Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(15)

I was standing there, unmissed, beside her.


Having lived in more normal-sized social environments since leaving home, a lot of my childhood seems as insane to me as it might to an outsider. I grew well used to separating out the many personalities in my family, discerning how each interacted with the others, how they formed into groups or reacted to the groups of others, but when I actually think about the ordinary, daily life we led, I find myself asking the same questions strangers ask. How did any of us get to use a bathroom in the mornings? When did Daddy sleep? Were we ever actually alone?

Every single evening for the first ten years of my life, I spent some part of it with at least nine of my siblings, in one house. We are similar enough in ages that we now all feel like peers, but I have to make myself remember that, as children, the age disparities were sufficient to make each of us feel we had little in common with at least half of our siblings. This was, I’m sure, more pronounced for the eldest three, the Big Ones, who must have felt put upon by the babysitting demands that fell on them precisely when they felt least like looking after children. Few tasks could be less appetising to a freshly minted teen than supervising one of six or seven younger siblings who held them in varying states of awe. I don’t have to intuit this, since they said it quite openly all the time. When Dara and Shane were smashing themselves up on BMXs and sneaking fags, I was still using the tiny blue scissors to cut out pictures of dinosaurs that I could put in the cereal box of prehistoric bits and bobs I termed, rather grandly, my dinosaur den. I was as ignorant of their lives as I was of taxes, politics, or girls – although, in between snips, I do recall wondering why the latter’s bums went all the way round. Despite this, at my father’s insistence, I spent an inordinate amount of time with my older brothers. They already had to share a room with my little brother and me, which was probably not ideal, since when they were sixteen and fourteen years old, we were six and three, sleeping at the bottom of two bunk beds placed side by side. The room therefore operated on two different strata; on the top level, talk of football and fights and discos and illegal fireworks, while Conall, on the lower level, would be getting very detailed explanations about the dinosaurs I would point out to him – but never let him touch – in the snazzy cereal box he doubtless coveted.

Dara and Shane were charged with taking me into town or to football matches, probably just to give everyone a reprieve from my manic energy. They were less than thrilled about being seen in public with a small, strange ginger boy, and the fact that I carried around a box of dinosaur-related miscellany probably didn’t help. But take me they did, and I almost always returned home safely. It’s a curious thing that when time came for me to greet fatherhood at the age of thirty-two, I fretted a lot about whether I possessed the maturity and will to look after a child. I’d forgotten that so much of the guardianship I experienced in childhood was from children who actively resented my company. And in return I loved them more than anything.


I was well into adulthood before I realised most other people don’t have to list their family in one long run, and always in age order – Sinead-Dara-Shane-Orla-Maeve-Mairead-Dearbhaile-Caoimhe-Fionnuala-Conall – because they will, otherwise, leave someone out. Even though this is true, I still reserve the right to be offended if anyone asks if I know all my siblings’ names, which happens roughly a third of the time I mention the size of my family.

‘Well,’ I’ll say, to some friend of a friend, in between bites of tapas, ‘there is one brother whose name I’ve never caught.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, tall guy, lovely fella all things considered,’ I’ll say, spooning the last bit of tapenade onto a pitta, ‘but it’s just gone on too long. I’d feel rude introducing myself now that we’re all approaching middle age.’


As children, our family’s internal subdivisions were useful for keeping track of the different age groups. Like all class systems, it was instituted by those at the top, ostensibly as a shorthand for keeping things in order, while also conferring a certain irrefutable status on those who invented it. Being a Big One was just different from being a Middle One, no matter how old you got. Their seniority travelled with them, as if it were a ladder of power pulled up behind them as they climbed, out of reach to those who followed. Sinead, Dara and Shane were aristocrats, custodians of an unearned but unimpeachable moral authority that was rarely challenged or even considered, least of all by me, a Wee One through and through. Each of them had already left home for university by the time I started secondary school, an absence that only added to their cachet. The Big Ones had, after all, lived through that odd period of time when our family was relatively small, and watched first hand as it ballooned. To me this meant they might as well have been present at the birth of the Universe.

The Middle Ones, though only slightly younger in real terms, lacked this perspective, and so we held them in less awe. But they also knew the game was rigged. Unbeknownst to us at the bottom, at some point closer to the dawn of time the Big Ones had told Maeve and Orla that after a certain point – say, finishing primary school, or making your confirmation – a Middle One would progress to being a Big One. In reality, as each milestone came and went it became clearer and clearer that the divides were impermeable, and no such social mobility was possible. By the time this betrayal was realised, the Big-Middle-Wee heuristic had been intractably established. So much so, in fact, that when the Wee Ones reached those same milestones seven years later, it was with no concept that such a promotion was even being denied. Fuelled by resentment toward their social betters, the Middle Ones thus contrived deep distinctions between themselves and those below. In so far as four members of a family arbitrarily grouped together by age can be said to have an ethos, theirs might have been something like ‘we are not Wee Ones’. Maeve and Orla set the rota in which our daily labours were enshrined. Dearbhaile, closest in age to the Wee Ones, and perhaps nervous this would place her position at risk, was particularly vigilant, and took to policing our bedtimes with the iron fist of a prison camp guard. These were delineated in increments, informally attached to the Australian soap operas they followed each weeknight. It was generally agreed that even the dewiest babe-in-arms should be permitted to stay up until the day-glo charms of Neighbours finished at 6 p.m. Staying up to watch the slightly more self-serious Home and Away was a privilege enjoyed only by those over twelve. The true Rubicon for emotional maturity was being allowed to watch Heartbreak High, which owed its place as our natural watershed to the fact that some of its characters had nose rings and disliked school. At each of these shows’ end there would be an audible swivel of heads, as attention was brought to bear on whosoever had not yet decamped to their respective rooms for the evening. Were one of us Wee Ones bold enough to stay up later than was allowed, it was presumed we would be murdered, probably by Dearbhaile. Perhaps only Mairead didn’t seem especially bothered by the ins and outs of who was where or what, maybe because she was technically the Middle Child and free from such insecurities. Although one does wonder if her placing merits the traditional distinction, when middle here means being the sixth of eleven.