My father, William John Keery, died on 15 July 1946, aged 63. The death certificate said the cause of death was cardiac failure, myclogenous leukaemia.

I have no doubt but that the death of my father has been the single most important factor in the shaping of my life. More objective and better qualified witnesses might identify in this assertion elements of self-delusion, wishful thinking, poor psychology, or even scapegoating. I believe the early loss of my father, my reactions to this loss, and my assessment of the situation in which my brother and I were placed, created identifiable behaviour patterns. Secondary to those patterns was the way in which our boyhood and education was organised by our widowed mother.

In writing this I feel deprived that I have no recollected image of my father’s deathbed, a body laid out for family farewells, or indeed of any funeral. It was probably part of the polite Protestant culture of the time that little boys should be protected from such things.

When I put my memory into overdrive I do find some images, which seem related, but in which I have no confidence as to their reliability.

One is of my mother crying and holding my hand in a room I take to be a bedroom in what would then have been the Portobello nursing home, now the elegant educational establishment in Portobello House on one of Dublin’s Grand Canal basins. I believe there was a man standing by the bed, who must have been a doctor, explaining something about blood with the aid of what looked like a glass block the size of a pack of playing cards. Father looked very pale and seemed to be sleeping quietly in the bed.

I have no image at all of a funeral. The next picture I can conjure up is of the big double room in Cowper Drive absolutely packed with people standing and sitting in dark clothes, many of them apparently very upset and frequently nodding at John and myself as we wandered around in the forest of adults. I assume this crowd to be the host of relatives, friends and other mourners invited back to the house after Father’s funeral.

Associated with the packed sitting room image are recollections of being patted on the head, of being held on knees, and of snatches of remarks, mostly questions which, while credible in context, are almost certainly retro-projections rather than real memory. “Isn’t it terrible for the poor little boys?”, “Your father worked too hard”, “How will Florence manage?”

Many of the relatives and friends crowding the sitting room on that day became key players in the years immediately ahead as Florence mobilised what today’s vocabulary would describe as the “support mechanisms” she would need to ensure that her two sons were raised as she saw best and with every possible opportunity. Certain men came to represent characteristics that I would have loved to have in a real father. There were friends and relatives of “Bill” and Florence whose hospitality or visits to Cowper Drive provided opportunities for holiday visits or gave Florence a break from what children never imagine, until they become parents themselves, as the unreasonable demands and burdens of good parenting.

Among such figures definitely present in the Cowper Drive sitting room on that day were George Verso, Bill’s’ oldest friend, who became Uncle George to John and me and survived to be loved in turn by my children. Who could not but be charmed by this small, apparently frail man, who as an under-age volunteer had joined the Black Watch and marched with them to the Somme and survived? His badge of battle was a hearing aid to compensate for being deafened by a piece of shrapnel. He always succeeded in making this hearing aid into a marvellously interesting contraption for the amusement of little boys.

Then there were the family and friends from the North. The women particularly always seemed prone to tears. They were my father’s sisters Edie and Lil and Florence’s friend Winnie Long. In the next few years there would be many visits to Lisburn where both Edie and Lil lived and to Killinchy where Winnie lived with her husband Willie. There would also be regular visits to Cowper Drive by Edie and Lil. To John and me this extraordinary pair of complaining but resilient women would become known as the world’s greatest snorers. Whenever they occupied the guest room upstairs beside the maid’s room the house would echo during the night with their breathing. Curious small boys would creep upstairs to marvel at the snorts and whistles from the mouths gaping open above the tight white lines of tucked-in sheets.

Read on: 1947 – Take a Bus