Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(29)
Patricia later told me she did occasionally diverge from fulsome support, as when, two babies later, she took the caffeinated nausea call and betrayed her shock with an exclamation of ‘Jesus Christ, Sheila’, which stung my mother slightly.
‘Oh, I thought you’d be pleased,’ she said. ‘You’re always pleased when I’m pregnant.’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Patricia shot back, ‘please don’t think you have to keep doing it to make me happy.’
Undeterred, my mother went on to have three more children, the first of whom was me.
Mammy’s people, like my father’s, were all Fermanagh. Sheila McGullion was born into a cottage on the estate grounds of an Anglo-Irish farmer named George Tottenham, for whom my grandfather, James McGullion, worked as cattle master. Granda McGullion lived on site, in an arrangement that seems cut straight from the nineteenth century, but which continued until his retirement in the early seventies.
I never knew my grandmother, who died the year before I was born, but I was very fond of Granda, the only grandparent I can remember. He was a quiet man with a big face, and hair that seemed like a thick bush of white from afar but which, once you were sufficiently close, you could see was actually quite sparse. We often did get that close, since he often allowed us to comb it, slathering his big comb with Brylcreem and raking the gooey mess all over his hair, neck and scalp for what seemed like hours. There he would sit implacably, saying little and tolerating whichever cub or cuttie – the preferred Fermanagh terms for boys and girls – was pawing all over his hair like a stumpy little barber. No doubt he was delighted that he’d devised a play activity for which the only requirement from him was to sit down at the end of a tiring day. He had a tiny pair of wooden clogs which he would produce when we came over, and which he claimed belonged to a friend of his called Barney. Barney was a leprechaun and had a day job working in a sweet factory, giving his old pal Granda an exclusive inside line on those small rectangular boxes of Smarties which we were unaware you could buy in literally every shop on Earth.
Granda had the work ethic of a soldier ant, and well into his seventies would insist on earning his keep when he came to stay, trimming bushes, painting walls or doing other odd jobs. It was a joy to get to carry him out a pitcher of weak orange juice as he sheared at a hedge, working like a man who hadn’t been born a few months before the Titanic sank.
The life of my mother’s family seems odd to contemplate now, lived in a four-room cottage that was home not just to my mother and her parents, but also four siblings and, later, at least one ailing grandparent. As a child, I imagined them all sharing a big brass bed like the Bucket family in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, their evenings spent peeling the one potato between them, washed down with pig’s milk and a decade of the rosary. The strangeness of it is only increased when one considers further details, such as the preposterous deference that was to be shown by the family to the landowners for whom my grandfather worked. Mammy, for example, was encouraged to refer to Mr Tottenham’s children, Ashley and Allison, who were broadly the same age as her, as Master Ashley and Miss Allison, even when they were all as young as five or six. It’s hard for me to comprehend what my grandfather thought this would achieve, but whatever encouragement she was given to follow this practice, it didn’t stick, and they had a close, non-hierarchical friendship in their later lives.
Tales of this cottage were one of the few things I’d been told about Mammy’s near-parodically Irish childhood. Even describing it risks making me sound racist. In pictures, it looks like the kind of tiny house in which Irish people were depicted in Victorian cartoons, paid in pigs’ feet and boiled cabbage, their only possessions bought with their winnings from leaping contests with the fairy folk. You can see it now in an engraving in your mind: the woman of the house a toothless slattern, scrubbing on a washboard while breastfeeding her seventeen children, all happy to work twenty hours a day licking the fields.
It wasn’t quite on that level, I was told, but not far off. The house was small but was said to gleam, and Mrs McGullion was a proud and welcoming host. It had no fridge, so milk and vegetables were stored outside, and the floor had some form of lino covering, although its uneven surface suggested bare earth lay beneath. It goes without saying that an indoor toilet would have been regarded as a space-age luxury; such business was undertaken a sixty-second walk away, in the outhouse behind. Here, of course, came the glory of the place, as the latrine, and the house itself, backed on to the reckless beauty of Lough Erne’s south-western reach, one of the more spectacular places on Earth you could hope to freeze your arse off.
This estate is now home to Blaney Spa and Yoga Centre, run by Gabriele, the widow of Ashley Tottenham – the aforementioned Master Ashley – who also died tragically young, a year or so before my mother. The old dwellings have been renovated into ‘the Inishbeg Cottages’, and are rented out to holidaymakers. A few months after receiving Patricia’s letters, I set off to see the place. Here, I thought, was a chance to commune with the spirit of the dead, and rattle through questions for my dad, Patricia and any Fermanagh natives that would come out and meet us.
My wife and I drove down with my father so that I could fire questions at him on the way, in a more informal manner than the one I usually manage. My father loves to drive, so if you want to get decent dirt out of him it’s a good way of going about it, disarming his usual reflex to bat away questions like a dodgy builder evading a reporter from Watchdog. The trip to my mother’s birthplace took us through a lot of the places of my father’s own childhood, which allowed him to indulge in some rare moments of nostalgia en route. Belleek is an idyllic, lough-strewn corner of Northern Ireland which, from most angles, looks almost ludicrously pretty. Fermanagh might be the least talked-about county in Ireland. You rarely meet people from there or hear about them on the news. I reckon there are people who’ve lived there all their lives and are still not sure that it’s a real place.