A love for the ages: ‘She was beautiful and she thought I was gorgeous’

Eamonn and Rose Giblin fell in love at the fourth green of a golf course. Playing with a friend, Rose had lost her ball, and an opportunistic Eamonn went foraging for it and for her attention. Whether or not he found the golf ball is besides the point now, the 96-year-old says: “I found her.”

“She was beautiful and she thought I was gorgeous,” Eamonn recalls of their first meeting.

Of past St Valentine’s days, he remembers taking his wife for fish and chips and the pair getting “wibbly wobbly” from drink. He never went over the top with romantic gestures during their many decades of marriage, but they still hold hands and look out for each other in their nursing home, he says.

Memories of love and romance are being shared among the residents of Ashford House Nursing Home in Dún Laoghaire on the afternoon of St Valentine’s Day. These occasions are more important than ever during the coronavirus period, and staff work hard to make them “extra special”, with a prom dance and high tea organised for the afternoon, says owner Denise Morrin.

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Social distancing is not an issue, as all residents received their second vaccine dose on February 1st. The nursing home has remained Covid-free through the pandemic.

George and Theodora

Former documentary maker George Morrison (98) has “wonderful memories” of February 14th, he says. His late wife, Theodora FitzGibbon, an actor and cookery writer, was an “enchanting woman”, he says. Fittingly, they met at a restaurant, although she was dining with another man that evening, Morrison recalls.

“She was an exceptionally beautiful woman and remarkably talented. I adored her from the moment I met her … I don’t mind proclaiming that any time,” he says.

Flowers were the key to her heart, and Morrison would buy her a “large bouquet” each Valentine’s Day, he says.

“I regret to say she died in 1991 … I will never forget the things that I experienced with her. I think of her every day.”

Four years later, however, Morrison married Janet, who was not as enthusiastic about flowers but whom he loved just as much, he says.

“I thought I couldn’t have loved any more until I married again.”

Morrison says he has never been much of a dancer, but that didn’t hold him back in love.

“It is a peculiar thing because most people would find it unattractive that someone cannot dance, but my two wives didn’t,” he adds.

Marcella and John

Marcella McCarthy met John – now deceased – in their hometown of Sligo. He plucked up the courage to ask her out and they went to the pictures for their first date, she says.

“He bought me a big bag of sweets … John and myself had a great time. He was very, very kind and never said a cross word,” she says.

Sitting at the window of the nursing home surrounded by red balloons, McCarthy has a Valentine’s visit from her son Anthony. St Valentine’s Day is “for the young people”, she says, but she is enjoying the activities put on at the nursing home to celebrate the occasion.

“Today is for the young lovers, it is not for the likes of me … For people like me, I go back and back for the memories,” she says.

Centenarian Ann Flanagan fell for a man her mother did not approve of. He lived across the road from her in north Dublin, and they would go for secret walks together along the canal.

“We were sweethearts together … I literally grew up with him, and we were best friends,” she says. But Flanagan’s mother disapproved because his family “wasn’t grand enough for her”, and she kept a “keen watch” on the pair during the short romance, she says.

Looking back at the age of 100, Flanagan says her childhood friend was the love of her life. She never married, she says.

St Valentine’s Day was different back then, and her mother “didn’t believe in it”, Flanagan adds. “She was a country woman and had no time for that nonsense … What I thought was a different story.”