Ann Breslin

He was sitting bent over on the chair, head in his hands, rocking slightly back and forth.

Crying?

Crying?

I had never seen my father with so much as a misty eye, and yet here he was, crying.

Not sobbing, not wailing, but definitely crying.

I wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't looked up and muttered, where you burn books, you burn people.

It was Derry, June 1973.

I was eight years old and just home from school.

The library at Brook Park, the People's Park, had been firebombed.

I was disturbed seeing my father crying.

I was used to seeing him shy or short-tempered, but never this.

He was 51 years old and went to the library about once a month on a Saturday.

and brought home the pile of books that he would read through in the evenings.

He loved history and poetry and later local writers like Lynn Doyle and W.F.

Marshall.

They were food and comfort to him as he worked in all weathers on building sites, carrying hods of bricks up ladders, gripping them so hard that the skin on his hands was broken and chafed.

Sitting on the edge of the sofa, using an old wooden chair as a table, he cleaned out the deep hacks with butter and sugar, rubbing the mixture into the open cuts to lift out the dirt and soothe and soften the skin.

Butter and sugar, his homemade balm.

He used the same chair to cut his tobacco, walnut plug, cutting off a piece and then rubbing it

putting it into the little pouch and then filling the bowl of his pipe.