Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(16)

For our part, being a Wee One meant being subject to a sort of benign servitude, but also free from the politicking that came from finding oneself so close to and yet so far from real power. We enjoyed a lessening of responsibility born of the fact that we were more likely to be considered, essentially, giant babies than functioning people, and this well into our older years.

We also benefited in another, less immediately obvious way. It’s inarguable that my father relaxed with age, gradually loosening the grip in which he held his children as each managed to survive school trips, hospital visits, exam schedules and nights out without being maimed, murdered or featured in newspaper articles in which neighbours said we ‘always seemed perfectly normal before this’. As younger parents, Mammy and Daddy adhered to a strict code that was largely absent by the time I was growing up. In fact, the televisual rubric I just described would have been unthinkable while my mother was still alive. She was not a lover of television, unlike my father, who loves the medium so much I’m pretty sure he can still see the 5USA logo when he shuts his eyes. It’s likely that Neighbours became the staple of our TV diet since it was originally the only show that Mammy permitted us to watch, and even then only at lunch time during school holidays. It was supplemented by Glenroe, a gently diverting rural melodrama that ran on Sunday nights in Ireland for two decades on a budget roughly equivalent to a tube of Pringles. For me and every other Irish child, it was the last thing we were allowed to watch each weekend. Once we heard the strangled fiddle music that brought each episode to a close, we’d have to face the trudge towards bed, and the school week ahead. Which meant we’d sit through thirty minutes of crag-faced people in wellies having affairs near barns just to keep our weekend alive.

My parents had been stricter in other, more meaningful ways too. The Big Ones describe their adolescent years as if they were parented by the Stasi. Each tells tales of my dad sitting in his car outside teen discos, waiting for the last chime of music to sound. At this, he would blare his horn until they marched into his Volvo, red-faced and sullen, for their 9:30 p.m. ride home. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I was pretty much allowed do what I wanted, and regularly stayed out all night and into the small hours of the next day. So long as I was bright and chipper, and my school results didn’t suffer, nothing was said. No doubt this was partly due to my father becoming less fearful of our independence as successive waves of his children took to their own two feet without disaster. But it’s also likely that the thrill of acting as our private taxi service was beginning to dim.


Some things about having such a large family are stranger than people even think to suggest. I remember standing with my father in the kitchen of Nazareth House convent, waiting on them to deliver the truly gigantic turkey they cooked for us every Christmas. Officially, they were cooking the self-same large turkey we had brought over, since our own oven was too small to cook something big enough to feed the entire clan. But, in practice, they gave us a brand-new, much larger turkey, bearing little resemblance to our own. The turkey we were handed by Sister Angela, which had gone in the size of a rucksack, was now the size of a Fiat 500, resplendent in garnish and trimmings. It was the kind of thing you could imagine being taken out of the oven by a forklift, rather than a kindly nun, but that’s underestimating Sister Angela, a lovely, burly woman from the west of Ireland who had a smile that could melt glass and forearms that bent steel. She was effectively Popeye in a habit, and seemed to enjoy nothing on Earth more than preparing us a turkey that, once eaten, we could happily strip to the bones and convert into a back bedroom.

This subterfuge was, of course, never directly acknowledged. The nuns knew my father to be a proud and dignified man, and for us to mention they’d been switching the bird every year might have made things awkward. They were soft on my dad not just because he was a lovely man who had done so much for us, but also because he donated so much of his time and effort to the community. Despite working full time as an engineer, and seeing to the upkeep, recreation and extracurricular activities of his eleven children, he also served on the parish vocations council and as the school’s treasurer, and was always on hand to perform any number of other duties, like recording school events on his camcorder so they could be distributed to parents.

This combined my dad’s two favourite things: helping people and contriving excuses to use new technological apparatus. He took to it with the same zeal and professionalism with which he attacked all tasks. So it was that an offhand request that he record one school concert quickly snowballed into a multi-term commitment to record each nativity, musical and choir recital that ever took place while his children attended the school. For a man like my dad, this also entailed securing a rudimentary editing desk and tape-splicer, and buying multi-volume manuals on transition effects and video graphics.

My father’s first camcorder came just before I was born, and made its debut at my christening in November 1985. This film is best known among our family for featuring the tail end of my dad’s brief adventure with facial hair, as prolonged exposure to footage of his ill-advised moustache led him to shave it off during the editing process. By the time he was using his camcorder skills for school occasions, his efforts had progressed beyond the realm of mere recording, reflecting the swagger and dynamism that comes to a director once he’s bought eighteen issues of What Camera? magazine and a highlighter pen. Solos are zoomed, entrances panned from one side of the stage to the other, and audience reaction shots captured with unflashy brio. My father was self-taught, but even the most discerning cineaste would have to admire the star wipes and drop-shadow WordArt title sequences, made famous by Bergman and Scorsese.