Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(2)

He might have been stressed by that morning’s checkpoint run, the dystopian rigmarole undertaken by everyone who lived on Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic of Ireland, during which army patrolmen would have commanded him to present ID as they manoeuvred their long, mirrored stick under the vehicle on the off-chance he’d paused ahead of the school run to place explosive materiel underneath his eleven infants’ feet. Of course, you could also just have happened to catch him during the nerve-obliterating period between 1999 and 2001, when no fewer than six of his daughters were simultaneously teenagers. I can’t imagine what that was like, and I was there. To be honest, the wonder isn’t so much that my father was frazzled, but that he managed to avoid going flamboyantly insane.

Contrary to the expectations of non-Irish people, it was highly unusual to have a family so large. Among my parents’ generation, it might have been slightly more common, particularly in rural communities, but by the eighties and nineties, such tallies were vanishingly rare. My parents were formidably – perhaps recklessly – Catholic, but even among the ranks of the devout, families with five kids were seldom seen. Seven would have been considered crisply eccentric, and nine plainly mad. To be one of eleven was singularly, fizzily demented. At best, you were the child of sex maniacs; at worst, the creepy scions of some bearded recluse amassing weapons in the hills. It didn’t help that we were so close in age and travelled, often singing, in the kind of large, vaguely municipal transport vehicle usually reserved for separatist church groups and volleyball teams made up of young offenders.

In some school years, it was easier to isolate the age groups in which we did not have a representative. In primary school we once had emissaries in six out of seven classes. We’ve since been told tales of completely unconnected third parties working out their relative age groups by referring to which O’Reilly was in their year. Even within our own home, it was necessary to erect internal subdivisions that simplified things. This we did by separating into three distinct castes, which ran in age order thus: the Big Ones (Sinead, Dara and Shane), the Middle Ones (Maeve, Orla, Mairead and Dearbhaile) and the Wee Ones (Caoimhe, me, Fionnuala and Conall). When my mother died, the youngest of us was two. I was myself three weeks shy of my sixth birthday; the celebration of that was, I have been led to believe, a decidedly subdued affair.


It’s an infuriating quirk of the brain that I remember my first taste of a banana sandwich but not the moment I was told Mammy had died. The closest I can manage must be some moments – perhaps hours – later: a clear image of walking through pyjama-clad siblings who were crying in all directions. It was morning, but since Daddy had left so early the curtains hadn’t yet been thrown open, a practice fastidiously encouraged the second he woke. This tinged everything with a dark, greyish unfamiliarity that only added to the queasy gloom of the moment.

There are differing accounts of how the news was delivered, but we know Daddy rang to tell us some time after 6 a.m. Some remember Sinead answering the phone, others her pleading with Dara to get it. The Big Ones – then aged thirteen, fifteen and seventeen respectively – had understood the gravity of those last few trips to the hospital better than the rest of us. To children reared to believe no news was good news, a 6 a.m. phone call bore all the gut-punching potentiality of, well, news.

We’d been to see Mammy the preceding weekend. I once more find I only have very faint memories of that final visit. I can see her in bed, tired and pale, laughing through the web of tubes taped to her face like a child’s art project, but it’s impossible to know if this was on that occasion or some earlier trip. Those tubes were a common point of reference for us in the years after her death, my sister Maeve becoming convinced they’d strangled her. By contrast, I have quite floridly detailed memories from later on that day, playing outside in the tall trees that lined the clinic, presumably after the Wee Ones had been removed to give my parents some space from their more oblivious children.

Apart from that I can remember very little of that week, save that morning on the couch with Margaret and a smattering of sensations from the subsequent wake. My father had called Phillie and Margaret with the news before he left Belfast, so they could come over to our house and look in on us until he returned. They arrived in the early morning to a surreal mess of sobbing. It also fell to them to intercept Anne as she pulled in to begin her day’s work, around seven. Anne was a saintly woman who tended to the house and its numerous infant contents, most especially since Mammy had fallen ill. Anne was particularly beloved of my mother for her superhuman propensity for calm, an invaluable asset on those days when the cruel humiliations of cancer seemed inexplicable, or she simply found herself without the will to talk.

Anne was as steady as rain and implacable as taxes; the kind of strong, rooted Donegal woman you could imagine blithely tutting if her hair caught fire. Looking out the kitchen window past our own shaken tears, we watched as the news made even her steadfast frame crumple backward. We saw her face collapse and her knees buckle, hands grasping her mouth before they steadied themselves on the car door behind.

This was, of course, a mere precursor to the sight of my father returning to sobs and screams, holding us all as we heaved, and crying loudly himself. The sight of my father crying was so dizzyingly perverse that I couldn’t have been more shocked and appalled if bats had flown out of his mouth. Daddy’s stoicism was as solid a fixture in my life as rain, or Savlon. This was the man who had forged time and space with his own rough hands, unafraid of heights or the dark or spiders or anything, save for being caught without some WD-40 when he needed it. In many ways, my father’s grief hit me harder than anything else. It would be from the wreckage of this moment that he would reassemble the universe for us.