John Spillane: My proudest achievement is being a dad
John Spillane: 'I think my greatest quality is that I don’t have any greatest quality, just a load of kind of grand and not too bad qualities'. Picture: Fionn Hennessy-Hayes
I grew up on Laburnum Lawn, in Wilton, in a semi-detached house on a gentle slope on the southside of Cork, just where the city melted into the country. At the bottom of our garden was the Ditch, and beyond that the Orchard, then the Meadow, then the Quarry, a wonderland of wild and tangled natural woodland and water.
I remember having a family picture taken with my father standing behind me and smiling. I was a baby and his happiness went through me. I was one and half when he died and though they say it isn’t possible I think it stayed in my memory cos the picture was on the mantelpiece shortly after that, when I was two.
