Books: I fell in love with Sherkin as a child... and set my novel there

Who doesn’t love a good love story? Well, my life started with one, though the setting was far from romantic. It was the Intensive Care Unit at St Finbarr’s Hospital in Cork.

My mum, Carmel Feeney, a nurse, had just returned from a year travelling around America, and was on her first day at work.

In attendance was my dad Fin Breatnach, a third-year medical student ‘doing the rounds’.

Both were masked, both just 22, but their eyes met, sparks flew, and in just a few moments, they had left a lasting impression on each other.

So much so that when my dad met his friend (another medical student) shortly after, who told him about the ‘brand new nurse’ who had just started, who was gorgeous and who he was intending to ask out, my dad said his goodbyes, immediately doubled back, and asked her out first!

Well, all’s fair in love and war, as they say.

My parents were married three years later and, by the time I arrived, my dad was doing a six-month stint in Obstetrics in the Erinville Hospital.

He was on call there the night my mum went into labour with me. Which was just as well because when I came into the world looking a concerning shade of blue, there was no paediatrician on duty! So, it was left to him to get me started.

His next posting was at the Mercy Hospital where he was inspired by Dr Seamus O’Donoghue to focus on Paediatrics.

It was the early 1970s, when the use of chemotherapy to treat cancers in children was in its infancy. My dad’s interest in this area ignited but it meant we had to up sticks from Cork to Coventry where he would complete his paediatric training, and after that to Great Ormond Street in London for his oncology training.

When we returned to Ireland, it was to live in Dublin, where my father started work at Crumlin’s Children’s Hospital and established Ireland’s first Paediatric Oncology centre.

It was extremely high-pressure work, time-intensive, and without half as many staff as a comparable unit in the UK would have had.

But my father was fortunate that for respite in the summer we could go to Sherkin Island in West Cork, where his mum, my gran, had a cottage.

Those trips were the highlight of the year for my siblings and I.

From Cork city, we’d turn onto the N71 and start counting down the towns and villages - the place names having an almost mystical sound to us: Innishannon, Bandon, Clonakilty, Rosscarbery, Leap and on to Skibbereen (which we had to say as fast as possible for maximum effect).

After that, it was on to the last and, to our minds, most beautiful stretch of the journey, to Baltimore. And then the ferry crossing to Sherkin Island where the holiday would really begin.

The island had been a feature of dad’s childhood summers because his parents, Monica and Riobárd Breatnach, loved the place and its outer neighbour Cape Clear.

So much so, in fact, that Riobárd, a professor of Old and Medieval English in UCC, translated Conchúr Ó Síocháin’s Seanchas Chléire (The Man From Cape Clear) into English in 1975.

Riobárd was a friend and peer of J.R.R. Tolkien, a fact I was thrilled to discover having been a huge fan of The Lord Of The Rings growing up.

He was also on the very first jury for the Cork Film Festival. Seemingly, he invited all the distinguished members to visit Fastnet Lighthouse during which trip everyone, bar my grandad, was horribly seasick!

Riobárd died at just 61, the year after The Man From Cape Clear was published but my Gran, a wonderful storyteller in her own right and a most resilient lady, continued to live on the island alone for another 20 years, despite urgings from her family to live with them in Cork or Dublin instead. But she insisted, if she was going to be heartbroken, she’d rather be so in a beautiful place and stayed.

And my goodness, did we all find Sherkin beautiful. It was a playground for us as children: traipsing across pock-marked cow fields, down to pristine beaches which we often had to ourselves, jumping in off the rocks into the incoming tides, and then racing back to the cottage, always with sky-rocketing appetites.

It was an experience in peace and freedom, and in such contrast to the noise of Coventry and London and even Dublin, that we revelled in it.

Only the skies in Sherkin seemed to carry any drama, with the weather rolling in from miles away and the spectacular, drawn out, summer sunsets that rounded out each day.

It’s maybe no wonder, when I was given the advice to write what you know and love some years ago, that I immediately thought of Sherkin as the setting for a book.

I arrived on the pier with my main character, looked up the steep hill, took a deep breath and started walking, combining memories with imagination to see what would happen.

And what happened many, many drafts later was Love & Other Liabilities, a second chance romance set on my own island of ‘Inish Ruin’.

It’s the story of an emotionally walled-off woman who has to return to the island where she grew up to save her finances, but is instead forced to face up to the past - and the boy who broke her heart - with the help of an irrepressible flatmate, an elderly bride-to-be, an unruly dog, and an island of well-intentioned meddlers!

A summer escape from the February rains. And a love story from me to my favourite place.

Fiona McCann’s début novel Love & Other Liabilities was launched on February 12, published by Poolbeg.