Thank you
Mum loved a Thank You card – she had a stockpile of them and they lay in waiting, together with the Thinking of You cards, until the time came for her to be able to write one of them to someone.
So in keeping with her tradition, we know one of the first things she would want us to do, as a team, is to say thank you to you all - Thank you for taking the time to be here and for making this month, from 3rd April when mum passed away to today, 3rd May, such a caring, compassionate and bearable one.
It has been full of so many emotions that will resonate with many of you here: – disbelief, sadness, loss, love, joy, and grateful appreciation both for having had mum for so long and for the support and kindness of so many of you. She was our mum but she kind of belonged to everybody.
So many messages - memories of her care, kindness and nurturing spirit - memories of her mischievous, cheeky, amusing behaviours either experienced first hand or through one of us retelling a ‘mum tale’ to them.
Happy
Happy – It should have been mum’s middle name. On the day she passed away, Tricia and I spoke with Basil, one of mum and dad’s long-standing neighbours – we told him that sadly mum had passed away but that it was peaceful and she was happy ..... Basil’s simple reply was ‘She was always happy’ He wasn’t to know what a comforting comment that was at such a raw time ....
Now because mum was happy, we all had to be happy – none of us were allowed to be depressed. Believe us, we tried through our teenage years, and beyond, but she wasn’t having any of it.
'Go and visit a hospital or see people living out on the streets ...... then you will know what depression is' she would say. So we just gave in and abandoned any plans we had to try and feel sorry for ourselves.
Biography
Mum was born in Mastergeehy in a beautiful part of Kerry – the youngest of 4 sisters and a brother.
She went to the local national school and then took up a course in shorthand typing in Caherciveen. She came to London in 1951 where she worked for William Hill.
Meeting dad
In 1962 she met dad at a dance hall in Kilburn. When he escorted her home to Tufnell Park and asked to see her again on the following Saturday night – she told him that she was busy and couldn’t meet him. He was soon to find out that the reason she couldn’t meet him was that she was working evening shifts on the football pools to subsidise her mother’s pension back home, having lost her father some years before. Dad was so taken by her humility and her commitment to her mother that he knew she was the one for him.
They married in October 1964 in St Joseph’s in Highgate – what in later years, mum used to jokingly refer to as ‘The scene of the crime!’. It always amused us!
Home Life
We grew up appreciating the value of things – she never spoilt us but we never felt deprived of anything. We frequently heard her stories of hardship in Ireland and walking to school for three miles without shoes. Sometimes it was 5 miles .... it used to change from time to time, so we never quite knew whether to believe her!
Campbells
But we weren’t one family. We came as a pair. The Currans and The Campbells. Mum met Mary Campbell after their first borns, John and Mary, were born 2 months apart. Then began the synchronised pregnancy era with Bernadette and myself, Clare and Tricia, Kieran and Liz. Mary Kathleen had to go it alone as the 5th Campbell child without a Curran counterpart!!
So the 9 of us had two mums and lots of fun, ham sandwiches and orange dilute to keep us going for birthday parties and our regular outings to Finsbury Park.
We would all shuttle backwards and forwards across Ashfield and Hermitage Road for decades – It was a sad day for both mums when our Xmas day ritual of alternating which house we watched Top of The Pops in began to change shape with our lives.
In this age of social media where the lines of true friendship and loyalty are blurred, mum and Mary, from the day they met to the day mum passed, stood together as lifelong friends. In recent years, when mum had forgotten all our names, including Mary’s, she never forgot her face and their greetings with each other were so poignant. Two amazing women with their no nonsense approach – keeping us all in check, bringing us back down to earth and amusing us all in the process.
Aunt Abbie
Mum had another lovely relationship with her sister, Abbie and as children, we loved when they got together – they were a comedy duo or legends as Richard called them. They had so much in common, including both of them spending hours tidying up and the house still always looking the same when they’d finished! It’s comforting now to think they will be back together again in the same resting place with each other - alongside mum’s ‘favourite nephew’, Aunt Abbie’s son, Anthony.
School / St Marys
Mum spent 21 years as the powerhouse Welfare Assistant, or as we used to joke with her, The Bandage Keeper, at St Marys Priory School. The messages received from so many past and present pupils and staff is testimony to the little lady, Mrs Noreen Curran. She was so many things to so many people and even OFSTED, in the long forgotten days when inspections were more people orientated, called her ‘a gem’ – and she was.
So many times when any of us were with her over the years right up to more recent times with dad: young people, teenagers, young women and men with children of their own, would come up to mum, many of them hugging her, showing her so much fondness. I once said to her, ‘Mum, everyone loves you don’t they?’ to which she very humbly replied ‘They do’.
The staff treated mum like their own little queen – Her retirement party was such a tribute to her and we thank the school community for how they valued her both while she was there and in the 14 years since she left. She was never far away in their minds from the next invitation.
