Liam at Home - Joy McCormick
Taken from North by Northwest

Liam McCormick's immense and unusual gifts are chronicled elsewhere in this book. My task is to try to portray the man - Liam at home, Liam the husband, father and member of the community. It is not possible to describe a person with whom one has spent thirty-two years, so I can only give examples of the man as we knew him. For example, he was an immaculate timekeeper. Another asset was his reliability: that is apart from sudden seismic changes of plan, which as when he tried to change the fully booked venue of our honeymoon a few days before the wedding. We did actually stay one week as booked on the Canary Island of La Palma. There he heard of a virtually unknown island called Lanzarote. So off we flew, landing in a sandstorm, to stay in the island's only hotel where their fresh water came daily by sea in a tanker.

Settling down in Liam's family home in Greencastle was a challenge for both of us. I had emigrated from Dublin's north side to make a busy literary and organisational career in London for many years. Liam was a bachelor of 47 who, apart from college and sailing adventures, had lived with his mother in Greencastle. Part of his romantic picture of me was as a 'Protestant nationalist'. I saw myself as an ordinary Irishwoman who had been picked up on the pier in Greencastle by a man in pretty rough sailing clothes, who turned out to be the architect of the church in Milford which I admired so greatly. Our home had been bought in 1875 by Liam's great grandfather. Pictures of ships he had captained hung on our walls, as did a superb tiller carved by Imogen Stuart for Liam's Scandinavian voyages. The church in Southampton was just opening at that time, but Burt dominated our lives, especially as much of its creativity was in the building period. A few years later, in 1970, as a proud father he had our son Finn christened in Burt Church. Our daughter Aisling, however, was born in 1972, had to wait eighteen months for the church at Glenties to be finished to have her ceremony there. Glenties was important to Liam. His grandfather had walked from there to Derry, holding his Irish dictionary in his pocket, to eventually become High Sheriff of that city in 1901. Liam was the next Catholic to hold that position, at a time when we were both deeply involved in the Troubles of Northern Ireland.

:Liam's life was wrapped up in history and in the place where he lived. This led to his precept that a building should not be assessed until it was at least twenty years old. Many tried to urge him to live and work in Dublin; but he knew that much of his inspiration came from the sea and his life as a Donegal man. Constantly reading history, he made it real for our children by taking them round Greencastle's Norman castle, picturing for them knights and men at arms riding past our house. Sailing through European canals and rivers with the children, he brought many places alive for them. Sailing up the River Main, we knew that we were following in the steps of the Irishman St. Kilian, who founded the beautiful city of Wurzhurg. Liam himself got inspiration for the reordering of Armagh Cathedral from St. Kilian's Cathedral. On a practical level he brought back an idea he saw for a long slide across our garden at home for the children.

As a husband, Liam was an honourable and immensely enjoyable and interesting man, at the same time as being a normal fallible human being. Our home was always full of people reflecting our life - yachtsmen and women, politicians, artists, fishermen, friends. After his funeral friends and family filled the house and garden. After nine months in bed, having suffered a stroke, he was content to die, saying that there was no life for him if he couldn't read. So after asking that Imogen Stuart should design his headstone, he left us in August 1996. An outsize and caring personality leaves an immense gap, which is still with us today.

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Joy McCormick (nee Telford) emigrated to London in 1956. After serving as press officer to the International PEN Club's worldwide conference, she became their archivist for a period, before setting up the newly conceived Consumers' Association, as assistant director. Post-marriage, she designed and made vestments for Ireland, England and the US, including for three of Liam's churches. She represented the Irish Countrywomen's Association on the Irish Governments Commission on the Status of Women, including attendance at the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women; Action for Equality, Development and Peace in Beijing in 1995 and a Session of the Commission in New York. She has been a trustee of the Omagh Fund since 1998.

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