Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(26)

Elmo was also the first experience I had of my father’s remarkable animal telepathy skills, which he retains to this day. ‘She understands every word you say, you know,’ he was fond of telling us. They lived in complete harmony with each other. Elmo shared my father’s frustration at nuisance callers pulling into our drive with requests to buy the caravan or in the hope of persuading Daddy to become a Jehovah’s Witness. And Daddy was firmly in her corner when it came to her ongoing feud with the swallows that nested in our garage, and who took cruel delight in dipping over her with sarcastic swooping motions. While my father read nothing but good intentions into the minds of dogs, he clearly didn’t like what his avian mind-sensors picked up, and found that birds were, for the most part, obnoxious twats. ‘They know what they’re doing!’ he’d say, incensed, as they darted back and forth above her kennel like a malignant little squadron of Red Arrows.

We discovered that Elmo’s travels were not quite as PG-rated as we presumed when she had pups of her own, fathered by some unknown, distant Lothario. We gave away all but one, Sophie, in whom she delighted, teaching her to hunt by chasing not sheep but the ever-circling swallows, which were much closer and proved less hazardous prey. All looked to be going well until Sophie was a month or two old, at which point she contracted pneumonia and became gravely ill. She died on Christmas Eve, leaving us despondent and, we thought, removing some small bit of Elmo’s sunny demeanour for ever.


Priests died too. ‘Ach no,’ Daddy would say, ruffling the pages of the Derry Journal for effect as he spoke to no one in particular. ‘There’s Hustings LeFarge dead anyway.’ As with his love for Formula One, I often thought he was disappointed we didn’t share his fascination with church goings-on. We weren’t rendered dizzily incontinent by the inside track he had regarding clerical matters: who was going to a new parish, who had a new car, who’d been on the radio and who’d died – especially who’d died. Following a silence, or perhaps some mumbled words of sympathy, Daddy would expound on Father LeFarge, recounting his many-staged career with mounting astonishment that none of his own infant children were better acquainted with that time he baptised six babies that had fallen in a hedge, or spread awareness of Passion Sunday by touring the country with a kissing booth. It’s a true strength of my father’s parenting style that he always spoke to us as though we were adults, ignoring the difference in age between us and himself. However, a curious side effect of this was his tendency to grow incredulous that we were not adults and didn’t have the experience or memories he had accrued over his own lifetime. We would have to keep insisting that we knew little about the career of a ninety-year-old priest he’d last seen a few decades before we were born. ‘Where was it he was prelate?’ Daddy might then muse, addressing this query to a room of children who’d barely been out of the house, much less knew the movements of an elderly Jesuit from Sligo.

We had an anniversary Mass in our house every year for my mother, and friends and family would come to commemorate her passing with a relatively informal service in our sitting room. It was a bit mad seeing the sofa and armchairs replaced with rows of folding chairs we’d borrow from our primary school. The ordinary running order of a Mass would be broken up with more personal touches: people sharing memories or stories, and funny, tear-jerking little films made by my dad showing old photos or camcorder footage he’d put together. These videos were the highlight, done with a care and wit that was as apt to make the room burst into laughter as tears. They also gave me the only experience I can remember of seeing my mother moving through life in anything like a normal way, of her laughing or scowling at my dad for filming her, of her saying my name out loud. The work he’d pour into them was evident in every frame, and showed not just his love for Mammy, and for us, but his love of making that love known. Never particularly solemn in the early days, after a few years these occasions became openly joyous experiences, celebrations of her life and a lovely time for the family to return to the house and be together, no matter where fortune had sprayed them across the map.

The Masses were said by Father Bun McAliskey, the priest who baptised me and oversaw my communion, confirmation and each weekly Mass. We continued to do these Masses for twenty years, until Father McAliskey did our service, said his goodbyes and stood up in church the following morning to announce he was leaving the priesthood. He received rapturous applause and the full support of the congregation, ours included; we were slack-jawed and touched by the fact he’d obviously kept my mother’s Mass as his last appointment in religious orders.


By then, Elmo’s youthful demeanour had given way to a more mature and stately poise. The grey in her muzzle transformed that youthful nobility into something like gravitas and, in the manner of an actress making do with the paucity of good Hollywood roles, she made an overnight transition from ingénue to wise old priestess. It was clear her joints were bothering her, and a rheumy film gathered in her eye that looked decidedly suboptimal. She was soon chasing birds that simply were not there. On one fateful run in 2004, a car came in bearing the news we’d feared. She’d been identified, unmoving, on the road. My dad retrieved the body and, devastated, buried her in a plot behind the garage, overlooking the field in which she spent so much of her time, with a pleasant view of the road and happily off the path of those tormenting, tumbling birds.