Attendance / Illness
In the same way mum wouldn’t let us be depressed, we weren’t allowed to be ill either.
Many OLC girls remember one particular Prize Night in the early 80s, when Sr John was giving out awards for 2,3,4 years and, in Liz’s case, 7 years 100% Attendance. As all our names were called out one after the other, Mary, Veronica, Patricia, Elizabeth Curran and the audience of pupils and parents began to laugh, Sr John stopped the whole hall with one of her looks and said, I don’t think we should be clapping the girls, I think their mother had better stand up. Mum stood up reluctantly as the whole school gave her a round of applause - embarrassed but enjoying the fun of the moment.
Work Ethic
Along with dad, mum instilled in us all a strong work ethic – that it was our responsibility to just get on with things. Having said that, there were protests against this positive attitude to work during the teenage years and she did get a mixed response at times. Mary would try to get away with doing as little as possible, Tricia and I would work hard and Liz had far too many programmes to watch, to contemplate studying.
We have told this story many times as an example of mum’s sharp wit and gentle jesting and several of you may have heard it – but for those of you who haven’t .....
When Liz opened her A Level results, with us all watching her with baited breath, she read the letter with a blank expression and then nonchalantly said ‘I got BBD’ - There was a moments silence and then, mum quick as a flash replied ‘ Well, with all that television you watched, you should have got BBC!’
Never judged
But for all her jesting, she never judged and her calm, collected approach to life was tangible. She let us all do our own thing, in our own way and she was always there to support us, no matter where we were and what we were doing.
When I lived up in Leeds, and I used to go out on cold winter mornings to get in my car and it wouldn’t start, I would come back in to the house and call mum for some TLC and she would always try to help make me feel better. Little did I know, until years later, that these lot were at home at the time, laughing at what I expected mum to do when she was 200 miles away, wasn’t a mechanic and couldn’t even drive. But I didn’t care – all I knew was that when I went back out to the car after talking to mum, it started and that was enough for me.
As adults, especially now being mums / aunts to Max and Daniel, we have realised how laid back she was, given she had four girls to worry about. She would let us all go out on our separate ways, and although she must have not rested until we were all back home safely, she never let us know any of her fears. Although Liz maintains that she gave mum none of this worry, and the guilt must all be ours, as she was always in at home watching Dempsey and Makepeace! Doing mum’s ironing also while watching so double brownie points!
Thunder
One of the few things that unsettled mum was thunder and lightning. As adults, wherever we have been in the world and there has been T+L, we always think of mum. The house would go in to lockdown. She would close all the curtains, everything electric would be turned off, and she would at times get out her rubber wellingtons, which she cut down the top of and we called her ‘Thunder Boots’ . Sometimes we found her sitting in dad’s car with her rosary beads, in the full eye of the storm, protected as she felt, by God and the rubber tyres!
St Anthony and St Jude
Mum’s too favourite saints we spent most of our time praying to were St Anthony and St Jude. We spent hours in Chestnuts Park – praying for the return of another lost ring that had come flying off as she pushed us on the swings.
And St Jude – Well, we spent more hours praying to the patron saint of Hopeless Cases for mum to pass her driving test than she spent actually driving the car. It was clearly never meant to be.
Memories
Mum had so many little quirks / so many sayings / turn of phrases/ ‘mumisms - so many things that made her laugh/ so many things that made us laugh.
She had ‘the wink’ when joking around and ‘the look’ when she disapproved of something – Max was grateful that he got both the last time he saw her.
She also was our very own Mrs Twiddle – doing so many things by mistake – like spraying Pledge on her hair instead of hairspray, and using one of her 13 air fresheners she had in the cupboard as deodorant – all followed by ‘Oh for goodness sake!’ when she realised what she had done.
She would be rushed to write hundreds of Christmas cards in a matter of days and sit up to cram write them but would invariably fall asleep on them and wake up with a big scrawl across the card or written the wrong family names by mistake. After the standard ‘ Oh for goodness sake’ out would come the tippex and she would utter the obligatory lesson to be learnt phrase ‘Next year I’m starting writing my cards in October’!
She fancied herself as a bit of a detective by working out that, at 5 years, I didn’t bite Mary’s arm as Mary had said I had because there was a clear set of teeth marks on her arm and I had a missing front tooth at the time.
She extended these detective skills to working out who had drawn on the new wallpaper with a pen by making all 4 of us draw a line as evidence – as Liz was the youngest with the poorest fine motor skills she got the blame for the offence.
She “hid” our Easter Eggs behind the sofa in the front room right by the radiator during a cold April. Yet another ‘Oh for goodness sake’ moment.
Her secret ingredient for her mashed potato which also happened to be the same secret ingredient for her scrambled eggs – not so secret sugar - how she had any left after using 5 spoons in her tea as well we will never know.
