Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(32)
The arc of sensibility in Northern Ireland bends away from fuss, and it has bent that way inside me since my childhood. It’s one of the reasons I’m more comfortable talking about death in terms of its comical absurdities, in the odd contradictions and baffling misapprehensions that come in its wake. I talk about my family’s experience a lot, and shrink rapidly from any hint that I’m being too grave or serious while doing so. Far be it from me to make my family’s tragedy seem like something that was actually sad. The more I think and talk about the events of my life, the more I think on this horror of fuss and consider it the part of myself, and my homeland, that I would like to change above all others.
When Granda McGullion retired, in a move that, depending on who you talk to, was either par for the course or callous towards an old man, he had to leave Blaney, since the house came with the job. Certainly, Granda never held it against his employers and respected and admired the Tottenhams until his dying day. The feeling was very much mutual, particularly for Ashley, who adored the McGullions. ‘They always had a little light in the window,’ Gabriele tells me he was fond of saying. ‘He loved going there.’
The day before, I had been about to tell her about the letter my mother had written to Patricia in tribute to Ashley, when she produced a photocopy of it herself, a gift from Patricia some years earlier. It reflects how much my mother thought about people other than herself, even when going through unimaginable stress.
‘I hope to go to Fermanagh tomorrow to see Daddy for Easter,’ she wrote. ‘He’s in good form but was very saddened to hear of Ashley Tottenham’s death, do you remember him? His first wife died and he then married a German girl who had been an assistant at the Convent & College. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer, just after me and put up a great fight. He was only 37. I had been talking to him a lot any time I was down home because he was always interested to see how I was doing. Thank God I’m fine.’
8
The Forge
The large, white, five-bedroom bungalow in which I was raised was sometimes called the Forge by my father, and literally no one else. This soubriquet is lovingly rendered on letters my dad sends to relatives, conferring a certain elegance of standing. The Forge could be a fancy B&B, the summer residence of a timber baron, or a stately home that’s been converted into a rehab centre for celebrity drug addicts.
It actually takes its name from its being set on a plot of land once used by a blacksmith, a fact pleasingly confirmed if you dig a hole anywhere around our garage, where you will find all manner of shrapnel, pig iron and horse shoes. The field behind the house once verged on the UK customs checkpoint, but after the demilitarisation of the border that was shut down, and the land, together with the top bit of our field, was sold to build a family home for some new neighbours. My father planted trees to provide a barrier, as he did along two hundred metres stretching from the garage to the slope at the front of the house that has farmland on both sides. This second line of trees was essentially planted to keep the horse in Toland’s field from eating my dad’s flowers but, in the age of Brexit, it has now risen to the exalted position of being fully 0.04 per cent of the United Kingdom’s border with the European Union. Such a promotion might seem slightly above the paygrade of some mottled conifers and a fence you could knock over with a few harsh words. And if you ask that horse if it’s a solid barrier, he’ll tell you no. He may even do so from my dad’s flower beds, in between bites of nasturtium.
So, my family home is not merely on the border, it is a structural part of it, but none of that was of interest during my childhood because it was just my house and, for the most part, the border thing was largely irrelevant.
The land around the house is uncommonly pleasant: rolling hills, fields and open farmland pretty much as far as the eye can see. The hills in the distance are actually across the River Foyle, which itself isn’t visible from my home, although if you were to walk the short road down to Balloughry it’s so quiet you can hear the noise of the traffic as it passes along the far side. There’s wildlife here: wood pigeons, pheasant, large game birds and mid-sized raptors, along with the usual but slightly less commonly sighted owls, foxes and badgers. There are cows in the fields perhaps half the year, and a thin, scraggly electric wire separates their parish from ours where the slope meets the fence and our land terminates. The wire gives a faint electric shock that is barely painful, but enough to alarm cattle into thinking twice about ascending onto our property, and for the most part they seem to take no interest in us at all. Sometimes, however, the cows spontaneously develop some irresistible, albeit temporary, obsession with us, and congregate right at that fence. One or two mornings a year we’d throw back the living-room curtains to find forty-five cows staring with listless attention, like world-weary reporters summoned to a press conference about council tax increases.
Once or twice they’ve ventured further and have, in confused ebullience, stormed the fence and run around our house in a spiral of panic, perhaps in some thirst for the freedom of gravel and pebbledash denied to them in the field. To look out of our kitchen window and see a churning mass of dead-eyed cattle circling the house is thrilling. I’ve never forgotten my sister Caoimhe loudly screaming at me to close the door. This I did, but not before imagining – with delight – dirty-hooved cows storming into our house and running around for no reason. Thankfully/alas, this never happened, and any time they did break through the perimeter we would just ring the farmer and he’d come and apologise and I’d get to watch as he shooed them back down to their field with some uncanny authority that our own screams somehow lacked.