The Summer That Changed Me: 1995. Frank McNally recalls a long, hot summer during which he buried his father, got married, and worked the graveyard shift at 'The Irish Times'.
The weather story is a staple of journalism, especially on quiet news days. And when you're a lowly freelance, you get to write it a lot. So I can say with confidence that the summer of 1995 was the hottest in Ireland since records began. June, July and August averaged two degrees Celsius above normal almost everywhere. But August was exceptionally warm and dry, with a high of 31 degrees recorded in Kilkenny on August 2nd.
The American humorist, Dave Barry, visited the land of his ancestors that year and, when I met him at home in Miami a couple of years ago, he was still scarred by the ferocity of the Irish summer. They're used to heat in Florida. But Dave and his wife came here expecting rain and mist, and packed accordingly. Instead, they couldn't sleep at night because the hotels didn't have air-conditioning.
"We scoured the hardware stores looking for a fan," he recalled. "But the fans were all sold out."
It was hot even in late April, when my father died. There was nothing sudden about this. His decline started two years before when, one day after Christmas, he had a mild heart attack. I remember him putting on his suit to go to hospital, as older people do, with the look of a man who didn't know if he'd ever come home again. He did, eventually, and in his last two years, I made a point of trying to penetrate the pipe smoke and silence that generally surrounded him. But not with much success.
Once I asked him what his father, who died before I was born, did during his years in America in the early 1900s. I was duly informed that Granddad had been a "deputy sheriff" in Montana, a fascinating fact communicated to me as if it were the equivalent of him being a drains inspector in Longford (no offence to Longford). Further detail was not to be had.
By the spring of 1995 he was back in hospital, this time to stay, and mostly beyond talking. We took turns to spend nights with him. Twice a week I'd get the train up to Dundalk, armed with a book and a small bottle of whiskey to shorten the long hospital nights. In the mornings I'd walk to the station, past the Harp brewery, feeling relieved - and guilty because of it - to be out in the fresh air again.
A moving thing happened near the end. By coincidence, a neighbour and one-time friend of my father's - we'll call him Joe - was also in hospital, two wards away. Joe and he had not spoken to each other for 33 years, because of a row about land. Basically, when my father bought a 30-acre farm in 1962, Joe and a few others - who were hoping it would go unsold and be acquired by the Land Commission for redistribution - objected. The result was a campaign of small-scale agrarian terrorism - fires, sabotage, intimidation - that began the night my mother brought me home from maternity hospital and continued until the mid-1970s. After that it petered out into hostile silence, until the protagonists started to die.
My father always insisted that Joe, although the chief activist, was a good man led astray. But still the silence continued until late April 1995, when a delicate peace process unfolded. One day, after a number of confidence-building measures, Joe walked into my father's ward - he was the only one of them fit to stand by then - and shook his hand. Thirty-three years was a lot to catch up on, so they discussed the unusually warm weather instead, and said they'd pray for each other. Joe checked out of hospital, but died in the autumn.
In an echo of a certain romantic comedy of the era, our family had three weddings scheduled for that summer, including mine, and a fourth in 1996. In our case the funeral came first, but there wasn't much time for mourning. When my sister Patricia married in July, I - suddenly the senior male - had to give her away. I was due to give myself away in September, then another sister, Pauline. It was a summer clearance sale in the McNally family: everyone had to go.
Work was uncertain. The boom was just taking off, but freelance journalists were at the bottom end of a trickle-down economy. Shifts in the Irish Times newsroom were scarce, and jobs were only a rumour. Worse still, the Irish Press was on its last legs, and we all dreaded the expected flood of asylum-seekers from Burgh Quay.
It seemed a bad year to get married.
Most of my shifts were what is known in the trade as "Night-town". This is the graveyard beat, which then lasted up to 3.30 a.m. and had a reputation for driving journalists insane. After midnight, you'd be propping up your eyelids in between ring-arounds of provincial Garda stations where night sergeants would inform you that, no, there was nothing stirring. Anyone worried about crime levels should ring provincial Garda stations at night and ask if anything's happening. It's very reassuring.
I don't know if it was the weather, or delayed mourning, or what, but some time in June a wave of gloom crept over me. The weather was definitely part of it. For weeks I would wake up at dawn with a knot in my stomach thinking, like the woman in White Mischief: "Oh God, not another f***ing beautiful day!"
Some of it was work. Except for the weather story, everything I wrote about seemed to be on the theme of mortality, from the heat- related fish kills, to a grisly triple murder case in Cork.
I spent a week on the latter story, traipsing around Mayfield on the city's northern edge, where gardaí were digging for bodies. One day I made the mistake of walking up a lane near the scene marked "private", where I was met by a hostile farmer who clearly didn't like trespassers but, equally clearly, was enjoying the area's notoriety. Ordering me off the property, he quipped: "I've enough land to bury you in." The walk back down the lane seemed a lot longer than the walk up.
There's no good time to be depressed. But it's a particularly bad time when you're a freelance journalist trying to appear enthusiastic, and you're also about to get married. Luckily, being male, I was superfluous to the organisation of the wedding, in which my main role was to turn up on the day and stand where I was told. That and arrange the honeymoon. So while Teresa busied herself with the logistics, I took a few days off in early August and went to Lourdes.
Actually, Lourdes was a bit of an accident. Before Ryanair, empty seats on Aer Lingus pilgrim charters were a cheap way to get to the south of France, where I hoped that a few days in the company of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy would sort me out. I thought I could pay for the trip with a travel feature on the pilgrimage business. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was all I had.
Despite hosting some of the tackiest souvenir shops on earth, Lourdes - where my parents had been several times - is not without its charms. I steered well clear of the baths, sticking to the cafés and immersing myself gently in French beer instead.
But I think I was half hoping for a cure, and I half found it. Although I liked my father, I wasn't close to him. He was a farmer and a Fianna Fáil politician, whereas I didn't have the vocation for either. And his death was so well foreshadowed, I'd hesitate to describe my feelings afterwards as grief. But no matter how little a surprise the event is, it's still a deep shock to realise that the person you've spent you're life wanting to impress is gone forever.
Sometime around the start of September, the weather broke and the gloom lifted. Two days before the wedding, Hurricane Iris (although downgraded to a severe storm) swept Ireland, bringing heavy rain to most parts. The effect was clearly electrifying because, a full 24 hours prior to the wedding, I got around to booking the honeymoon, or at least a flight to Rome.
It started badly when I inadvertently booked us in one of the world's worst hotels, near Termini railway station; but then we headed south to Naples and Sorrentoand things picked up. We stumbled around the ruins of Pompeii, stunned by the setting and the knowledge that we were walking on 2,000-year-old streets. From there we took a boat to the Isle of Capri. And as we crossed the straits at dusk, a lightning storm lit up Mount Vesuvius behind us. Teresa said it was very romantic.
