'Arriving home in the early morning I noticed that the blinds in the front room were pulled down. This was a common sign of a death in the house '

'Arriving home in the early morning I noticed that the blinds in the front room were pulled down. This was a common sign of a death in the house '

Harry Browne remembers the death of his father when Harry was 19 years old.

Harry Browne

Trinity College Dublin

1961

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Harry Browne

Adolescence and Early Adulthood

Life Story

Russell Avenue, North Strand, Dublin

1960's

I had, until this period, no direct experience of the death of a close family member. At the age of seven my baby brother Brendan died, but we were protected by our parents from detailed knowledge of this tragic affair. Family lore has it that my Father took the tiny coffin to Glasnevin Cemetery for burial. This he did alone and unsupported. This was not unusual as infant mortality was all too common then. My Father died in June 1961 when I was nineteen years old. He went into hospital on Friday 9th June, we were told, for minor surgery and died of Liver cancer at 9pm on Saturday 10th, five years earlier he had an operation to remove his prostate (Dr Barnes assured May that it was not Cancer and there was nothing to worry about) for tests. So cossetted were we that my Mother didn't know how serious his condition was, and in point of fact, my sister and me were at an all - night party the night he died. Arriving home in the early morning I noticed that the blinds in the front room were pulled down. This was a common sign of a death in the house. This had never happened in my experience before and I knew instantly that my Father had died. I did not have a very close relationship with him in my late teens and it is a bitter regret to me that he did not live long enough for me to get to know him as an adult. A memory of my Father clings still; we used to play on the railway embankment at the stone bridge on the Clontarf road. Trains were steam powered and generated along with power, copious quantities of soot. This soot was thrown onto the embankment and we used to toboggan down it as if it were snow. One evening when I came home My Father said to me 'are you wearing stockings?' when I replied in the negative he said 'then wash your feet'. If a child came home in that state nowadays having been playing on the railway tracks there would be uproar. Those were more innocent and less uptight times. He was dedicated reader of cowboy books and an avid movie fan, going to the Pictures up to three times a week in the local Drumcondra Grand cinema. I have said earlier that we were somewhat better off than our neighbours and in the early 1960s my father bought, or rented a television set. This was the first appearance of the tele in our area and it was a wonder to behold. More often than not the picture was obscured by 'snow' to the extent that it was impossible to see what was on the screen. The make of the TV was a Bush and uncle Jack used to describe watching it as, as good as looking into a hawthorn bush. Nonetheless it satisfied Tony and he abandoned the cinema for the tele thereafter. We also had the first telephone in the area and had to wait fifteen months before it was installed, if you wanted to make a long distance call it had to go through an operator and to make a call to the USA it had to be booked at least two hours in advance, ironic when you consider that one can buy a ready - to - go mobile off the shelf and call anywhere in the world immediately nowadays. Later that year I left home and went to London to work. I think that the upset of my Father's death left me restless and unhappy and that I tried to accommodate it by setting out on a new adventure. Certainly there was no economic necessity for me to emigrate. The family was relatively well off and the industry in which I worked was undersupplied with qualified chefs.

Irish Research Council for Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences (IRCHSS)

Dr Kathleen McTiernan (Trinity College Dublin)

Dr Deirdre O'Donnell (Trinity College Dublin)