The last summer with my father

It was the summer of 1969. We were on holidays in Kerry, mother, father and four children - my teenage brothers, John and Dermot, my four-year-old sister, Sinead. Plus the 1950s-style extended family of my aunt, Mother Cecelia, and her travelling companion, Sister Ben, an honorary auntie in our household, because in those far-off days nuns were not allowed to venture out into the world alone.

It was the summer before my father died; our last family holiday together. It was July and, of course, like all the summers of one's childhood, my memories of it are steeped in cloudless skies and warm sunshine - although I do remember an improved proficiency at card games (Cheat, Beggar My Neighbour, Fish in the Pond) and ploughing through several Reader's Digest condensed books, the usual reading fare in holiday homes of the late 1960s, which suggests that it must have rained at some stage. We were renting a house in Waterville, one of a large estate built for workers at the local cable station. Opened in 1870, the cable station was one of several along the southwest coast from which a transatlantic telegraph cable was laid on the seabed, stretching all the way to New York and Newfoundland.

By 1969 the Waterville station had fallen into disuse and was out of bounds for us children. But, as with most deserted institutional buildings, our fascination with it lay in its eerie abandonment. Once a site of thriving function and proud modernity, its empty halls and holed windows echoed bleakly of a terrible redundancy, the lofty industrial aspirations of the Victorian age come to naught. Nature had claimed much of it back. Thistles and weeds sprouted in its gutters and forecourts, but it was still solid, a building of Empire, made to last and dominate, perched on its headland looking out towards the large world which by then had passed it by. The large world did not intrude much in those days except, of course, that this was the year of the Apollo 11 moonlanding, which we listened to on the wireless. Radio was the single biggest influence in our house. We tuned into Radio Luxembourg, while my parents ranged over the dial. Mealtimes revolved around the news. The pips at six were a signal for absolute silence.

Both of my parents were political animals, though from different sides of the civil war divide, my father being a staunch Dev man. Elections were their passion. I see my mother still, hushing us with one hand while, ear pressed to the Bush transistor, she scribbled down count results on the backs of envelopes. When my father came home from work, they would pore over these lists as if piecing together an elaborate, 1,000-piece jigsaw for adults. I think of the PR system as being the template of their relationship and its vocabulary - first preferences, quotas, transfers - as their language of love.

Because of the proximity of the mountains, the radio reception in Waterville was atrocious. My father had to heft the wireless from room to room to find the optimum spot, which turned out to be the return of the stairs. It was there we squatted to hear Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind. I remember less the momentousness of the occasion than the sheer discomfort of listening to that broadcast on the crackling set, with its makeshift aerial made from a coathanger, the sound coming in angry waves, hissing and fading, rising to a whistling screech, then subsiding again. But, as my father told us, it was history in the making.

It was hard to make the connection between the staticky reports and the bright orb that hung in the night sky over the house. We went outside to look afterwards and somehow I expected to be able to see the traces of that tiny figure on the moon's surface. A sooty set of footprints, perhaps? But it was like the terrible neglect of the cable station; man's puny efforts had left no mark on the vast, luminous geography of the moon.

The nuns arrived from their convent in Tyrone and my father drove to collect them in Killarney in the family Hillman. When they arrived, all clacking beads and starched wimples, Sister Ben discovered her little black suitcase - standard issue for nuns in those days; all of them owned one - had been left at the railway station.

My father had to drive all the way back to fetch it, a good 100-mile round trip. I think of him driving alone through the blue summery twilight, swathes of smoky clouds over the mountains, the shimmering sea on his right as he passes through Derrynane, Sneem and Kenmare, and I see it as the beginning of his journey away from us. And there is something about that case left on the platform in Killarney which seems to me the lonely epitome of impending death.

He was already ailing then, though he did not know it.

The memory of that holiday is reduced to such fragments. Props and snapshots. The sea-damp air in the high-windowed house, the furry, brown carpet on the return of the stairs, the arched front porch. This was a summer of kite-flying and swimming. My brother Dermot and I had kites which we flew - and eventually lost to the Atlantic - on the beach at Waterville. I remember still the tremendous tug of the wind, the thrusting flap of the plastic, the gritty feel of the salt-coated kitestring, anchored around an Ovaltine tin.

We went swimming with my father - my mother was afraid of the water. He was self-taught, employing a strange side stroke which we considered only one step up from the dog paddle. The nuns watched from the beach. I suppose the same prohibition applied to swimming as to travelling alone. They sat like stranded crows on the sands, hiding behind striped windbreaks. I pitied them their enclosure in unforgiving black.

And where is my father in these snapshots? Already missing, it seems. This was a time when fathers were the photographic archivists of the family; he it was who took the pictures. Behind the camera, not in front of it.

My only picture of him on that holiday is a mental one. He is sitting at the head of the table in that house in Waterville, wearing a check shirt and a porridge-coloured cardigan with leather elbow patches. The corn-coloured light of a late summer's evening streams in behind him, showing up the bashful limits of his farmer's tan. He smells of hair oil. He is about to say grace. An old-fashioned father, a man of his time. Born in 1910, he had more in common with the Victorian-age cable station than the headlong rush to modernity of the late 1960s in which he now seems to me stranded.

There he sits, at the head of the table, a long refectory distance between us, unaware of the sickness and pain to come, and the rupture in the family that his absence would create. The innocence of all that was what we celebrated, unknowingly, that summer of 1969.