Turn that off….now!….. I was listening to ‘Rio’ - by Duran Duran on headphones after lights out when, ‘Fat Harry’, came into the dorm. You didn’t mess with Mr Millar, great History teacher, a favourite at Armagh Royal, tough but fair. Still, this didn’t seem fair at all, headphones were allowed, he’d picked on me that night. Next morning at breakfast I realised he’d been kind, making sure I didn’t hear the news on the radio - dad had been in a car crash out west, near Ballina, en route to our Achill house.
Mum, Pete & auntie Ruth were in the car outside to take us on the 4 hour drive. January, then August ’83 largely defined the next 35 years. The lady in the other car died. Dad’s big rover had no front, it was on top of him. They cut him out.
We followed the ambulance north from Castlebar hospital, then an ambulance transfer at the border and up to neurosurgery at the Royal in Belfast. Surgery, treatment & rehab were televised on ITV as part of a series called ‘Trauma’, (there’s still a VHS in my office somewhere). Later that year we watched it in the boarders’ tv room. Someone shouted, ‘Whitcroft’s dad’s on the TV’ and 50 boys crammed around and stared with morbid fascination. The hand drill squeaked through a remarkably bloodless skull, and a little fountain of fluid popped out. I lingered near the door, lapping up the fleeting notoriety, but a bit overwhelmed.
Before & After | 1983 Rover 3.5L
This strange new, raging, repetitive, dependant was discharged in April. That summer we went to Guysmere boys camp at Castlerock. Pete was 12 I was 15. To collect us, mum drove up, dad a passenger, gran in the back seat, heading to her sister in Eglinton. They never arrived. A trailer came loose and flattened the new car on top of them. Dad had his second brain injury in 6 months. Mum, brain injury and facial lacerations. Gran, just a dislocated hip.
Church members were extremely kind. Good friends from the church collected and housed us, aunts and uncles took their turn over the summer. Our older sister took time off nursing, until that wasn’t sustainable. Eventually, someone had to come back to live in ‘The crazy house’. I moved home from boarding, Pete followed the next year. It was always eventful, like a constant ‘yo sushi’ of hilarious, very sad & dangerous.
In the middle of this I came to faith. Our church in Newry was safe, hopeful & friendly - home wasn’t. Music, singing, writing songs to express these intense new feelings, all became indispensable - God, girls & guitars!
Sometimes on the morning jog to the school bus, if it'd been a tough night at home, I’d sing a favourite worship song, or something I was trying to write to cheer me up. One of them was this, “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place’. The tune seemed to speak to something deep in our roots, N.Irish, a hint Scottish. The words of the Psalm ‘my soul is longing and fainting the courts of the Lord to see” hit me deep. That was my experience. Home would never be a safe place, but church was, the Lord was. Sometimes on those lonely walks to the bus I thought I could feel His hand on my shoulder, or hear a bird sing along, as if to say, “I get it”.
How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place | Psalm 84
It’s kind of an easy score at the moment for people to dump on ‘the church’. Even people who love it, like to complain about it! I’d just like to say that ‘The house of the Lord’ has been part of the saving of me. It and music, and a good marriage, have been components, consequences of knowing ‘The Lord ..shining as the sun, the Lord... like a shield’
I never loved the way we’d do this in church. A pianist would play it serenely with that pretty ‘arrangers motif’ between the verses - and I’d be biting my lip wanting to ‘get tore in’ ! So this version is trying to reflect what I grew up listening to in pubs on Achill, a bit Paul Brady, a bit of the Chieftains, a bit of the North. Hope you enjoy it. Special thanks to Gillian Brown, I was gonna sing this myself, but when we started recording harmonies etc, it just fitted her voice like a glove!
Resources for you to use this version will be free on our home page as Worship Bundle.
21 January 2025