Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(24)

When her litter finally arrived, these instincts went into overdrive, and I looked on each of her offspring as my personal responsibility. Like some little Irish Oedipus, I mapped new frontiers of dysfunction by casting myself as Bruno’s mother, son and, now, proud father to her eleven pups. While they were little more than squirming, wriggling caterpillars, too small to open their eyes, us Wee Ones handballed them to and fro, sizing them up and allotting each an equal sequence of cuddles and pattings, courting near constant admonition from my father that we treat them a little more gently. Had he not been on hand, I fear more than a few would have been squeezed to death. It was clear we were not especially attuned to the finer points of animal husbandry, as we discovered one particularly hot day when Conall became flustered at the thought of them growing parched, unspooled the hose by our garage and directed a torrent of water directly into the kennel to ‘cool them down’. The next thing we knew, he’d sent a squadron of bemused little pups sailing on a river of soaked bedding, hay and hundreds of their tic-tac-sized turds. But they survived, and soon their eyes were open and they were yapping and squealing like actual little dogs, and producing copious amounts of larger, more substantial, shite.

Three weeks in, I was woken by a distant whine, and followed the pups’ mewling cries to the top of the road. It was just before dawn, and raining hard. I found them huddled beneath a shipping container by the customs checkpoint, and climbed under to inspect them. There was more than enough space for me to sit there cross-legged, and as I did, they gambolled into my lap, their drenched bodies patting me all at once like a sad applause of frightened little hands. There was no sign of their mother, although I could hear her barking in the very same field of sheep that had done for Nollaig. I sat there in the full horror of their abandonment, holding these soaked pups and crying. Daddy was soon alerted to my absence and a little while later he arrived for me, sending Dara and Shane back for a towel to grab the litter. He told me Bruno’s instructive instinct had kicked in and she’d likely brought the pups up there to hunt sheep, but finding they preferred to flop around uselessly in the rain went on without them. Sister Annette took me out of class the following day to tell me, in the curious terminology used in such cases, that Bruno had been ‘worrying sheep’ and ‘had had to be destroyed’. Even as a child, the idea that chasing sheep ‘worried’ them seemed preposterous, conjuring images of flocks pacing back and forth, of flighty ewes biting their nails. And as for ‘destroyed’, I didn’t even know where to start with that one. They were talking about Bruno as if she were an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, or a nuclear warhead. I imagined piles of bold dogs, stacked like a cache of decommissioned paramilitary ordnance. I’ve since been told this isn’t too far off the truth.

I wonder now why they had to tell us at all, but then I suppose, unlike with my city friends, they couldn’t pretend she’d gone to live on a farm. Perhaps they could have reversed it and told me she had been sent to live in a council high-rise in town, but that apparently never occurred to them. Our neighbours didn’t throw parties this time, and even the farmer who was forced to report her gave his condolences to my father, since he knew it would be a heavy blow. I was inconsolable for weeks, and it doesn’t take a particularly deep grasp of psychology to work out what I saw in these eleven helpless infants, senselessly deprived of a mother. It was pretty heavy-handed stuff but, what can I say, God’s a bit of a hack sometimes.


While my parents would not have agreed with that statement, their Catholicism was less dogmatic and more a happy-clappy Christian fellowship-type thing; all summer camps and trendy books written by cool priests with nice hair. Not that we were too outwardly zealous. We’d see Americans on TV crying in church or speaking in tongues and reflect that even the most ardent Catholics we knew were more likely to mumble their way through the rosary. That kind of ostentatious religion just didn’t seem to suit Northern Irish Catholics. American evangelicals seemed to treat God as their best friend, and American Catholics in Irish and Italian gangster movies treated him as a reclusive weirdo who had an ungovernable obsession with their genitals. Catholics of the English upper classes, like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, were even weirder, obsessed with blood and candles, and appearing to think of their godhead as an occult dominatrix who issued pellets of shame and guilt like a giant, sadomasochistic Pez dispenser. That wasn’t how most Northern Irish Catholics would have framed it. God was a boring but avuncular boss, or a more senior friend from work, someone to whom you’d be polite if you bumped into them down the shops, but most certainly not one you’d wish to spend time with outside office hours. Our version of carefree papism was the kind where everyone stuck their heads down for the prayers and said very little, but occasionally a laughing priest might tell you about a recent go he’d had on a bouncy castle and how, in a funny kind of a way, isn’t our Lord Jesus a bit like a bouncy castle, when you think about it?

We went to Mass every Sunday without fail, and did confession, communion and confirmation, but everyone did that. My second week at college was actually the first time I’d ever gone two weeks in a row without attending Mass. I never went regularly again. I had been more involved with the church than most of the kids in the parish, since our family did the readings every few weeks, and as more of us went off to university the pool of available readers was winnowed to those of us who were left, so we’d each end up doing four or five a year. Giving the readings did manage to eradicate any embarrassment I had about public speaking, which was useful in later life. I had used all that embarrassment up by the age of thirteen, which was the last time I used the stool that was placed by the lectern for smaller speakers. Having misjudged the effects of a recent growth spurt, I ascended the stool to discover I was now fully three feet above the microphone and my gangly frame and arched back gave me the look of a professional basketball player bobbing for apples. Mortified, I ignored the laughter – the loudest of which was coming from my own siblings – and gave both readings as the world’s tallest man, refusing to climb down even as I stood in silence while the Hallelujah was sung from the back of the church.