Creena Murphy ( nee McDonnell)

Creena with Christine Challis at my 40th Birthday Party

Today is mum’s anniversary.  Creena Murphy died two years ago today, in St Marks’ Nursing home in Maidenhead. The nursing home was in St Mark’s Road no more than a stone’s throw from the first house we lived in on coming to Maidenhead in I guess 1961. I so recall walking up and down that road, sometimes alone, sometimes with my sister, sometimes with my school friend Peter Tynan.

In my mind’s eye, I can see the cherry blossom in All Saints Avenue; the pink and white conker blossom on Castle Hill; lilac blossom blowing on bushes sometimes white sometimes mauve all along St Mark’s Road. And I remember the snow and ice along all the town’s roads, lingering for months past the New Year’s day in the long cold Siberian winter of 1963. We walked into town; we walked to school in Cookham Road. Everyone walked everywhere –  though I remember there were plenty of buses – red buses – in those days too – one every fifteen minutes to take you to the town centre for two old pence.

Corpus christi processions around the Rock

Mum had been born in 1924 in Cashel, Tipperary in the what was then the Irish Free State. She was one of twelve children and I believe the tenth in that sequence. Only her younger brother Gus and her younger sister Nancy are still alive. They both live in Boherclough Street, Cashel where Creena grew-up. Her childhood was scarred by the poverty of the times. The opportunities for work were few and far-between. Most of mum’s brothers and sisters left for England. Mum took a cleaning job in Indiaville – which is now the home of the Anglican Dean. Even in a hopeless time deprived of hope it wasn’t a promising start to adult life.

Creena, Christmas at 601 Brody House

Creena lived in Cashel until 1957 when we came to England. All the important events of mum’s early life were experienced through the prism of her hometown and a renewed sense of Irishness. Hers was the first generation after the declaration of the Free state and the civil War. She was educated at the local convent. Together with the ruler on the back of the hand,  the nuns gave her a taste for music, singing and acting. At one stage she was offered an interview for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin but my grandfather would not have his daughter on the stage!

In the end she married locally – a baker by trade – and settled down to married life in Ireland. She had three children of whom I am the youngest. I was only three when we left Cashel: for my brother who was nine and my sister who was seven the departure from our Irish home was traumatic. It was more so for my mother who lost the easy camaraderie of small town Ireland and never found it again in England.

Just messing about near the river - Boulters Lock Maidenhead

She settled eventually here in England. She loved it in her own way. Although this time with my father was difficult as their marriage slowly but inexorably came apart at the seams. It ended as so often with broken Irish marriages with violence and broken hearts. Neither party quite recovered themselves. Mum by then though had made something of a career for herself working first at McGraw Hill Publishing Company and then Johnson & Johnson.

In her later years she rediscovered Ireland and found something profound in revisiting her home she had lived without for so very long and perhaps never allowed herself the right to miss.

Always thoughtfully dressed; and always smiling; and always with a glass of wine or whiskey; and always with a mischievous smile; and always with a story to tell – Mum owned an artless charm. Most compellingly she was entirely unaware she exercised this gift on all she knew – most especially men. And naive of her effect upon men she always fed us some line about which we would tease her mercilessly.

After her stroke when she was emotionally, spiritually and physically impaired there was only a ghost left of all she once had owned so completely. But even then in the loneliness of the bedroom, sometimes solitary, sometimes irascible she remained beguilingly lovable.

She liked me to read her poetry. More strangely she liked my poetry. Most beautifully she recalled passages of poetry and prose word-perfect from her schooldays. Words moved her readily to tears. As she prepared for death she instinctively turned to the poets. She found words and phrases scattered like clumps of primroses in woodland through Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Verse. And Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar spoke to her most strongly in the last year bringing her always to tears.

I knew she found in those words her own hopes perfectly expressed. I read the poem at her funeral mass. And I place those fair words here like a posy to her memory and memorial to all the love she lavished on me all my life.

Creena wind swept & smiling....