I met Mrs. O’Leary on a wet Tuesday evening outside the music room in Marino, when my son was nine and I was pretending not to count coins in my coat pocket. The rain had soaked through the shoulders of my jacket, and the corridor smelled of damp wool, old varnish, and the lemon cleaner the caretaker used after school. I had brought Conor for a trial violin lesson because his teacher said he had “an ear for things,” which sounded lovely until I remembered ears did not pay invoices.
We were living in a small flat near Fairview then, the kind where the windows rattled when buses went by and the heating had two moods: absent or volcanic. I was working mornings in a café and evenings cleaning offices near Dublin city centre. My husband had left the year before, quietly at first and then all at once, taking with him the second wage and a good part of my courage. Conor didn’t ask for much. That made it worse when he asked for the violin.
Mrs. O’Leary was in her late sixties, with silver hair pinned like a small storm cloud and hands that looked too delicate for the sternness of her voice. She taught from a room behind a church hall, where the chairs never matched and a faded poster of the National Concert Hall hung crookedly beside a radiator. When Conor came out after twenty minutes, his face was shining in a way I had not seen since before everything got hard.
I asked her the price before he could speak. I had rehearsed the sentence on the bus. “We might only manage every second week,” I said, trying to make it sound practical rather than desperate.
She looked at Conor, then at me, and said, “We’ll see how he gets on first.”
I thought she meant we would discuss it later, but later became a month, and then two. Every Tuesday, Conor went into that room carrying a borrowed half-size violin in a case with one broken latch, and every Tuesday I sat in the corridor with my supermarket bag between my feet, waiting for her to ask. She never did. I tried once, after Christmas, when things were especially tight and guilt had become a kind of weather in our house.
“Mrs. O’Leary, I haven’t forgotten,” I told her. “I just need a bit more time.”
She closed the music book on the stand and said, “You’re giving him time. That’s the expensive part.”
I didn’t know what to do with kindness that direct. It felt almost rude to accept it. In my family, help was usually hidden inside jokes or handed over with a list of reminders. But Mrs. O’Leary had a way of making generosity seem as ordinary as putting on the kettle. I later learned she had done the same for half the northside. A girl from Artane got piano lessons for nothing after her father died. Two brothers from Ballymun learned the fiddle because she said their house needed music louder than worry. She never announced it. She simply forgot to charge the people who could not pay.
The incident I remember most happened the spring Conor was due to play in a small student concert near Clontarf. He was to perform a simple air, nothing fancy, but to him it was the Abbey Theatre and Carnegie Hall combined. The week before it, I found him sitting on his bed with the violin unopened beside him. He had overheard me on the phone to the electricity company, promising money I didn’t have. Children are not fooled by soft voices behind kitchen doors.
“I can stop lessons,” he said. “I’m not going to be famous anyway.”
There are
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
