A Single Headstrong Heart
by Kevin Myers (Lilliput Press, € 20.00)
On the cover of this affecting, beautifully-written memoir is a photograph of young Kevin Myers, a parrot on his shoulder; beside him, smiling cautiously, is his father Willie, who was a GP. They were on their way to the Cup Final at Wembley when a street photographer snapped in passing.
Willie was about 60 at the time but looks much older. He was a troubled man.
He suffered from depression and hypochrondria. He was lonely. A calamitous event had defined his life. The Fianna Fáil government had given his job to a party placeman in the 1940s, forcing him to leave Ireland for Britain to find work.
He seems to have incurred the party’s wrath by placing a death notice for a relative who had died while serving with the British Army.
He hadn’t long to live when the photograph was taken.
Father and son loved each other, but they rowed. The last words they exchanged were in angry ones. His son’s continual mockery finally provoked the old man into striking him. Kevin flew out of the house.
He never said goodbye to Willie, who died shortly after that incident; regret and guilt have haunted him since.
A lucky break – an offer of a place at UCD – rescued him from the aimlessness and emotional chaos of his young adulthood in his home town of Leicester. He determined to make something of himself, immersing himself in the study of history, his interest in which Willie had awakened with his stories about the Irishmen who had fought in the First World War.
Answers
He was an established journalist and controversialist when an old man revealed that his father had served in the IRA, and more specifically, in the battalion to which Collins’ Squad had often subcontracted its grisly chores. He had been close to Charlie Dalton, a notorious killer.
The news posed questions for which Myers may never find answers: had his father killed people?
Had he chosen to study medicine, the science of curing and treating illness, as a way of making amends for harming or killing others?
Had he been driven by that same sense of righteousness – that same headstrong heart – that led his son to denounce malefactors at his boarding-school, causing them to be expelled on their last day there?
Had he, Kevin Myers wonders in this compelling memoir, ruined lives as his father may have done before him?
