#012 - BallyGoBrunch After Dark Part One

Constance Swinford is first to take the mic at BGB's spoken word night

Always keen to make the most of her bustling little café, Carol Boland was delighted when Mad Tom’s fiancé Rocky suggested they start a spoken word night every Wednesday. The themes ranged from “Monsters” to “Creatures” to “Terrifying Animals” during the height of Beast Fever but now that the tourists have drifted away they’ve been forced to diversify. While locals are still trying to figure out who or what killed Bianca Hatton, they were happy to nibble on Carol’s signature tangy mustard sausage bits and sip warm Pinot Greej while Constance Swinford took to the makeshift stage.

ARTEFACT #012: AN ORAL HISTORY OF GROWING UP IN GARBALLY STUD BY CONSTANCE SWINFORD (NÉE COSTELLO)

ROCKY: Thanks to everyone for coming out. Just a bit of housekeeping before we start. Aisling has asked me to remind everyone that next Friday is the last day for submissions to the time capsule. All the details are on the lovely poster over there by the door. Look, I know things are not as exciting since the Beast stories dried up but we have to keep moving forward if we want to grow as a community. My shaman texted me that earlier. So tonight’s theme is “A Journey” and first up we’ll have Mrs Swinford and after her, Mikey Maguire. Thanks Mikey for the wine. But everyone, go easy on the little bottles. They’re way more lethal than the big ones. Miss Constance, take it away …

CONSTANCE SWINFORD: There’s no need to curtsey, my dear girl! I wrote this abridged MMEMOIRRR as my submission to the Ballygobbard Project time capsule but after reading it himself Peter Mahon, the committee researcher, suggested it might go down well in front of a live audience. So here we are!

ROCKY: Maybe just don’t hold the mic so close to your mouth, your majesty, I think our sound engineer is crying over there.

MAJELLA MORAN: Rocky, she’s not royalty, she’s just posh!

AISLING: Majella, this is being recorded for the time capsule. Would you ever zip up.

MARIAN: Girls! Whisht.

AISLING: Sorry, Mammy.

ROCKY: In your own time, your highness.

CONSTANCE: Well! Do feel free to stop me at any point if anyone has a question. So! Growing up in Garbally! My dear mother Eliza used to tell me, “Connie, you don’t own a place like Garbally, you are merely the custodian!” The house was built in 1862 by my great-great-grandfather Arthur Costello, a dairy farmer and third cousin to the Earl of Chonderley.

MAJELLA: Christ, she is royalty.

AISLING: Shhh!

CONSTANCE: Although Garbally had eight bedrooms, three parlours, servants’ quarters and a modest ballroom, Arthur used it as his secondary residence. I was a teenager when my mother explained it was where he kept his mistress and two illegitimate children hidden away many miles from my great-great-grandmother in Roscommon. He died of heart failure caused by exhaustion at 33. I can understand why! The second family had been removed by then and we’ve never found any record of them, although I have tried.

My own father, Richard Costello, was something of a bon vivant. My mother said his hobby was “collecting waifs and strays”, and when he was at home the house was always full of interesting characters. Writers and musicians, poets and movie stars, that sort of thing. People who wanted to escape the limelight for the Irish countryside. Princess Margaret herself dropped in by helicopter one particularly memorable weekend in the late ’60s for a hunting party. If only the locals knew what was happening two miles out the road!

MARIAN: Princess Margaret!

AISLING: Mammy!

CONSTANCE: Unfortunately Papa was away more often than not. As a successful breeder of thoroughbred horses, he was usually gone for months at a time. When he came home he brought fabulous gifts but I knew my mother was never happy in his absence. She became fretful after a day or two and would take to her bed with a bottle of brandy. It meant I was left to my own devices much of the time. I used to wander Garbally’s galleries, taking in the huge framed portraits of my mother’s ancestors, assigning them nicknames and interior lives. Sometimes I helped Annie in the kitchen making pheasant pies and rhubarb tarts, but I always felt in the way. I didn’t know where I belonged.

I was a shy child. Rather than attending the local school in Ballygobbard, my older brother Edmund and I had a governess who came to the house and taught us mathematics and French six days a week. In the summer I longed to join the village children eating ice cream by the river, but my mother insisted they wouldn’t warm to me. When I did meet any of them, they laughed at my accent. I tried to hold my head up high and ignore it, but the truth is the rejection stung. It was lonely behind Garbally’s huge gates. I wanted a friend. That’s where my love of horses saved me. I used to ride the length and breadth of the estate on Whiskey, my little Welsh pony, splashing through streams and jumping ditches, only coming home when the light had faded. I understood horses and they understood me. That’s the greatest gift I inherited, not the estate. 

