‘I HAD TO STOP RUNNING FROM DAD’S DEATH’
Tess Cope, 61, is a transformation specialist helping leaders harness their potential through systemic coaching. She lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband Gary.
In Irish culture, family is everything. As a little girl in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, birthdays and Christmases were spent in a sea of uncles, aunts and cousins, and our house was always busy and full of laughter. It was just as well – by the end of the decade, the streets beyond our front door became fraught with danger.
Reaching my teens, the trauma of the Northern Ireland conflict was just part of daily life, from frequent stop-and-searches on the way home from school, to frenzied escapes from buildings as bombs detonated. What happened to my country in those years is no secret – but what happened to me in my early 20s was something I kept bottled up for decades.
Police greeting
I was 22
