Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(39)
Family Matters was a programme that dealt, appropriately enough, with all kinds of matters pertaining to families. Really boring Irish families. It was presented by two couch-dwelling presenters in loud outfits, who would throw to pre-taped reports on ‘issues’ and then circle back to the couch for follow-ups. Segments would include short pieces on, say, the rising price of school dinners, followed by a curt interview, in the studio, with the minister for education, in which she would say it was sad that school dinners were so expensive, and she’d look into it. Another segment would be about the difficulties of balancing work and home life, a topic illustrated with the story of a family in Roscommon that had to balance the demands of their llama farm with the extracurricular rigmarole of their kids’ passion for stilt-walking. They also did very worthy segments about tragic things that happened to families, and it was under this remit we were recommended, I presume by someone in Derry who had run out of friends to tell about our awful misfortune and fancied spreading the news further still. The word reached my father that RTÉ were interested, but he was reluctant, not least since this wasn’t the first time the media had come looking for an angle, and the previous occasion had not gone well.
In July 1992 we were featured in Take a Break, a weekly women’s magazine that specialised – in fact still specialises – in tacky and exploitative coverage of human-interest stories. Take a Break touts itself as ‘Britain’s bestselling women’s weekly’ and it has, if anything, become odder since we were in it. ‘I dug up my fella’s secret lover INSIDE OUR HOUSE’, and ‘DEMON STRUCK as we PEELED POTATOES’ being two recent examples of cover stories. To make the whole effect even more queasy, each cover features a smiling woman who is not a celebrity or the subject of any of the stories featured, but rather a model they’ve hired to fill space that would otherwise be blank. I am moderately obsessed with these women and the function they perform. Take a Break know what they’re doing, so there must be a reason why she’s there. Presumably their research shows that people are so used to seeing smiling women on magazine covers that it simply doesn’t matter if the person in question is uncoupled from all of the horror and insanity around her. The cover woman is some form of basic avatar with whom the reader can identify. Self-possessed, sunny, aspirationally pretty but not unrelatably so, and nearly always turning to look lovingly outward, promising you, dear reader, that buying this magazine could make you stare delightedly at strangers, just like she does. Her bright clothes and wide smile are drastically at odds with the macabre and unsettling messaging around her. She creates the impression that this reader’s friend is herself the person to whom these stories refer, and is thus the woman whose ‘cruel hubby STUFFED a dying girl into a SUITCASE’, or had ended up, oh cruellest of fates, ‘PREGNANT by MOSQUITOES’. Therein lies the magazine’s timeless appeal for those who love sensationalism and schmaltz, or just something sufficiently unhinged that it might take their mind off an impending root canal as they sit in a dentist’s waiting room.
In our case, we were very much the other type of story that the magazine offers: maudlin tales of adversity that just about approximate real events. These remove every scintilla of complexity and nuance from a person’s life story and mulch the whole thing into a frictionless pap digestible by any reader, no matter how unbothered by detail or distracted of mind. There was nothing here that would demand more than 3 per cent of the brain power God gave a tapeworm. I imagine the hope among the editorial team was that they could one day write a story so blandly, effortlessly readable that its broadest details could be gleaned by someone who’d just been kicked in the head by a horse. This they did with the story of my mother’s death, under the sickly-sweet headline ‘For the Love of MUM’.
‘Gripping her husband Joe’s hand, Sheila O’Reilly pulled him close. “Promise me you’ll look after the children. Bring them up so I’d be proud,” she said.’
My mother had, of course, never said anything of the sort, or at least Daddy had never mentioned it, perhaps out of a fear it would ruin our perception of her as someone who spoke to people in the way human beings generally do. The problems, alas, were not limited to those of taste, but of mind-boggling inaccuracy. Take a Break gave my mother’s job as marriage counsellor, when she was a teacher. They quoted us referring to her as ‘Ma’, ‘Mum’ and ‘Mummy’, which impressively enough were all terms for Mammy that we would never have used in a million years. ‘Ma’ in particular seemed like an insulting flash of improvisation that suggested our English correspondent imagined us speaking with a catch-all Oirish lilt, some way north of Darby O’Gill. They misspelled three of our names and forgot about Shane entirely. Most impressive of all, however, was the following passage:
As Joe fell into a troubled sleep in bedroom number two of the bungalow, the children were still awake. Maeve and Orla, the identical twins, had their heads together. ‘Sinead’s doing three A-levels,’ said Maeve. ‘She won’t have much time.’ ‘And Dara’s in the middle of his GCSEs,’ added Orla. ‘The others are too young,’ said Maeve. One by one they ticked off their brothers and sisters. The solution was simple. ‘That leaves us,’ they agreed. They waited until dawn, climbed out of bed and got dressed.
When Joe came down the stairs the next morning he stood still in the hallway and stared into the kitchen, blinking in astonishment. The place was spotless, the breakfast things neatly laid out. ‘Hey, and what’s this?’ he asked, eyeing a chart on the wall.