I was eleven when I was sent away to boarding school, six years after Edmund. I had looked forward to it and thought I would finally fit in, but the truth is I missed Garbally terribly and I missed Whiskey even more. Oh, it was awful! I hated the uniform and singing hymns and playing hockey and all the rules. I was a country child, not used to being cooped up all day. I needed to be outside! The other girls talked about boys and shared sweets and cigarettes. I was frightfully homesick.

I did make one friend, the year I turned 15. Her name was Helen Taylor, the only daughter of a businessman from Wexford. She had brown eyes and freckles across her nose and she always smelled of vanilla. She kept a stash of strawberry jam in a padlocked box under her bed. We used to sneak out into the garden and eat jam sandwiches under the stars, wondering what we would be like as adults and where we would end up. Silly stuff, really, but it felt important at the time. She had a stepmother she hated and a cat at home called Mittens. Helen moved schools after only one year, to Switzerland I heard, but I could still smell the vanilla and taste the jam on her lips long after she’d gone. I have thought about looking her up, now that we have social media and what have you, but I think too much time has passed. I can’t imagine she even remembers me.

MAJELLA: (whispering) Oh my god. Alexa, play KD Lang

MARIAN: Majella Moran!

MAJELLA: Ouch! You’ve very pointy elbows, Ais.

CONSTANCE: I met Victor Swinford when I was 18, having been unlucky in love thus far. His aunt is my mother’s first cousin, or at least that was the flimsy excuse my father gave for introducing us at a point-to-point in Kildare on a wet Saturday in 1977. We had two Garbally-bred horses running and when my father pushed Victor in front of my binoculars, I gave him a quick kick to the shins and told him to get out of the blasted way. Haha! I nearly missed the finish! But I was told Victor Swinford was very keen on me, and my mother in particular insisted we take tea back at Garbally afterwards. By then I knew about my father’s gambling habit and I could see the house was falling into disrepair. Edmund had been lost to alcoholism in New York. Annie was only coming twice a week and we had closed off half of the house to save on coal. The Swinfords had oil money. So I knew what I had to do. 

Victor and I married in the summer of 1979 in the gardens of Garbally, where else? The wedding made the local paper! I caused quite a stir when I arrived in trousers on my prized mare, Curracloe Queen, who was only a filly at the time. She went on to win the Queen’s Vase race at Royal Ascot the following year. I think that might have been the proudest day of my life. It certainly elevated Garbally Stud’s already successful name. Well, once you have Queen Elizabeth’s seal of approval it doesn’t take long for everyone else to fall in line. Victor and I lived in London for a number of years until my parents passed away and it was time to come home.

My parents thought Victor Swinford would be the one to save Garbally, but they underestimated me. I achieved more with the stud than I could ever have dreamed and Victor and I had a fine life together. Although he was a little dull, Victor had a dry sense of humour and was exceptionally stylish in his Savile Row suits and signature rimless glasses. It quickly emerged that he didn’t have as much oil money as was rumoured, but that was neither here nor there. He loved the house as much as I did, carefully redecorating the rooms over the years, but he was what I used to call an indoor cat. He was sensitive to the cold and preferred to stay by the fire reading and playing cards while I was always happiest out in the yard. Still, we were a good match, Victor and I. We never had children but we travelled the world, from the Americas to India and everywhere in between. Sometimes we went together, sometimes separately. They say opposites attract and while “attract” may be the wrong word, we enjoyed each other’s company.

I was truly heartbroken when Victor succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 1999. He had been in a hospice in Dublin for a few weeks, but as the end drew closer I told his team that he needed to come home. We had talked about it and I knew Garbally was where he wanted to take his last breath. When he did, I was right there by his side. Once again, left to my own devices.

In the end, selling Garbally wasn’t a huge decision. I never felt like the real owner; I was only the custodian, after all. And I had no children to pass it on to. Once the arthritis had set into my hip, spending time in the yard had become painful. I was happy to watch the races on my little television set by the stove. By then I had properly integrated into Ballygobbard, welcomed with open arms once I made the first move. The village was my home, not the estate and I made many good friends including Marian down there. Hello Marian! When a charming developer offered me the right price I took it without so much as a backward glance. It gives me great pride to see it thriving now as an events venue, which does so much for the community. I’m quite content in my little townhouse in Rathborris, with only a slatted wooden fence between me and my neighbours at both sides. I’m enjoying not living behind a 12-foot wall anymore. I’m no longer Constance Swinford of Garbally Stud, I’m simply… Constance. At my age, there’s something freeing about it, and I go to sleep feeling content. Sometimes at night, I can still smell vanilla. Thank you for listening, everyone. Oh please, there’s no need for the applause.

AISLING: Mammy, are you crying?

MAMMY: I think I’m allergic to this mustard.

---

Coming next week: BallyGoBrunch After Dark Part Two – local publican Mikey Maguire gives an insight into life on the other side of the bar