Madeleine Read Free Page A

our heads to ask, though our names would have been a pretty strong clue if we’d thought about it. And Gerry’s dad was a joiner, like mine. His mum, Eileen, had been born in Glasgow to Irish parents. She had been sent to live with her grandmother in Donegal shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, returning to Glasgow when it was over. Gerry’s father, Johnny, was from St Johnston in County Donegal, just over the border with Northern Ireland.
    Johnny had had a tough start in life. He’d lost his mother, his elder brother and his father before he was sixteen. After spending some time with an uncle in Sligo, Johnny found himself responsible for his father’s pub and a small brother. Having been forced to give up his own education at a Jesuit college, Johnny wanted better for his own children and insisted that they all worked hard to gain the grades to get to university.
    Unlike my own family, Gerry’s was large and boisterous. Born in the same year as I was, 1968, he was the youngest of Johnny and Eileen’s five children. He has an elder brother, also Johnny, and there are three sisters in between them – Trisha, Jack and Phil. From Gerry’s stories it sounds as if it was a fun, loud and colourful household, quite mad at times. It must have been hard, too: seven people living in a one-bedroom place in a Glasgow tenement – and that was without the occasional ‘lodger’ with nowhere else to go who’d be offered a berth on the floor. Johnny senior was away working for long periods, and Eileen also worked intermittently, as a shop assistant and later as a cleaner, so ‘wee Gerry’ was often entrusted to the care of his elder siblings. But life in a tenement full of Catholic families and hordes of other kids had more advantages than disadvantages. Everyone was in the same boat, so to the McCann children and those of their neighbours, this was perfectly normal, and nobody felt deprived.
    Like me, Gerry did well academically in school. By the time he came along, the family work ethic was well established, his goals had been set for him and he followed in the high-achieving footsteps of his brother and sisters, competing with them and always determined to do even better. ‘Shy’ and ‘Gerry’ are words that would never occur in the same sentence. All the McCann children are very sociable and self-assured – and McCann confidence is of the kind that would make you a fortune if you could bottle it and sell it. My dad often cheekily remarks that they were born with silver microphones in their mouths.
    Gerry was good at sport, too, and being Gerry he was hugely competitive. Middle-distance running was his forte and at seventeen he was the fastest in Scotland in his age group over 800 metres. At Glasgow University he ran with the Hares and Hounds club, whose team strip was a hideous bright yellow. Fine for sports kit, but he was so attached to his running shirt that he insisted on wearing it out socially as well. You could see him coming from a mile away.
    To me, the contrasting strands of Gerry’s personality – the confidence and ebullience interwoven with that honesty and openness – combined to produce a very engaging and attractive man. He was a lot of fun on one hand and kind, serious and loving on the other. And yet I kept my distance and tried to play it cool. It was his jack-the-lad image that held me back, I suppose. I was hesitant to plunge into a relationship in which I might end up getting hurt and I guess there was an element of pride to it, too. I didn’t want to be just one of a succession of girlfriends. It all seems a bit silly now, after Gerry’s wonderful qualities have been confirmed to me so many times over the years. I’m not suggesting that his reputation as a ladies’ man was completely without foundation – it wasn’t – but there is no doubt that it was unfairly exaggerated, as these things often are, and that I paid too much attention to gossip. And believe me, I know now