Family Fortunes: My guardian angel chased me with a frying pan

Breda came into my grandmother’s home aged 14, where she helped with the running of the house and raising my own mum and her six siblings.

When my mum died, too young, Breda came to work for my father and was on the front line in raising myself and my baby brother. She had been particularly close to my mum and never forgot that.

She was a devoted woman: devoted to the church, her family, and to me and my brother.

When she would hear I hadn’t been to Mass, she would call me a communist across the kitchen table. I was pretty sure I wasn’t a communist, and in subsequent years I like to think I was proven right.

Her signature dish was a mince-swimming-in-gravy combination – served three days a week come rain, hail or snow – and I cannot profess to have loved it. One day I shouted something at her and she chased me, armed with the frying pan, like a lion in the Serengeti, through the sitting room and hall, back round to the kitchen, up the stairs, patting me on the behind with the pan as we went, until I ran out of breath.

She had a few laps in her still. She was also known to chase me down the road at times. I was caught every time. I just couldn’t understand how; she was a heavy smoker. It was 1984, the year of Carl Lewis, LA and four gold medals, and the whole world seemed to be running faster than 10-year-old I.

Breda was very vocal and never failed to add her voice to the debate of the day. She could tear strips off the parish priest if the mood took her, but everyone who knew her knew her bark was always worse than her bite.

I am sure it was her who hard-wired me with a love of opinions and instilled in me the confidence to voice it when you have the urge to.Today she is still going strong, aged, I dunno, somewhere between 45 and 105.

When I think of the link from my mum to Breda, through the loss of my mum, and those years my brother and I were growing up, and I look back now, through the eyes of a parent, I’m pretty sure that I grew up with my own guardian angel right beside me all the way. It just so happened that she was the one serving up the mince.

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