She insisted that vegetables were raw unless they had been cooked for at least an hour or maybe two.
When stopped by children on the street asking for a penny for the guy ... she would tell them that she would give them a penny on the way back as long as they could tell who the guy was,
She shushed her way through the whole of Coronation Street even though no one was talking.
She’d call me when I lived up in York and tell me it was a Bank Holiday in London.
When Mary lived back at home, had been out for a night and fell asleep with one shoe on and one off – mum told her that she went in to her and took the other one off in case she woke up in the night and thought she had developed a limp.
We all remember her clickety clicking on her old school typewriter, typing up my education dissertation, with Piaget’s name peppered through it a hundred times – only to comment on completing it – ‘Ok, now take it .... I have had enough of that Piggot bloke!’
When we tried, like us all in the 80s, to tape the Top 40 on a Sunday evening with the perfection of cutting the tape before the DJ’s voice kicked in and being delighted with our faultless performance, only for it to be ruined with mum arriving at the door of the front room saying ‘carrots?’ in her quest to find out our preferred vegetable of the evening.
She encouraged us / made us enter Talent Competition in Pontins – Overlooking the fact that you were meant to have some sort of talent to actually enter – but that didn’t matter / just a minor point - we are just all thankful that video cameras and Youtube didn’t exist to capture these moments!! Suffice to say the only ones that came back with any prizes were mum and dad for their “old time waltzing”.
There were trying and crying times too over the years for us all but she always ‘positived’, for want of a better verb, her way and our way through it.
Max Daniel
She was a lovely grandma to Max and Daniel.
One lovely memory of Max with mum when he was three and decided he would help her buy some shoes. He picked up a pair far too big for her and when she told him they were too big, he said ‘That’s ok, grandma ... you will grow in to them!’ As Max grew bigger and she grew smaller, their relationship grew sweeter. On the historical, nerve-racking day last year, that Max got his hair cut that had been long and curly for his whole 15 years, mum spoke one of the most articulate sentences she had spoken for some time, as she said to him as he was nervously going in to the hairdressers, wondering if he going to regret cutting it .... ‘You’ve got beautiful hair!’ His only reply was ‘Great timing grandma!’ and again they both laughed.
Recent years
In recent years, as mum became less vocal, she was no less loving. She forgot our names and the names of people special to her but never forgot that they were special.
She never lost her perceptive ability to care about others when she saw people struggling with their health or in difficult situations – even though she was not in a position to be able to help them directly. She had incredible compassion.
She loved the times when Tricia took her to Singing for the Brain. She was often the star attraction.
People would smile at her when we were anywhere in public. She would smile back with such genuine appreciation of other people and gave out such radiance. She was just so sweet, so incredibly cute and our own little Mrs Pepperpot.
80th Birthday party
Mum’s 80th birthday party, 5 years ago, that many of you were there at, was a great celebration of her life while she was still able to feel the joy of having fun.
Now
Since mum’s passing, people’s messages about mum have been overwhelming. The overriding memory people have of her is her smiling and laughing and being one of life’s bests. One of the things she passed on to all of us was to never be afraid to laugh at yourself and not to take yourself or others too seriously. She had an enormous capacity for fun and for joking but was never malicious or mean-spirited, always cheeky and good natured.
She had the ability to make us all feel that we were her favourite daughter whenever we were with her (even though Liz wants it noted that she actually was!). Her hugs, her kisses and regular phone calls and letters when we left home or went travelling, meant more than she probably ever realised. None of us ever doubted how much she loved us all. She was and always will be at the very centre our family, the one who held everything together, who taught us how to be strong and independent, taught us how to be forgiving, how to be kind and how much family really means.
Annie’s song
Mum loved singing, dancing and music and we wanted to play something that might go some way to capture her essence in some way.
Annie’s Song is as close as we will get – Not only has it a great tempo to waltz to but, long after mum lost her speaking voice, as soon as we put this song on she would, until recently, sing almost every word. She was so tangibly alive inside!
Dad
The final words to dad.
We all know that promises are very hard to keep. You and mum, 53 years ago made a promise:
For better, For worse – For richer, For poorer That would have been the first 45 years then - the rich bit being when mum on several occasions won £50 on Red Rum and the things she didn’t buy with that!
In sickness and in health, til death us do part
Since mum became ill, the tables turned in your roles as a partnership, She had spent years looking after the five of us – and slowly, over recent years, you have done everything to help her. Your dedication and commitment to her has been so admirable. Keeping her warm and fed – laughing with her, teasing her playfully and protecting her. The look in her bright blue Irish eyes, in what we never knew at the time were to be her final days, said she was happy and ready to go peacefully.
Noreen Curran was a very special lady, a beautiful spirit who was our mum and your wife and we are so proud of her and you.
God Bless and Rest in Peace our wonderful mum.
X xxxx