Word: kavanagh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fine was called for charging the next time the Crimson came down the floor, and Tim Kavanagh hit four straight foul shots to seal the Fordham victory...
...begins with voices discussing an unfortunate old lady who jumped out the window of her lonely cell in Totall Point, a drab, new high-rise apartment in London. Gradually the voices become characters. Scenery is sketched in, and the reader eventually learns that the old lady was a Mrs. Kavanagh, a 76-year-old alcoholic with a string of arrests for public drunkenness. The Housing Council relocted Mrs. Kavanagh in totall Point after her small house was flattened by progress. Like so many of the aged and helpless, she had in effect been buried...
...what begins in seedy depression evolves into the story of an extraordinary friendship. In addition to the comfort of the bottle, Mrs. Kavanagh had Mrs. Biddulph, a regular drinking buddy whenever she was not serving short sentences for shoplifiting. The two women were different but complementary. Mrs Kavanagh was vulnerable because she was friendly. Her last pinch at the hands of the police came about because she made a public nuisance of herself by muzzily trying to shake strangers hands. Mrs Biddulph survives on a generalized anger about the state's institutuion compassion and the pathetic efforts...
Instead she keeps them in a box. After Mrs. Kavanagh's death, the letters take on a deepened significance, especially the following passage: "Yesterday I stood looking out of the window where I am, and I wished you'd come round the corner, quick, a surprise, I'd have gone on my tiptoes to shout your name out of the window. Love, that I would, since people round here think I haven't a son at all, that's what they're like these days, can't even dream about nice things happening...
Fade out of sight and mind as quickly as possible," says a gentleman to a work house fugitive in that early book. The welfare state does not talk that honestly to Mrs. Kavanagh and Mrs. Biddulph, but the message remains pretty much the same...