Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(23)

There was also, let’s be honest, the fact that they had eleven cardigan-wearing little children, arguably the most solid credential that exists within Catholicism short of holy orders. They were paragons of piety, and aspired to raise the lower-middle-class ideal of a good Catholic family. If only one of us had managed to spot a statue of the Virgin Mary riding a bike or smoking a fag, it’s a fair bet my mother would be a saint by now. Unfortunately, after the golden years of the early twentieth century, during which it seemed that barely a week went past without such a sighting, the boom was over by our time, strangely coinciding with the advent of reliable compact photography.

It’s sometimes hard for me to work out whether we were ourselves especially holy, or if we simply lived through a particularly holy time for my mother, when her faith gained greater expression in the face of death. I was well into adulthood before I realised that in every single memory I have of my mother, she was living with cancer, or the fear of its recurrence. But while it does seem that her faith was strengthened by her illness, it’s also true that she was very committed to begin with. The Catholicism of my parents leaned less on dogma and more on a generalised sense of gratitude, humility and fellowship, and an emphasis on family and community. They didn’t go for diatribes about hell, sin, masturbation and abortion. We did hear about that stuff in school and at Mass – most especially abortion, which was almost always described as part of ‘the culture of death’, to use the church’s favourite phrase of the time – but even then only infrequently.

Insofar as evil was ever mentioned to me as a child, it was less in relation to touching myself or fancying boys and more to do with present, quotidian sins, like making fun of people with disabilities or becoming involved in paramilitary violence. On this latter point, my parents were particularly clear. Contrary to the narrative often pushed by outside chroniclers of the Troubles, the sectarianism we saw everywhere growing up was not so much religious as tribal. In Derry, a Catholic didn’t mean someone who had internalised the virgin birth and the transubstantiation of Christ’s corpse into a sliver of cheap, waxy, haunted wafer. Catholic in the common parlance merely meant someone who was born of Catholics, no matter what their feelings about Christ’s literal existence, or their opinion on the Second Vatican Council. The Catholics who made up the IRA were almost exclusively Catholics in this sense, and the same was true of all the Catholics mentioned on the news after each round of murders. They were Catholics in that they were not Protestants, and vice versa. My parents, on the other hand, were Catholics in the more full-strength prescription of the term, and lived the values of tolerance, kindness, mercy and forgiveness that perhaps organised Catholicism didn’t represent at the time.


The local farmers were less forgiving of Nollaig than we were when he graduated from mauling frozen chickens to killing and eating their sheep. It shouldn’t have been surprising, perhaps, since he had for a while been growing more bold, nipping at visitors and issuing growls and even bites that had long since progressed beyond playful. One cold, wet Sunday – again adding fuel to the whole Protestant theory – Nollaig killed a sheep a few fields over and was put down. I don’t believe a vet was involved; it was instead agreed that Nollaig should be presented to the farmer himself, so that he could have a full, frank conversation via shotgun. We weren’t exactly distraught, but our neighbours threw street parties. We suddenly had that disquieting realisation that everyone within an eight-mile radius had hated him as much as they loved us. I guess it was the dog-owner’s equivalent of when your friend breaks up with her boyfriend and everyone finally tells her that his beard is disgusting and that podcast of his is going nowhere.

Perhaps inevitably, we entered into a rebound relationship, taking in an Alsatian/Labrador cross named Bruno, who was everything Nollaig hadn’t been. Bruno was a girl who we initially thought was a boy, hence her name. We twigged she was a girl when it became clear she was pregnant. It seemed as though she had come from nowhere, but now I wonder if she had been a stray notch on Nollaig’s bedpost who, after keeping as far away from her psycho ex as possible, swooped in and nicked his bed once he was out of the picture. She was quiet and kind-hearted and immediately proved more popular than poor Nollaig, but often flinched from contact, especially from men, which made us think she’d had a troubled time of it. Desperate to love and be loved, I saw in her a kindred spirit, and doted on her unreservedly. Since my mother’s death, we each sought the opportunity to project our neuroses onto the family pet, and here was one that finally seemed aware of our presence. For those of us suffering a lack of attention, we adored her steadfast fascination with everything we did. For those of us who wanted space, we had a little underling we could chase from any rooms we entered, with an alacrity that suggested we might want to do the same to some of the house’s human occupants.

I think I just wanted someone I could repeatedly express my love for, without having to think too much about why, exactly, I needed it so much. I should be clear, this wasn’t Bleak House; my family were open about how much we loved each other, and my father especially. It’s just he probably would have been freaked out if I’d said it four hundred times a day, which is, approximately, what I needed to do at the time. An oddly co-dependent little friendship was forged. I cared for Bruno by treating her very kindly, and she cared for me by not taking off. Two pitiful little eejits, each sad in their own way. I performed those tasks a motherless child might imagine a mother would do: walking beside my furry little infant, saying ‘I love you’ and ‘I’ll never leave you’ and ‘do not eat that dead bird, it’s been at the side of the road for two weeks’.