Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(44)

It’s likely he had got away with this when travelling with my mother. In much the same way that, taken together, Usain Bolt and I have eight Olympic gold medals, I think proximity to her talent had given him a false sense of the worth of his own contributions to their linguistic interactions. Mammy was fluent in Irish and French, both of which she taught at A level, and she consumed novels and poetry in both languages. In her twenties, she taught herself rudimentary Spanish using only a phrasebook and non-stop badgering of Eduardo, her sister Aileen’s Spanish husband. When she was entering her forties, my oldest siblings began studying German, and she decided she would start learning the language as well, doing night classes so she could keep up with their efforts. This, more than anything, epitomises my mother’s best qualities; not merely endless compassion and thoughtfulness, but a work ethic that makes my head hurt. The kind of woman who, while balancing the demands of eleven kids and a full-time teaching job, decided to do a German GCSE from scratch. At night. Simply for the joy that it would bring her, and the service it could provide for her kids. The fact she earned a higher mark than Sinead at the end of the year was unremarked upon.

Irish was undoubtedly her best language, but her French was supposedly so good that she spoke it like a native, enabling us to holiday in more secluded, and likely cheaper, parts of France. In 1988, we spent two weeks in a farmhouse in Pont-Aven, for which I was too young to remember much more than it being the time my father had first quit smoking. That and seas of yellow fields, terracotta tiles and a delightfully ramshackle old tractor that sat by one of the barns behind the house. A little while into the holiday, Mammy became withdrawn and reserved, and spent at least one full day by herself in her room. My mother was usually so calm and sunny that for her to entirely shield herself from view was as absurd as it would have been to see her sumo wrestling. A glance at the calendar suggests this was the day she found the lump that heralded the second recurrence of her cancer, and which two months later would cause her to have a mastectomy. The following day she was just as lively and together as before, focusing on the positive, determined to get on with things. Daddy started smoking again.


When his own stock of phrases ran out, my father delegated all communication to those whose language skills surpassed his own. When it came to French, this meant Maeve and Orla. At twelve, they had a single year of secondary-school French, making them capable of indicating numbers of things and naming basic household objects and activities. Daddy deemed this sufficient for the twins to do most of the talking, not just to shopkeepers or rural folk we’d ask for directions, but to campsite officials, border guards and police. A significant communication gap persisted throughout the French portion of our excursion, taking us through long stretches of arid, yellow-brown countryside populated entirely by people with no interest in Maeve and Orla’s favourite colours, pets or subjects in school.

We entertained ourselves on the road by singing hymns and popular hits, usually en masse. We were raised to think it was perfectly normal, in fact desirable, to break into collective song at the drop of a plectrum, but I can’t help picturing what we looked like to other motorists as we hurtled past. Ten scrubbed little faces, silently belting out ‘How Great Thou Art’, their eyes closing for the high notes as they careened down the autoroute.

For the Wee Ones in the back, our time was spent either giddily demented or bored out of our minds. Unfortunately, these swings rarely synced up, so at least one of us was elated and another seething with contemptuous boredom at all times. Add to that Conall’s constant quest to keep Jeremy under control, and Fionnuala desperately trying to stop her stomach from becoming an external organ, and we were an eventful little cohort of activity, albeit one studiously ignored by everyone else for the entire five days of our journey.

We stayed sane by playing interminable bouts of I Spy, which began as nothing more than a way to distract Fionnuala from being extravagantly sick every eight miles, but soon became wildly competitive. Caoimhe and I led the charge as the two oldest Wee Ones, and became increasingly creative. We quickly set upon the fact that if we said ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with… A’ we could subvert the natural order of the game by using ‘a’ in its indefinite-article sense, as in ‘a car’, ‘a sheep’, etc., which managed to frustrate any older players who’d occasionally take part. More frustrating still was Conall’s habit of picking the same three words – road, car, Jeremy – but refusing to admit it because it would mean his turn would be over.

‘I spy,’ he’d say, barely concealing his glee, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with R.’

‘R? Road?’

‘No.’

‘Conall, it’s road again, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘Conall, stop laughing. You’d tell us if it was road, wouldn’t you?’

‘…’

‘Conall.’

‘Yes, it’s road.’

Looking back, I can see he was just delighted to have our full attention for a moment or two because I’m sure it was a rare enough occurrence for the three-year-old baby in a family of eleven. But, at the time, we wanted to throw him out the window.

The attention-seekers among us could break up the tedium by reflecting on the minor celebrity status we enjoyed. We caused a sensation wherever we stopped, since the sight of all ten of us – Jeremy being invisible, even to French toddlers – crowded inside the minibus was too fascinating for many passers-by to resist. We routinely caught kids pressing their noses up against their windows in astonishment, or people counting us out of the minibus with their fingers or coming over to my father and asking him, in French, if these children were really all his own. The effect was even more pronounced in Lourdes, where people associated having a large family with a certain godliness. Occasionally, words were abandoned and they simply shook my father by the hand, as if he had just heroically rescued us from a house fire.