Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(20)

Beep. The cashier rang the items through at the price my father had suggested, and he motioned for me to get them ready for transportation. She had blinked, and to anyone there who didn’t know us, we must have seemed like a father-and-son team of hucksters, the kind who would have been seen pushing a cart filled with scrap through dustbowl-era Kansas but who, in Derry, were reduced to selling their ill-gotten gains on the lucrative black market for discount toilet paper.


These kinds of experiences were a staple of my childhood, and fixed for me the image of my father as a miser, particularly when he would later instruct us on the usage of that very shipment of toilet paper. It was his contention, argued many times and at least once at the dinner table, that one sheet, judiciously used, was sufficient for most movements – I believe he even mimed specific foldings that could be employed in helping us achieve this feat. So, to some extent, this reputation was earned. He also never bought branded cereals or snacks; we feasted instead on those supermarket variants that were almost but not quite like the target brand. ‘Wow,’ we’d say, in between diffident bites of our Puffin bars, ‘Tesco must have really good lawyers.’ But this perception of him was massively unfair, since he worked extremely hard and earned a good wage by Derry standards, and spent all of it trying to manage an unreasonably large household. It’s striking how little I understood this at the time, which was a direct consequence of all the measures he took to make sure we never felt poorer than anyone else.


Considering he spent his adult life giving the staff at the Northern Irish Birth Registry premature arthritis, it’s surprising that my father was himself an only child. His mother’s name was Mary, and his father was a carpenter named Joseph (I know), and they lived in Belleek, County Fermanagh. My paternal grandfather died before I was born, and Granny O’Reilly when I was just two, after spending her final months in our family home. As a schoolmistress, Granny O’Reilly was a pillar of the community in Belleek, and my father tells stories of local men lining up to have their forms, applications or legal documents looked over and signed by her at a time when illiteracy was widespread.

The few photographs I possess of Granny O’Reilly show she was hard to age. It sometimes seems as though all Irish people from the past were born old and then proceeded to age like the pears you get in an all-night garage, accumulating freckles, liver spots and clicking noises at the bendy parts, achieving their final form by around the age of thirty-five. There are photos of my dad when he was seventeen and he already looks like a full-grown man. I’m thirty-five and dress like a toddler. When my father was a teenager, he looked as though he already had a pet name for his favourite stepladder. For older generations, this effect was even more pronounced. The photographic record shows that Granny O’Reilly began her life aged sixty-eight and proceeded to grow smaller and older from there. There are pictures of her with my father as a very small child, which logic dictates must place her in her thirties, and yet her wild hair and deadening glare present the steely mien of a woman many decades her senior. She was stern-faced with a shock of white hair and thick, scowl-prone eyebrows, which made her look like the sort of person who’d keep her arms folded on a trampoline. She was also my dad’s teacher throughout his primary education, a situation I don’t believe thrilled my shy and retiring father, and which added a certain frisson to the much-feared faux pas of calling your teacher Mum. In what seems like a cruel trap, any time he did accidentally make this fairly understandable lapse, he was upbraided for it in front of the whole class. By his actual mum.


Daddy might have been, by instinct, a more stoical, less effusive father, which makes not just his parenting but the love with which he undertook it all the more impressive. He had a lot on his plate, so maybe it’s OK that he occasionally held up supermarkets with toilet roll purchases.

He is almost comically square, and has more odd ideas about the ways of the world than I can fit in one book. Focusing on, say, that time he had a row with my brother for bumping into him while they were riding dodgem cars – coining the memorable exclamation ‘They’re called dodgems, not crashems!’ – allows us to humanise him for ourselves and others. The fact that my father’s ideal bumper-car experience is one in which dozens of stone-faced children carefully evade each other in total silence can surely only add to the esteem in which he is regarded. Slack-jawed awe is the default reaction I get when I talk about my dad and what he did for us, and rightly so, but my dad hates this kind of sentimentality – and its close cousin, pity – more than he hates traffic wardens, or broccoli. Luckily, he has a ready stock of foibles ripe for us to tease him about. Like all older Irish men, he marries a high-minded rejection of all things modern with a near-chronic addiction to trash culture. My father will roll his eyes when I say ‘cool’, as if lingo that bleedingly hip is an insult to the martyred poets of Ireland, and yet five minutes later will tell me that Nick Knowles has gone country, and the new steel guitar album he debuted on Loose Women sounds a marked improvement on his last.

He knows, vaguely, what a high-five is, but his handle on the concept is so loose he once announced one with a tender, hopeful cry of ‘slap my hand high up in the air’, a declaration that has become something of a family motto. The Christmas before last, he announced, and demonstrated, his total ignorance of rock, paper, scissors, as either a term or concept, and subsequently refused to believe it was a known thing. He has a similar reluctance to accept the existence of the Easter Bunny, which he claims was only invented in the last few years. Stranger still, of course, are those phenomena that do not exist, but which he believes in with every fibre of his being. My father holds horses to be malevolent, because one stood on his foot when he was a boy – this despite living near horses for most of his life, not least the rotating cast of ponies that have been put to pasture in the field directly behind our house. He choked on a fishbone when he was quite small, and the experience so scarred him that we were all told fish was an incredibly dangerous foodstuff and should be eaten only in fillet, finger or nugget form, if at all. To serve someone fish with any or all of its skeleton intact is, to my father, roughly equivalent to feeding someone the contents of a Hoover bag.