mary Hoban (1920-2010) on September 10 in St Thomas’s Church, Dugort, after the Gospel reading by Rev Norma Macmaster, the presiding celebrant, the Rev Val Rogers, invited Poet Paul Durcan to recollect the life of Mary Hoban.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept , when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Mary Hoban was one of those unique women who in a strange universe persisted in singing her song; who was able to meet the hardship of life with the song of her storytelling; who looked her tormentor in the eye with mirth and even sometimes with glee.

In September 1996, I was the resident writer in the Heinrich Böll Cottage. I glimpsed a lady coming in and out of the house with the great hedge, across the road, but I sensed she was a private, shy person, and it was not until a month later, a day or two before my departure, that I chanced to catch her leaning on her wicket gate and, as we passed the time of day, I took the chance to compliment her on her enchanted garden, one of the loveliest cottage gardens I have ever set eyes on.

Although she was indeed reserved – you might say, sternly bashful – she accepted my compliment and for the next 14 years I was privileged to sit by her stove in her enchanted living room and while away the hours talking about everything under the sun, moon and stars in the village of Dugort and beyond. For Mary Hoban, the latest news from Tóin a nEanta was as fascinating as the latest news from China.

Her small, cosy, chaotic, unpredictable living room was every bit as enchanting as her garden. On the wall beside the kitchen door hung her own tapestry reworking of the 19th-century German Romantic Realist painter Karl Spitzweg’s masterpiece ‘The Poor Poet’, a bachelor man in his attic surrounded by books and ensconced on a mattress with an umbrella unfurled above him. Its grim humour reflected a part of Mary. Next to it a finely wrought piece of fretwork by her brother Jim: ‘Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday and all is well’.

For 14 years I have been coming and going to and from Dugort and every time as I drove in from Bogach BΡn, always what first I searched for was the smoke from Mary Hoban’s chimney.

The smoke from Mary Hoban’s chimney was as crucial and significant and sensational to me as the white smoke from the Sistine Chapel.

Mary Hoban’s door was always open. I’d cry:

‘Mary! Mary!’

‘Come in! Come in!’.

After her liturgy of greeting and benediction there were the sacred rituals of the hearth: the carrying in and out from the porch of black plastic buckets of turf; the feeding of the stove with turves, the right number of turves. There were the seating accommodations to be made with her adored cat Andi, who now has made a new home with Mary’s grandniece Kate Piggott in Guildford.

Mary and I spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours talking and laughing in her little front room; watching the bird table; watching TV at lunchtime; listening to Mary reciting the most intricate and complex family histories and genealogies. If I had a brain half as capacious as Mary Hoban’s I could tell the grandchildren of the former post-mistress of Dugort, Mrs Alice MacNamara, more about their own genealogy than they might know themselves.

Alice MacNamara’s kindness to, as well as love for Mary Hoban should be carved in stone. As should the name of her loyal, laughing postman Tony Grealis.

What a proud lady Mary Hoban was – proud of her family, proud of her neighbours, proud of her friends, proud above all of her own place, her own parish. Of course, she loved all of Achill, in varying degrees, but for her, Dugort was the centre of the universe; Dugort was home, and all who dwelled therein.

Although I as a visitor knew her always as Mary, I envied everyone else who knew her as Girlie. For there was something wonderfully, preciously, exclusively, purely ‘girlish’ about Mary Hoban. Right to the end of her days, there was in her that special, unique mixture of the child and the adult as if it was vouchsafed to her to be tip-toeing forever into eternity on a high-wire tightrope between adolescence and adulthood.

She could be as worldly as Princess Diana, yet she carried in her breast the flame of a defiant innocence.

Pretty and dignified as she always was, no matter how frail and wracked by pain, she was never one to be fussy about domestic hygiene. Once when I confessed remorse to her that my own housekeeping was not up to scratch she scolded me in her decisive, charming way: “What does it matter, a bit of dust?”

In May of last year – the Year of Our Lord 2009 – the Caretaker of the Heinrich Böll Cottage, the extraordinary Mr Michael Carr of Ballinock, went home to God, and in August he was followed by Mary Hoban’s lifelong neighbour and cousin, Violet Gray, whom Mary in my company always called Violet – never ‘Vi’.

It is the end of the world – the last of the last has died. Yet nothing will change. China will go on being China, Achill Achill, and Mary’s Garden will go on being Mary’s Garden. Just inside the wicket gate a stone with two words painted in whitewash by her other Guildford grandniece Milly Piggott: MARY’S GARDEN

Dear, beloved Mary Hoban, rarely did such a lady grace the islands of Mayo. The celebrity columnists may have their Grace O’Malley’s but give me Mary Hoban. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.

Her home was called ‘Mountain View’ and she lived out her life day and night alone facing the two mountains of Finsheen and Dugort Hill.

Mary was like the dew of Hermon which falls on the heights of Zion. For there the Lord gives his blessing, life for ever.

In monbretia time, in fuchsia time, in blackberry-picking time, in red-hot poker time, in agapanthus time. May her path through eternity be strewn with flowers from her own garden. May she rest in the deepest peace of the bosom of the Lord.