Peggy Reen (née Kerrisk) (part 2)

Peggy Reen has lived the greater part of her life in Millstreet and she has vivid memories of the place in earlier days. She and her husband Frank set up a pharmacy in the town after their marriage and Peggy discusses the hardships they endured and the difficulties they encountered in rearing a young family during the war years. While recalling these years in the pharmacy, and the medicines dispensed at that time, she describes her clear memory of an earlier time when illness struck her family. As a young child, an infant sibling succumbed to the Black Flu of 1919. Her father took the body of the infant and buried it at dawn outside the graveyard wall as was the custom when a baby was unbaptised.