A blissful, carefree day of summer as a child was rudely interrupted when my sister Maree took my car without permission. Gleaming in all its glory, it evoked the semblance of the male love of his boy toy. I threw a tantrum, and she sat gleefully enjoying my plight.
“She hadn’t insurance either,” Mum teased me when we reflected on the photo many years later.
My love of all boyish things, particularly modes of transport, began back in those days in the late 1960s when Mum and I travelled daily from Essex to London and back to visit Maree as she was cared for by the medical staff in London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for an inoperable brain tumour.
I often played on a toy London bus up and down her ward, unaware of the suffering she endured, although I should say they endured, as my mum kept her own trauma of seeing her little girl suffering without complaint. One thing I learned was how much a mother can endure and keep it hidden inside to protect her children.
Maree was a couple of years older, and the only sibling who was close to my weight, which it allowed her the liberty of tossing me gently off the end of the see-saw in the background when I was being my usual boisterous self. She was the sweetest and gentlest of children.
She succumbed to her illness in 1970 at the tender age of 10, after her doctors allowed her to be cared for at home.
Our family of me, Mum, Dad, my brother and remaining sister returned to our native Dublin that year, and the boat trip from Holyhead was yet another exciting adventure.
I was just turning seven, and to their credit they shielded me from the tragedy of the loss of one of life’s great gifts, Maree.
I’m in my 50s now. Mum and Dad have since joined Maree. Cancer took Mum at an earlier time than she deserved, and Dad died from her loss a few years later.
I have owned a string of cars since my childhood, some cheap and rust-ridden and some fairly nice ones, too, but I often reflect on how much I would give to find Maree had taken one of them for a spin, even without insurance.
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