Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(22)

Even for a family like ours, who were fairly used to priests calling round, seeing one in full regalia, just walking around our house and garden, was a thrill. It was a cousin of that confusion you get when you spot a teacher in the supermarket. Here the feeling was multiplied, since Father Balance arriving in his full rig produced the opposite effect of a teacher sighted in the wild. Outside of school, teachers could seem pathetic and drab, shorn of the power that hung about them in their natural habitat. I once saw Mr Johnston in West Side Stores. A man who breathed fire and crushed souls from 8 until 3 each day, now pondering, dead-eyed, whether to buy a 3-for-2 pack of Rootin’ Tootin’ Cottage Pies, or a shop-soiled Vegetable Varmint Vegan Lasagne. Father Huck, by contrast, brought the magnificence of his station with him, as if Christ’s power was not just all-encompassing but conveniently portable. On secondment to this outpost, he transplanted the gravitas of his own, greater universe to the spot between our house and the garage, projecting it entirely onto the large caravan in front of him. As we pulled our sleeves down over our hands against the cold, he stood implacable and resolute, broadcasting the solemnity of God in the very same place where, just twenty-five minutes earlier, our dog, Nollaig, had been eating his own shite.


Nollaig was no longer ingesting effluent, but still refused to honour that half-state of reverence the rest of us were attempting, the type of quiet awkwardness that’s general when you have Mass in a weird place and everyone tries to act as though it’s perfectly normal. He was barking and growling, as if mocking the events unfolding in front of him. Father Balance said nothing, but I thought I caught a glint of contempt in his eyes at each interruption. What, he seemed to say to our dog, is so funny about a priest blessing a gigantic caravan in the rain? I presume the smell of the incense was what was bothering Nollaig. Either that or Mr Devenney, our otherwise kindly neighbour, had landed us with one of Ireland’s few Protestant sheepdogs. Such dogs could, of course, sow discord among the others, annex the lands of Catholic cows and march provocatively past contested field routes each July. On the plus side, most farmers agreed, Protestant dogs would probably be more willing to put in a shift on Sundays.

Whatever his denomination, Nollaig – Christmas in Irish – had long established a reputation as something of a cheerful arsehole, and was less a beloved pet than an uncaring brute who tumbled through our lives like a demented frat boy in an American campus comedy. We all pretended we liked him, perhaps out of fear he’d steal our lunch money or push us into a drinking fountain. He’d been a gift for my sister Mairead the year before my mother died, although a combination of his spirited nature and Mairead’s being just seven led to her slowly being forgiven of prime responsibility, and it was instead assumed that he was the family’s problem. He ate everything he could get his paws on, and several things he should never have been able to. He once savaged a frozen chicken that had been in one of the two big chest freezers we had in the garage. How he managed to open its lid, which was large, heavy and stood four feet off the ground, is still a matter of speculation. When Conall was two years old he grabbed Nollaig’s lead in a fit of misplaced affection, and Nollaig shot off at such speed that the baby of the family was jolted, Buster Keaton fashion, off the ground. For a few seconds he trailed behind our dyspeptic hound in mid-air, fully horizontal, as his little fist gripped the tether now hurtling him toward certain death. In the end, Conall got away with a few cuts and bruises, but for him, my parents and most of the rest of my family, it was extraordinarily traumatic. Personally, I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and feel as though it made the rest of Nollaig’s bad behaviour broadly worth it. In any case, whatever his thoughts on virgin births or the holy catechism, there was just as much a chance Nollaig was dismissive of priests due to general misanthropy rather than outright sectarianism. In the end, I’m happy to presume our dog was a prick, not a bigot.


Pursued by Nollaig, Father Balance raised his hands and approached the caravan with grave intent. Birds squawked and gravel crunched underfoot as he stepped forward to mutter a blessing. He swung the thurible around the wheels and then the windows, and then round the back, as if there was a pre-set routine for such things, an off-the-peg setting for a caravan blessing that was second nature to any priest. Within a few minutes the deed was done, and we dispersed in the joyful knowledge that some small part of God’s portable power was now embedded in our caravan.

Such were the perks of knowing so many priests. When I was a child, it seemed as though my dad knew every priest in Ireland. This is because he knew every single priest in Ireland. Irish priests happen to be my father’s specialist subject. By this, I do not mean the Irish priesthood, as in the history and customs of that institution (though on that topic, too, he is undeniably strong). I mean the literal, individual priests. Each of them. By name, location and family connection. Ireland’s small population, combined with my parents’ energetically devout Catholicism, put them on friendly terms with most of Ireland’s clergy during that extensive period of the twentieth century when Ireland was a net exporter of priests.

It’s worth explaining just how comically, parodically Catholic my parents were. They weren’t just avid churchgoers and committed in their home lives, they also gave readings at Mass and served as eucharistic ministers, handing out communion to parishioners. They worked within various Catholic-flavoured remits: charities, prayer groups and councils that gave a papist slant on marriage, vocation and youth outreach. My mother spent her entire professional career teaching in Catholic secondary schools, and my father volunteered as treasurer of our Catholic primary. More memorably still, there was a short period in the late nineties when he taught computer skills to the nuns who lived in the attached convent. We more than once visited Catholic sites like Lourdes and Knock on family holidays and experienced the true scalding heat of boredom at large, outdoor Masses in the wind and rain of holy fields. Before I was born, my parents took the opportunity to embark on a cross-continental trip that took in not Florence and the Louvre, Barcelona or the Algarve, but the many and splendid Marian shrines of Europe.