“I had an uncle, Feathery Mickey Bourke, who lived with us when we were children. He was very much part of the family, silent and odd and lefty lefty as he was. In many ways I was his kind of fair haired boy, because I was the eldest and he had a shine to me even in later years when he wouldn’t talk to anybody. But he always liked to see me coming back because I had been away in foreign places and places he had been to. In one period in his life he had been to the Mediterranean and so he lived vicariously through me as old people will do through young people. He was very much a prominent person in my early life who talked a great deal about the history of Limerick families and who told me a great deal about Irish saga and Irish Mythology. There is always a member of the family who affects you. It might be a baby brother, it might be a maid, a nanny, a gardener. In my case it was Feathery, my Uncle .You have to begin with some kind of gargoyle’’.
The Stony Thursday 1978. Poet Desmond O’Grady talking to John Liddy.
Leave a Reply