Downpatirck is the town that is embedded in my heart

Downpatirck is the town that is embedded in my heart

2 August 2017

DOWN Memory Lane is a new collection of stories, research and reflection from Helen Long.

After 33 years of correcting students’ work as an English teacher at Wallace High School, the Carryduff woman is now enjoying the time she has to write her own material since retirement.

She has published several books, raising money for various charities, and this one she describes as a “labour of love” with material collected over the past 10 years.

Helen may live on the outskirts of Down now, but as she says in the opening to her book: “I was born in Downpatrick, and it is embedded in my heart and woven into my memory…”

In her reflections on Downpatrick and Down, Helen has divided her books into three main sections dealing with family, war and emigration. There’s even a poem or two.

“This is just a humble gathering together of aspects of my life over which the Downpatrick region has had a profound influence,” she says. “Although personal, I think there is a universal resonance about many of the experiences recorded here.”

One of Helen’s most interesting childhood memories concerns The Judges’ Lodgings — the imposing building on The Mall beside the Gaol, which was built in the early 1800s. It was bought just over 50 years ago by her grandfather Samuel Malone and Helen was an eager visitor.

With four storeys reaching from the basement to the wide and spacious attics, there was plenty to explore.

“My sister and I loved to stay at The Mall, not just for the enjoyment of our grandparents’ company, but also because this house was so ancient and rambling that it offered endless possibilities for exploration by inquisitive, imaginative, adventurous children,” she writes.

“One area that has always scared me in the basement was the intensely dark little tunnel of a room facing the bottom stair, as black as the coal that was stored there, where who knew what was lurking. Any trip I made down those stairs at night was done at top speed, with eyes well averted from its fawning entrance!”

On a lower floor she also remembers that one door “scarily declared” that there were ‘Two Men Sleeping’. It was, she learnt, a door sign still in place from when American GIs were billeted to The Judges’ Lodgings during the Second World War.

Aside from the oddities and the dark corners there were, however, many comforting sights, smells and sounds. Among them were the fresh smell of timber and the rows of tools belonging to her grandfather who was a woodwork teacher, and expansive well tended gardens where she picked fruit to sell to Hanlons, and for her granny to make jam.

Painting a picturesque landscape, she adds: “On the ground floor, the kitchen and living-room overlooked the Quoile River with its wide expanse of marshland which flooded regularly and provided winter quarters for thousands of migrant wildfowl…Perhaps it was this early familiarity with these intrepid birds that first sparked my love for them, from the 

seasonal excitement of seeing their first chevrons in the sky to their wild evocative cries.”

Another topic well covered in the book is the Downpatrick war dead. On the War Memorial in Downpatrick there is a list of 66 young local men who died in the First World War, and after some extensive research Helen tells the stories behind some of them.

“Names are important,” she writes. “Especially when they tell you that some unfortunate families lost more than one son. In fact, by my calculations, four Love brothers died in WW1; three McKinley and three Roberts sons were also lost; as well as two Clydesdale brothers.”

Local clergymen were among those to lose sons, she notes, and she records the story of

Captain Robert McElney, son of the Presbyterian minister Rev. R McElney, who was awarded the Military Cross at the Battle of the Somme —  ‘For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He led stretcher parties and worked in the open under heavy fire continuously for 34 hours’.

There are other stories too. That of William John Lyttle, the only son of William and Grace Lyttle of Scotch Street, and her own grandfather John Long (1888-1940), who survived the war and won a Military Medal for bravery but was felled by a brain tumour at the age of 52.

Tales of emigration involving her ancestors, both amusing and heartbreaking, bring the book to close.

Among them are the spirited Grace McCullough-Martin who she dubs ‘Amazing Grace’. Young Grace, she notes, left her parents’ farm in Drumaghlis with only a note on her pillow reading: “I have gone to America”.

Down Memory Lane is now on sale for £2. A small number of copies are available at Down Museum and Down Cathedral and at the Roundabout newsagents in Carryduff.