As a child, I liked nothing better than to listen to adult conversation – indeed, I still enjoy eavesdropping, and until the advent of mobile phones I’d rich pickings on buses and in coffee shops. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of the holidays I spent with my favourite aunt in Tralee where the chat was mighty.

It was while sitting in auntie’s kitchen that I first heard of Mary O’Connor, the young servant girl who inspired the annual Rose of Tralee International Festival.

Each morning after 10am mass, auntie and her relatives had tea and biscuits sitting around the oil-clothed table. The dishes were blue willow pattern, the teapot fat and brown, the tea strong and the tin of biscuits tilted on its side for easier access to the chocolate-covered ones. As they ate and drank they talked in a jumble of voices about “himself” and “herself” – whoever they were; as well as Daniel O’Connell, The Whiteboys and the Great Famine that I’d heard about in school.

First Rose of Tralee by Patricia O'Reilly

When the name Mary O’Connor was mentioned, I perked up. One of my cousins was called Mary O’Connor. Auntie laughed and voices rose and fell, contradicting each other, with tumbling words as they told of the servant girl who had lived more than 100 years ago and became known as the Rose of Tralee.

I was a captive audience, hanging on every word. Mary, I learned, was a shoemaker’s daughter from Brogue Lane, so beautiful, they said, and as good inside as outside, that William Mulchinock, the young master from the big house fell in love with her. It was the most romantic story I’d ever heard. An Irish Cinderella, little did I know then that there was no happy ending.

The Rose of Tralee Festival was in its infancy, but already it was bringing a new vibrancy to the town – the hotels were full, restaurants and cafes doing a brisk business, tubs overflowing with flowers, bunting draped on lampposts and music on the streets. Auntie wasn’t one for enforcing rules, but my cousins and I were strictly forbidden to be out on the streets, and so those early days of the festival passed me by.

The little I learned about Mary O’Connor that summer stayed with me, lurking at the back of my mind as I grew up. I worked in a variety of places, married, had children and bemoaned not writing.

Getting on with it

For my next birthday the man presented me with a typewriter, and the unspoken message, “To get on with it”. I did – starting with short stories for magazines, moving to writing features for newspapers and magazines. Then I tried my hand at radio – talks, documentaries and plays, a few non-fiction books before finally arriving at fiction and settling on writing historical fiction.

On a grey November afternoon, having sent my previous book to the publishers, I was in nostalgic mood, remembering summers in Tralee, grieving that all the folks who’d sat around the oil-clothed table scrabbling for the chocolate biscuits were long dead. I checked out Mary O’Connor on Google, interested to see what had been written about her and who had done the writing. To my amazement, her story hadn’t been written in novel form.

Researching was a minefield of differing bits of information. I settled on my main characters; Mary, William, William’s mother and Mary’s family. Locations were important. I revisited Tralee, relishing the place names as I imagined the lives of the people in my story – Brogue Lane, Prince’s Quay, Ballyard Hill, West Villa, Clahane.

The story is set in the 1840s during the time of Daniel O’Connell’s monster rallies for Repeal of the Irish Union of 1800. The parts of his speeches that I quoted are taken from Richard Aldous’s Great Irish Speeches. I re-read Beatrice Coogan’s The Big Wind, familiarised myself with sensory India from Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram.

In the first chapter I had Mary’s father threatening her with marriage and her flouncing out to the potato market before wandering along to Denny Street. It was “black with people”, as one of Daniel O’Connell’s rallies for Repeal of the 1800 Union was in progress, and she was struck by his promises of “happiness”. I added falling snow; included William Mulchinock and as his mother Margaret, plays an important role in the story she made an entrance in the following scene.

And so the research and the writing progressed. I embellished facts and added characters and intrigue, taking creative liberties with set pieces, imagining places, occurrences and dialogue. After all, I was writing fiction. As I wrote, fact blurred into fiction and vice versa. The first draft was a mess; the second daft was considerably better as I fleshed out details – such as the use of tea to restore mahogany furniture; the healing properties of goose fat for chapped hands and the favoured foods for a formal dinner – when trifle was known as an Empire dessert.

Gradually re-write after re-write, and in between our family being visited with a variety of illnesses the book came together. I called it The First Rose of Tralee because it is the story of Mary O’Connor who was the first rose of Tralee.

The First Rose of Tralee by Patricia O’Reilly, published by Poolbeg is available from bookshops nationwide for €15.99.