Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(34)

We had miles of greenery around us to amble through but settled instead on caking ourselves in dirt and leaves by tumbling down the slope behind the house – the one that bordered on the cows – as an improvised slide. The electric fence that sat at the bottom of this slope should have been a disincentive, but we were no fools – we knew that we were protected from hitting the fence by the thick barrier of stinging nettles that we rolled into instead. We climbed trees and poked at streams. We traipsed through hedges looking for blackberries. We really wanted to find caterpillars that we’d keep as pets. We’d store them in a jar, which we would invariably forget about, only to discover some months later a grisly glass prison of exploded, furry mould. Nowadays, I’m incapable of holding myself back from rambling through the square mile that traces around our house, down towards the river, swinging right to trace the path over the border and towards the nearby village of Carrigans. The entire time I do this, I’m constantly chattering to my wife or anyone else foolish enough to accompany me, loudly lamenting my own inability as a child to see this very real wood for these very real trees, when I would have covered the entire countryside in concrete if it meant a chance of a cinema or a Laser Quest setting up nearby. It’s a conversation I’m sure they relish.

Despite my rural upbringing, I feel as though I developed very little kinship with nature. The only time I did feel like a proper country boy was when friends from the city would come out and not know how to climb over cattle fences or tramp through paths without getting their runners muddy. I’d laugh at their fear of large, stupid cows and lie about the names of trees and birds we’d encounter. I never got caught until one day I couldn’t identify an oak, which is probably the only tree that every person in Derry knows since it’s the official tree of the county. To me, knowing all the names for trees would have been as pointless as a city boy remembering every brand of satellite dish on his road. Of course, I had even less need to memorise a hundred types of dinosaur, or star, or prime number, but I did all that – because I was an indoor kid at heart.


The front door of our house was reserved exclusively for tradespeople, postmen and visiting priests. The back hall was the real anteroom, as well as the area in which phone calls were chiefly made, with the little table common to every home in the Irish countryside, on which stood the phone, the phone book, a torch and a rack of keys (perhaps 4 per cent of which were identifiable). We had a religious icon over the door, a tiny little Blessed Virgin with a font of holy water at her feet, guaranteeing protection for all who passed over our threshold.

For most of my younger days, it was nearly impossible to use the phone when I wanted, since my sisters spent most evenings calling a revolving cast of friends with great urgency, mere hours after they had last been sighted, safe and well, at school. The phone table itself was the most uncomfortable place to sit in our entire house. Possibly to dissuade us from near-constant use of the phone, it was as ill-shaped and wonky as one of our treehouses, almost as if Daddy had intended it as a piece of hostile architecture, the way city planners put those spiked benches in bus stations so homeless people can’t sleep on them. Despite this measure, my father was accustomed to picking up the phone by his armchair to hear one of his daughters angsting to a pal, as if the line was permanently connected to a switchboard for disaffected Northern Irish youths. When the internet was installed, it worked off the same phone line, meaning it was now not just permanently engaged, but also emitted an ear-splitting electronic screech if you haplessly picked up the receiver. In those days the internet was charged like a phone call, meaning that one month early in my use of the service I racked up over £100 of charges. I wish I could even claim it was for some agreeably salacious use, but I was mostly concerned with reading rumours about the new Star Wars prequels and downloading South Park sound clips.

Once a hub within our home, in the aftermath of the landline’s demise the back hall has become little more than a vestibule for various items of outerwear to be quickly grabbed if you need to go outside into the garage. There are roughly a thousand discarded shoes, and a mat for the dog, who is allowed to sleep there when she gets scared by the many things that now appear to terrify her very greatly indeed. There is a coat rack by the far wall which holds – and I have counted – twenty-eight coats, jackets, fleeces and items of hi-viz apparel, all of which at one point or another may have been in daily use by one or several of us, but which were for years kept as a last resort should someone need something to wear when nipping out for a fag. None of us live there any more, nor do we smoke when we return, so this stock of coats has been frozen in time since, I would reckon, about 2009. A recent dig through the archaeological strata uncovered a coat I’d forgotten ever owning, a tatty army surplus thing, its pockets containing a few crumbles of weed and a USB stick of bad techno.


The back hall opens onto the kitchen, where the first thing that greets you is the twelve-foot-long table that has served as the locus of family life for thirty-five years. It’s the first sign that you’re entering a house that was designed to accommodate my family’s ludicrous dimensions. It has a marble-effect top, which was probably meant to seem classy but looks more like the backdrop for the cover of a mid-nineties rap album. It was the venue for all the family meals we had together growing up, was the centre point of Christmas dinners, and is now the favoured spot for late-night drinking sessions when we end up at home together. The dogs like to sit underneath it. The steady hum and hiss of their snoring, accompanied by Italian football on Channel 4 and the dishwasher working its way through the dinnerplates we’d just used, was the soundtrack to my every childhood Sunday. That is until I started blaring the Aphex Twin and Autechre CD-Rs that would send Daddy in to rip the speaker plug from the wall.