Image from the past of local author

IT’S amazing how a story, written years ago, ca suddenly spark into life again.

I wrote this piece four years ago and it centred on a writer called Katherine Keane from Drogheda.

‘I came across a story from 30 years ago and it was about a return to town by author Katherine Keane, then 84 years old.

She was launching the reprint of her book ‘Who Goes Home?’. The novel told the story of the well to do family life of the Donnellans, linen mill owners in a small Irish town in the 1880s. It traces their politics and their loves and contains a vivid and unique portrait of Charles Stewart Parnell.

The town portayed is Droone, but Mrs. Keane frankly admits that she modelled it on Drogheda where she was born in 1904. And the linen mill is plucked from her memories of the old Usher factory on the banks of the Boyne, a few hundred yards from her home ‘Riverside House’, near the Boyne Viaduct.

Katherine Keane’s father, John Boylan, was a sea captain. He captained the ‘Colleen Bawn’ which sailed between Drogheda and Liverpool. He inherited his love of the sea from his father and grandfather before him, who, like him, now lie buried in Mornington cemetery.

A son, William, was also a sea captain. He spent a day and a night marooned on a raft in the North Sea after being torpedoed towards the end of World War II. He received an OBE for this.

There were nine young Boylans in the family, Katherine was one of the first to move away to Dublin. She was only 17 years old when she passed an examination to get into Dublin Corporation. Her pay, £3 a week, was very good for those times and she lived quite a comfortable life in the city, first in digs and then in a flat.

One by one the entire family drifted towards Dublin, until finally the parents, John and Mary, decided to leave Drogheda also and set up home in Rathgar.

Katherine began writing when her children had all started school. She first published ‘ Who Goes Home’ in 1947 and followed this closely with another novel, ‘So Ends My Dream’. She wrote several successful radio plays.

As a young girl Katherine went to school in the Presentation Convent, Duke Street. She recalls one of her teachers, a Mother Ita.

She remembered her walks up Mell and home, the excitement she got from watching the fishermen hauling in their nets of salmon on the Boyne and she recalls playing on Donors Green. “But on my last visit to Drogheda I was saddened to see that it is nothing like as beautiful as it was when I was a child,’ she revealed.

‘It was only when I left Drogheda that I truly valued it and remembering its old walls and its lovely churches realised that there is nowhere else in all Ireland truly like it.”

Fast forward to just a few months ago. A gentleman called Sean Foley from Tuam was flicking through books in a shop when he spotted Katherine’s book, ‘Who Goes Home?’ - the one based on Drogheda and Usher’s Mill from years ago.

He bought it and brought it home and when he opened it - shock! Inside was a beautiful photograph of Katherine, going back to when she was a young woman.

On the back, handwritten, was a note, ‘author as a young woman’.

Sean googled Katherine and found the above piece and the book duly arrived back to Drogheda - where it all began.

Katherine Keane - famous again.....