It is 1953 and, onboard a speeding steam train heading south, a little boy, aged 5, and little girl, aged 7, watch an English countryside race past the window while, opposite, the formidable monochrome figure of a Catholic nun sternly pins the children to their seats with her gaze.
Abandoned by their mother, these children had spent years in a Scottish children’s home but now, partly due to an accident, (or some questionable act of serendipity), they were heading to England to be reunited with her.
This fact is not, and would never represent, some fairy tale, happy ending for the children but it would create the circumstances that would lead to my own conception and birth.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to decipher the true psychological character of their mother, Kathleen McCartney, at the time these events were unfolding but I do know that the prior act of depositing her children in a Catholic orphanage several years earlier, would not have played heavily upon the woman’s conscience.
She was planning to marry an RAF airman she had met at a dance and, yes, one day he would become my father but, before then, she had a problem because, in order to gain approval for the marriage from the RAF man’s own mother, she would be forced to reclaim the orphans back into her life.
And that is what happened … and that was why this story opens with a train speeding south from Scotland.
Three years later, Kathleen McCartney, not a maternal woman, would give birth to a baby boy.
His name would be Christopher.
- LIFE 1 (1956 – 1966)
- LIFE 2 (1966 – 1976)
- LIFE 3 (1976 – 1980)
- LIFE 4 (1980 – 1995)
- LIFE 5 (1995 – 1999)
- LIFE 6 (2000 – 2010)
About the Author
