Gertrude McCall was born 97 years ago, at Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, in December, 1904; and two days ago, we laid her old bones to rest beside those of her beloved husband, Tom Teevan. Winter's last hurrah, a week-long icefield covering much of Leinster, had by that morning yielded to the first embrace of spring. Crocuses and daffodils were rising from the soil which was to welcome Gertie. A century gone, and with it the last of a generation, and it was almost as if we were laying to rest the values and the habits of that generation into the Deansgrange clay.
No one is born into a time of unchanging certainty. She entered this world one year after the Wright Brothers flew the first controlled flight of an aeroplane. In the Congo, Roger Casement had just reported on Belgian atrocities there, and in the Olympics in St Louis, Thomas Kiely had just won gold in the decathlon, something no other Irish athlete would achieve in Gertie's long life. In the Far East, war was raging between Russia and Japan. In New York, police arrested a woman for smoking on Fifth Avenue: outrageous then, but no doubt a commonplace by the time of Gertie's centenary.
Prime auctioneer
And what a future of unassailable prosperity awaited the McCall family, back then in 1904. Gertie's father was one of the most eminent businessmen in Co Monaghan. He owned Carrickmacross's major farmers' suppliers, selling grain, animal feed and agricultural ironmongery. He was the town's prime auctioneer, and also owned its ancestral market rights, which gave him a commission on all animals sales in the local mart. Money was almost his and the McCalls' to command.
The McCalls lived in a large house, Nuremore, outside Carrick, and there were five children: Eileen, Gertie, Rita, Marie and James. Fair stood the wind behind the McCall family fortunes at the start of the 20th century, as fair as the wind which helped Louis Bleriot's frail aircraft fly across the English Channel in 1909, the first public event which Gertie would later remember.
Greater ones would follow: the outbreak of the Great War, and reservists being called in from harvesting the Monaghan fields beneath the fine August sun, that summer shortly before her 10th birthday; later, tales of trouble in Dublin; British soldiers billeted in tents on the grounds of Nuremore; Crossley tenders, Black and Tans, a sense of menace.
When Gertie left school, she went to study pharmacy with Hayes Conyngham and Robinson, from which drudgery she was rescued by an encounter with a young law student, Thomas Teevan, the son of a dispensary doctor in Hackballscross. In due course, Gertie McCall became Gertie Teevan: the wedding took place at 7 a.m. and the wedding breakfast at 8 a.m., in order for bride and groom to catch the 9 a.m. mail boat to Liverpool.
Only heirs
Tom and Gertie moved to Donnybrook 62 years ago, and they had two fine sons, Diarmuid and Richard - as it turned out, the McCalls' only heirs. For Eileen McCall had married a local dispensary doctor, Mick Daly, but had no children. Rita became a nun in India. Marie died of TB. Jim McCall, who inherited the family business, married Madeleine McDonnell from Ardee. But poor Jim had no business sense, and managed to squander the family fortunes. The house was sold, later becoming Nuremore House Hotel, and the feeds business became part of Lough Egish Co-op. Poor Jim and Madeleine, childless and penniless, ended up in a bedsitter in London. It's life, Jim, but not as we knew it.
And so the only descendants of the McCalls of Nuremore turned out to be the two Teevan boys. Their father Tom - my uncle - had become a barrister, briefly Fianna Fail Attorney General, and then a High Court Judge; but superior and antecedent to these vocations, he was primarily a gentleman, scholarly and kind, a cultivator of cactuses, a sage and witty observer of the world, who, 25 years ago, was slain by an aortic aneurism.
Thus was Gertie widowed one quarter of a century before her own death. She lived out her days in tranquillity, her humour wry, sharp, mischievous and pawky - "Nice skirt, Rachel, but very short." A visit to her was always a pleasure, and her knowledge of soap-operas and farm prices alike was a credit to her memory and to the Monaghan numeracy her brother so conspicuously lacked.
Stoic good humour
Of course, she was helped throughout these many years by the love and attention of Richard, who became chief steward of the Turf Club, his wife Patricia and their children, and her other son, Diarmuid, the solicitor, who continued to live at home. It was he who, with blinding goodness and unswerving devotion, minded her for the final years of her life, as she became more and more incapacitated. She took her infirmities with stoic good humour, just as he did his duties with unbroken vigilance; and to see such uncomplaining care, such ceaseless loyalty, such selfless love, was both humbling and elevating.
Though nearly the oldest of her generation, she was the very last to go. If there is a recipe for old age, she found it: be calm, avoid stress, stay interested. We all know that death is our certain portion, death our certain share. Yet she rounded the melancholic bend of middle age, and then lived a ripe, full half-century beyond, loved and respected by all who knew her; and who could reasonably ask for more?