The death of my friend Una O'Higgins O'Malley is the end of a link between our two families that I had known about for years before, out of the blue in the 1970s, Una wrote to me while I was working for The Irish Times in Belfast. She had seen my name in the newspaper. Was I, she wondered, any relation to another Henry Kelly, usually known as Harry, who had been a young civil servant in the 1920s?
To this day I remember the wobble in my voice and, yes, the tears, as I told her Harry Kelly was my father. Suddenly we were both in tears on the phone and when we calmed down and got on with our conversation we started a small journey of shared memories, mostly from me to Una about her father.
Because, you see, my father was private secretary to Kevin O'Higgins at the time of his murder and had worked with him for several years. Una had known from family papers who her father's civil servants had been. To her, most of them were just names but she had, she told me, always wondered about his private secretary. She had heard - and the records had proved it to her - that he was one of the few people in the room in Dun Na Mas, the family home in Blackrock, on the morning the Minister for Justice and External Affairs died, having been shot while walking home from Mass. It was July 1927. The Minister's police were armed and strongly advised he should take the car home. He insisted on walking and had not gone far when he was gunned down.
The first my father knew of the attack was when, to great excitement from the neighbours, several official cars screeched to a halt outside his family's small house in Emerald Street, off Seville Place, to take him to the Minister's home, where he lay only minutes from death.
Una was a baby of just five months. Doctors in the room where he lay knew there was nothing they could do, so the few people with him knelt down and began the Rosary . After a few minutes Una was brought in and handed to him. He held her as best he could and kissed her; then the baby was taken away. My father, a young man of only 24, was sobbing. In his semi-formal suit, stiff collar and tie he tried not to break down. He told me years later he didn't know whether to stay or leave.
Eventually, believing he would be unable to cope and using the excuse that he should not intrude into the family at that terrible moment, he left and stood outside the door until the end.
I know all this from my father's own words and from the fact that later that day he wrote down what had happened. As I was growing up and quizzed him about his experiences from 1916 onwards - oh!, would I had quizzed him more, for what stories he took to his grave - one day he went to a drawer in his wardrobe and showed me what he had written. "Don't be too hard on me, son," he said, "it's a bit sentimental but I was young and my hero and a man I loved was dying."
Yes, it was emotional but it was written in a beautiful hand and it took me inside that room so that I could almost see Una being handed to her father and the few people kneeling for prayer. Dad wondered what, if anything, we should do with his few words and some other bits and pieces he had kept since his work with Kevin O'Higgins. He had, for example, worked with the minister on a speech to the Oxford Union in which the phrase, "Challenged from the left, challenged from the right, we shall stick to the middle of the road", had been in part my father's idea. In the margin of the manuscript of the speech Kevin O'Higgins wrote: "Well done Harry, thanks". I think there were one or more drafts of this speech which, with my father's written recollections, stayed in our house until that day when Una telephoned me.
We began to correspond and eventually met. It was with Dad's permission that I took items relating to her father and gave it to Una. There was talk of a little library, perhaps in the house in Booterstown, and although my own memory is now a bit hazy I think the more personal items went to the family and some other, rather official, papers we gave to Clongowes Wood College in Kildare.
I grew up with a memory of a photograph on display in our house. It was in a small, oval silver frame and showed a man with slightly pointed features smiling gently. I pestered my family to tell me who it was. My mother told me several times it was a man who was a friend of Daddy but had died. Later I learned it was Kevin O'Higgins, who was never far from my father's thoughts. When he sat in the evening to read and listen to the radio all he had to do was glance to his right and there, on top of a small china cabinet, he could see the man he had served and loved as a young civil servant. My father told me that when I was growing up he didn't want to tell me who the man was or what relationship he had with him because he was determined not to influence his children politically.
All I can add is to wish Una's husband, Eoin, and family my small best love at this moment. Una was, in a cynical, self-centred world, a formidable force for good and for sheer decency. Others will write more eloquently of her peace work and her achievement in starting the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. For now I just want to remember the strange link that bound together two families and two children, one of whom didn't know that the other existed until she saw his name in the paper and he answered her telephone call.