Return To Garvaghey
Although Uncle John ran a speakeasy, where he employed his brother, James Montague did not find life in New York easy during the Depression years. So the three boys were shipped back to Ireland in 1933, the two eldest to their maternal grandmother’s house in Fintona, Co. Tyrone, where they had been born, but John was sent to his father’s ancestral home at Garvaghey, then maintained by two spinster aunts, Brigid and Freda, who welcomed the boy of four.
From New York to a farm on the edge of the Clogher Valley in County Tyrone was a significant step backwards in time. John did all the usual farming chores. He became a normal Ulster farm child, though haunted by the disparity between what the house in Garvaghey had been, in the days of his grandfather and namesake, and the reduced present.
John went first to Garvaghey School and then to Glencull, three miles away, where he was coached by a young and ardent master. Scholarships brought him to St. Patrick's College, Armagh, the junior Diocesan Seminary and the place where his Jesuit uncle, Thomas Montague, had gone.
Read more about this topic: John Montague (poet)
Famous quotes containing the words return to and/or return:
“Return to her? and fifty men dismissed?
No, rather I abjure all roofs, and choose
To wage against the enmity o’ th’ air,
To be a comrade with the wolf and owl—
Necessity’s sharp pinch.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I got my first clear view of Ktaadn, on this excursion, from a hill about two miles northwest of Bangor, whither I went for this purpose. After this I was ready to return to Massachusetts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)