Justine McCarthy: ‘I’m proud to carry my father’s torch’

In an exclusive extract from Bandon journalist JUSTINE MCCARTHY'S new book, she writes how she can vividly recall her father’s sudden death when she was just four years old

OUR house sat amid copses of evergreens atop a slope above the Bandon to Clonakilty road. Below was a bend so sharp it made even slow drivers slam their brakes. Every time I heard the screech of brakes, I knew my speed-addicted mother was driving that car, that she had failed to avoid hitting the wall and that she was lying dead down there in her cherished Sunbeam Rapier with its silver bird on the bonnet. I knew it for certain, until I heard our front door thud and her car keys tinkle on the hall table downstairs, and I allowed myself to breathe again.

It was on a winter’s day that one of my worst fears came true. I had been sent home from boarding school for a week, after a solitary head louse dropped ignominiously from my hair onto my copybook. My mother was at a funeral in Limerick and I was left alone. It was one of those days when the Man Above never switched on the light in the sky, foretelling a storm. I walked to town for the latest edition of Jackie magazine and a Mars bar in O’Farrell’s shop. It was dark when I got home. I drew the curtains around me in the window seat and nestled in for a spell of reading bliss. Then the lights went out. And they stayed out. I had never known such unadulterated terror.

I screamed and screamed for someone to come and rescue me but the only response was the banshee-howl of the storm. I ran for my life from the house, through the groaning wood at the bottom of the garden, down New Road, into Market Street, past the cinema, along South Main Street, passing Mister Downing’s tailor dummies and the dead cows hanging in Mehigan’s butcher shop window, over the bridge, beyond the Munster Arms Hotel, and into Shannon Street, until I collapsed on Jean Crowley’s doorstep, a drenched and bawling fright.

Jean had lived with us until she married and made her own home on the other side of town but she continued to work in our furniture shop. Once she had got me soothed, she phoned my mother, who was, by then, in a state of near hysteria herself, having returned from the funeral to find the front door wide open, the lights on in the house, and me gone.

This tendency to catastrophic thinking was rooted in an earlier event, my father’s death when I was four years old. He was only 44 when he died of a massive heart attack on his way home from work. I can recall very little from my childhood but I vividly remember that day. I was playing dolls on the landing with Adrienne, the sister closest in age to me, when two uncles appeared. Their demeanour was so sombre it seemed to block out all the light. They carried us to the kitchen where the men who made coffins in the backyard for my father’s undertaking business were silently lining the room, heads bowed. I can still see and hear myself following Birdie, who minded us, around the kitchen as she poured tea for the men, and probably something stronger from the bar on the other side of the wall. ‘But what does dead mean? When is daddy coming home?’ I kept asking her.

Although my mother lived to be 85, she never truly recovered from her shock and grief. My oldest sister Berenice had had our father to herself for four years before Adrienne was born and everyone said she was ‘the apple of his eye’. Her truncated life would be shadowed forever by his loss. Gina, the youngest, was only a year and ten months. I was the one daughter who did not inherit our mother’s Spanish-hued good looks. With my fair hair and freckles, the consensus was that I was ‘pure McCarthy’.

As a young teenager, I envied my sisters’ resemblance to mum and felt a burden of having to carry the family’s torch lit by my father. As I came to learn from strangers about the many kindnesses he did in his life, I grew proud to carry his torch.

Bandon journalist Justine McCarthy.

• An Eye on Ireland: A Journey Through Social Change - New and Selected Journalism by Justine McCarthy is published in hardback by Hachette Books Ireland, €19.99.