Bewley's landmark cafés with their marble tables and almond buns always extended a warm welcome. Maeve Binchy says farewell to a home from home
You would get the smell half a street away, coffee like it never smelled at home. And the fresh-from-the-oven cakes and buns, six of them on a plate ready and waiting for you on the table.
Long before the days of self-service, the waitresses would come and serve you, always with a few words about the world we lived in. Like the rain maybe, or the sales, or Peggy Dell playing the piano in a furniture shop across the road, or the marriage of Princess Grace, or the hardy souls who swam all the year round in our cold seas.
And then they would leave you to your own chat, going off to talk on other topics at other tables.
Bewley's was filled with characters and we would talk about them for a bit before settling down to our own chat. There used to be a woman with a handsome, ravaged face and wild and curly hair, wearing a matted fur coat with not much underneath it. There was a rumour that she was a wealthy person and that someone had left Bewley's a sum of money to make sure she was fed every day, which she always was, with great kindness and charm.
There was an old man whose coat was tied with a rope, who always complained that the tea was cold. The thin, slightly stooped waitress would feel the side of the teapot and assure him that it would roast the hand off you, so then he would grudgingly drink it.
There were men with sheafs of papers covered in figures, adding and subtracting; there were well-known poets and writers and actors. Real celebrities were there, such as Maureen Potter at one table or Eamonn Andrews at another, and everyone would just nod at them, delighted to be sharing the same aromatic air - but we would never go up and disturb them.
When I was a student we could make one cup of coffee last an hour and a half and, like everyone else, we felt a slight guilt in case this sowed the seeds of the eventual decline of Bewley's fortunes. But we had to make it last because nobody wanted to leave the warm, happy coffee and sugar-flavoured fug and go out into the cold, rain-filled streets. And nobody had the price of another cup of coffee.
I look back on hours and hours of conversation then, about communism, about how to starch petticoats, about who would be on the committee of the L & H debating society. And about how, when we were old and rich, we would come back from overseas and buy a whole plate of cakes and have three coffees each. It was the 1950s then, and we all assumed we would have to go away to get a job, and a lot of us did.
Then, when I was a young teacher, I would bring the pupils' exercise books and correct them in Bewley's. History essay after history essay, more coffee, more cigarettes to keep me going, and the waitresses would be most sympathetic.
"You lot earn your money," one of them said to me. I thought she earned hers much harder, clearing up marble table after marble table of slopped coffee and crumbs, but there was never a complaint .
Sometimes, when I didn't even have time to go in, I would stand and watch the windows and wallow in the smell. The amazing sight of beans jumping, being ground just for our pleasure - it was very heady. And then we all bought our first coffee-makers there and were surprised that it didn't taste quite as good at home.
When I joined The Irish Times there was Bewley's right opposite us at a time when it was slightly easier to cross the road than it is now. And there were many long discussions there too. Things that were too private to be discussed in the Pearl bar or in Bowes but which needed the solidarity of the marble table and the almond bun.
Like what? I don't know. Love, hope, disappointment, press freedom, whether we had better coverage of something than the other papers, elections, sports, and what readers really wanted and whether or not we should try to give it to them.
In those days the budget extended to more than one promised cup of coffee. But when the bill was being totted up the waitress would ask: "How many almond buns?"
The number would be admitted.
"And did you have butter with them?" she would inquire, in the kindly but firm way that a priest might have asked you "did you take pleasure in it?" a long time ago.
Oh yes, we always had butter with the almond buns. Like we always loved going in to sink down and forget the outside world in Bewley's, and like we sang carols outside it for many Christmases, and like we always felt safe there and at home.
It was all things to all people and we are allowed to be sentimental and sad that a little bit of everybody's past has gone and that we can't conjure it up any more just for the price of a cup of coffee.