Having recently been made aware of your website, I would like to share with your contributors/readers recollections of two of my Aunts; these were sisters of my Mother and part of the McCann dynasty from Newry’s most famous “arrondisement” of Chapel Street.
My Mother Jinny McCann was the youngest of a large family. Her brothers all left home at a relatively young age
Warrenpoint – as it was, when ‘I was young and easy under the apple boughs’
[one of them Charlie was lost at sea in WWII] and I have only the vaguest recollections of my uncles Stephen and Danny (who used to send me, when I was a child, authentic magazines of the American West……my Father being a fellow student of the genre used to be more excited than I was when Danny’s packages arrived).
I also remember meeting my aunt Kathleen when I was walking down Hill Street with my Mother sometime in the late Sixties. That is the only memory I have of Kathleen who married and settled in Belfast. Her home is at the foot of the steps leading up to the turnstiles at Windsor Park. Walking down Hill Street with my Mother was the most horrendous experience for an impatient child eager to get to Kilmorey Street and the bus back to our ‘bijou’, that compact abode on the South Down Riviera that is Warrenpoint.
My Mother knew everybody and would chat for an interminable length of time to ‘catch up with the gossip’. However trips to Newry did have their rewards. No visit was ever complete without calling with my Grandmother McCann/Aunt Sue in Chapel Street and the nearby River Street home of my Aunt Mary[Dean]. Sue and Mary were only alike in terms of their innate kindness and the warmth of their personalities. In many ways they were quite different. Mary was a woman of some polish, sharp intellect and upright deportment. She timed each entrance to perfection. Sue was more soft, somewhat more na
