Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(28)
The first letter is dated 30 November 1987, just three weeks after the Remembrance Day bombings in which twelve people were killed by an IRA attack in Enniskillen.
‘There’s been so much sadness,’ she wrote. ‘Enniskillen really upset us all – I’ll never forget that Sunday – it was like a nightmare – listening and watching. I was thinking of the past pupils’ retreat and parking in there. I suppose the only hope is that good will come out of it.’
The letters Patricia gave me comprise less than five thousand words, and contain no direct mention of me at all. They cover my mother’s near-constant visits to people in hospitals, or attendance at funerals, and the care she gave to Daddy’s mother in the final stages of her life, eschewing the hospice in favour of letting her see out her days in the company of her grandchildren. They document her own illness too, and the changing fortunes of her battle with the cancer. But mostly they give encouragement, support and offers of prayerful solidarity to Patricia, alongside exhaustive updates on what we were all up to.
‘Sinead is very busy with school,’ she wrote in February 1991, ‘she has also been in the school show Brigadoon and this week she’s in the Operatic Society’s Carousel. Dara is very involved with computers and the school magazine. Shane has joined a “very important” football team and spends a lot of time training. Maeve and Orla patiently await their 11+ results and we’ve been doing the rounds of “Open Days” at the local schools. All the others are busy in Nazareth House in their own way coping with the new curriculum. They’re all very happy which means a lot. Sinead and Shane go to Germany during the Easter holidays. I’m supposed to be going too but apart from this setback, we have discovered that Maeve and Orla’s confirmation is the day we come back so it’s all very much up in the air at the moment.’
The setback she mentions is a lump in her neck, the third or fourth such growth in as many years. She did make it on the school jaunt in the end, but would never recover from this round of her illness, dying eight months later.
It seems profane to see her making plans and hoping for the best, but it’s deeply touching that she wasn’t mired in self-doubt and misery. More than anything else, the opportunity to see, to hold in my hand, something so clearly in my mother’s voice was revelatory, and made me want to do more digging. Mammy had become, like Jesus or Derry City’s league-winning side of 1989, one of those figures I didn’t know personally, but recognised from being up on the walls of our house.
Patricia had been Mammy’s first port of call with pregnancy announcements, although not by letter but via a morning phone call that might sometimes have been made before even Daddy was aware. Mammy always intuited she was pregnant very early, upon finding that the smell of her wake-up coffee made her nauseous. Many was the morning Patricia would receive the call before an abandoned brew had finished spiralling down my mother’s sink. Patricia was on hand, not just because she was Mammy’s best friend but because she always seemed delighted by the news, whereas other friends might have raised eyebrows at the increasing population of the O’Reilly household. It occurred to me quite late that this would have been a consideration: that it was something that my parents themselves would also have been, well, slightly embarrassed by.
It’s odd that realising this about my parents took me so long, since I had worked out that we weren’t like other families pretty early on. I’d noticed, for example, that my friends could recite their siblings’ names without squinting or counting on their fingers. As a child, it was hard to avoid the implication that my parents were either out for an award from the pope or, at best, severely unimaginative when it came to other hobbies. It’s not an area on which I’d like to dwell for too long, but neither is it one I can completely ignore, other than to say my parents were very Catholic, extremely fond of each other and had a deep commitment to, and love of, raising children. That being said, I don’t think we were ever brought up to believe that we had all been deliberately conceived, and I find the idea that it would bother anyone either way rather strange. I remember watching TV dramas where a horrified child would scream in anguish at the suggestion they were an accident. To me, this seemed such an odd thing to care about, especially for a child – perhaps because it warranted them fondly imagining their parents planning sex. It was hard to imagine my parents sat there one night, looking at their eight children and thinking to themselves, ‘we really ought to have one more at least’. I haven’t – mercifully – thought about the actual circumstances that led to my conception, but I’ve got to presume forward planning wasn’t much of a factor. What’s important was that, once I arrived, I was loved and indulged and given all the small plastic dinosaurs any child could fit in a decorated cereal box.
I never really thought of it from Mammy and Daddy’s point of view at the time, navigating the world as the parents of eleven children when it would have marked them out as at best mildly ridiculous and at worst deeply weird. This is why Mammy phoned Patricia before even her own mother. She’d noted congratulations from other quarters were growing a little more delayed. My mother loved having children – thank God – but she also lived in the modern world and understood that, as the numbers accumulated, each happy announcement might provoke greater surprise. By the last five or six blessings, this had transmuted to naked incredulity. For Granny McGullion, it came with hostility thrown in. It’s amusing to think of my parents, neat and prim and well into their thirties, being chided like randy teenagers, but according to Patricia that’s exactly what happened. Upon hearing that a fifth stork was flapping its wings toward our house, Granny McGullion is said to have uttered the words ‘Joe O’Reilly, that brute!’ Later, when they had a mere six children, Granny babysat while my parents spent a night in a hotel. As if waving her child off to a school dance, she gave Mammy a scolding reminder that they not take the opportunity to add to our number. The next morning, when my parents returned, Granny took Mammy aside and repeated her hope that this oath had been kept. I don’t believe she’d even finished her censorious spiel before Mammy had tipped her coffee down the sink with abashed disgust.