Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(37)

Because we all did quite well in school, people tend to assume my dad was a taskmaster. Friends confess they thought he must have been the pushy type; a field marshal who kept us in a perpetual state of readiness ahead of the next impromptu pop quiz. ‘Oh, I’ll pass you the butter,’ he might say at the breakfast table, ‘but only if you first tell me how accurate it would be to describe the decline of the crusader states as being primarily due to the quality of Saladin’s leadership in the years 1169–87.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. He hoped we would do well, of course, but I don’t think he ever knew what subjects I was doing, nor who any of my teachers were. One of the few benefits of being the widowed father of eleven children was that when he refused to perform the mundane and pointless obligations expected of other parents, nobody dared object. It was customary for teachers to send every student home with a daybook describing their behaviour, to be signed by a parent every night. In it would be written comments like ‘Séamas kept whistling the theme music to Pet Rescue’ or ‘Séamas was sarcastic to the school dog’ and your parent was supposed to read these and admonish you, and then sign the thing so your teacher knew that it was sorted. Loads of boys in my class just signed their own, but I think I was the only person who was actively encouraged to do so by my father, who simply lacked the necessary bandwidth to care about such details, let alone to do so for eight or nine children every single night. I did forge his signature for a while, but pretty soon I just stopped signing it altogether. My teacher never minded because, well, who wants to be the one bothering Joe O’Reilly? This suited my dad, who had several thousand other things to worry about, fine, and it most certainly suited me.

What Daddy might have lacked in a minute-by-minute, hands-on approach to my schooling, he made up for with more practical acts of ingenuity. He deliberately raised us in an incredibly uneventful part of the countryside, with nothing to do for miles around.

I was too young to remember the time the IRA blew up the customs hut at the top of our field, and would entertain fantasies, both fond and frequent, of more explosions coming our way to break the tedium. It didn’t seem fair that the city types had all the fun. Even a kidnapping or a chase would have been welcome, for God’s sake. It would be some years before we even accrued the few neighbours we have there now, so at weekends, if we weren’t grumbling as we helped Daddy cut grass or fix gutters, we would loll about in states of performative boredom that elicited from him only new, increasingly arcane tasks for us. Unless you wanted to spend four hours of a Saturday polishing the TV aerial, or re-labelling paint cans, it was better to try to look busy. It was here that one of my dad’s many moments of parenting genius proved mutually beneficial. He never told us to read; he had just built bookshelves in every room and filled them with a dazzling array of – mostly terrible – books, thereby ensuring that there would always be something to retreat to when boredom set in. And boredom – deep, crippling boredom – was pretty much a fixed state for a lot of my upbringing. I spent my childhood so bored, so paralytically intediated by my surroundings, that I found time to run through every bookshelf in our house until I went cross-eyed.

I read my brothers’ archive of slim paperbacks featuring ladies in corsets holding pistols or ladies in metal bras wielding swords; sports capers with names like GOAL! or NET! or HEADER!, the plots of which invariably involved an oft-unused sub from a broken home coming on to score the decisive strike in a big final. There were also bizarrely highbrow works by Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Thomas Pynchon, and Stanisaw Lem, but with no literary background I’m not sure that I was even aware that there was such a thing as a bad book. There were simply books I had read and those I hadn’t. Early on I remember someone telling me that even if you read a book a week for your entire life, and lived for eighty years and change, your lifetime haul would still only be about four thousand. I set out to beat that number

My first loves were the Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton collections peppered through every room, and the Reader’s Digest versions of popular classics. Later there came the bullet-stopping King and Barker novels that formed an early taste for horror and the macabre. After these, I began working my way through my older sisters’ shelves full of Judy Blume, Francine Pascal and, latterly, Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper. Polo would be my first introduction to the world of sex. At the tender age of eleven I was highly intrigued by Cooper’s descriptions of posh people bonking while wearing tight white trousers and receiving very fancy fax-machine messages. But many of the books in the girls’ rooms were propaganda they had been made to bring home from school. I have very strong memories of one book about a ballerina with an eating disorder, and another that was ostensibly a manual for teenage mothers but was actually written to scare young women into not being teenage mothers while also explicitly asserting that any form of contraception was evil. Catholic education required that girls fear the prospect of pregnancy above all things, while creating the perfect condition of ignorance which would result in just that. Having said that, none of my sisters ever became a teenage mother.

In Caoimhe and Fionnuala’s rooms I found slightly more varied material for the younger lady. I was particularly taken with girls’ comics from this time: Jackie, Bunty, Mandy & Judy, and the majestically uneventful Twinkle. Arriving in from Mass and eating Sunday dinner, I’d find myself filled (figuratively) with the Holy Spirit and (literally) beef gravy, and get a few pages in before full-bellied sleep would grab me for an hour or so in its downy claws. I’d wake up groggy and bloated, halfway through a particularly riveting edition of ‘Nurse Nancy’.