PROMINENT Paphos community member Peggy O’Neil was remembered yesterday by friends and family at a requiem mass held at the church by St Paul’s Pillar.
Listening to fiends’ talk of Peggy, who died last week, it was clear that we were saying goodbye to a woman who had become both an institution also a beacon of light for the many travellers who, after having found her café were given the complete lowdown on everything that was going on in the town.
Peggy would serve tea, cakes, sympathy and sometimes a brisk lecture on the ills of the world from the day the Miranda Café opened in 1971. Widowed a year later, she managed through some difficult times to make the café the one place to be if one was seeking knowledge on any subject relating to the town and its inhabitants. Many a lonely expat was cheered by a good cup of tea served along with a generous spoonful of kindness and sympathy.
Often above the gentle tinkling of china cups, there was to be heard the sound of Peggy’s clear, clean vowels extolling her displeasure on the use of one of her most hated icons of modern day – the mobile phone, customers soon learnt that the Miranda Café was a no-go area for any electronic intrusions.
Peggy quickly become known by me as the talking equivalent of the Yellow Pages phone book: if ever you wanted to know where someone lived, where they worked or who their third cousin was, then off you would go to the café. To her credit, she never failed me and she often told me she rather liked being called the ‘Yellow Pages lady’.
Mistaken often by locals as being English, she was in fact Irish – having been born in the seaside village of Sneem County Kerry. She left in the 1930s to come to London where she met and married her Cypriot born husband Michael.
He died soon after they came to Paphos and she carried on as a sole ‘foreign woman’ working the café at a time when the expat community was extremely small.
One Cypriot neighbour said, “Peggy wasn’t always the easiest of people to get on with. Maybe because she had had a bit of a hard life but once you got to know her she was beautiful, would do anything for you. We will all miss her, both her Cypriot and foreign friends.
“I think I was a bit in love with her,” said the neighbour paying tribute, “but also a bit scared.”
“We just stayed friends all these years, but I’d like to think if I had moved to ask her to marry me, I would have been given such a great gift.
“She was a beauty in every way and may God bless her.”
Margaret Mary (Peggy) O’Neil
June 9, 1921-May 3, 2009
