Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(51)

There they sit, telling us what else they have planned for broadcast tonight and for the rest of the weekend, as if we are guests in their oddly flat, uncomfortable home, which appears to be nothing more than two front-facing couches, a clock and an endless vault of TV programmes they’ve taken it upon themselves to choose for our nightly entertainment. You needn’t worry about us, though, Mike and Linda. We have a garage, a binder and the whole world in front of us.





12


Notable Explosions, 1988–2005


After Daddy had his leg cut off, I didn’t see him laugh again until the pope died. Not that the expiry of His Holiness was, in and of itself, hilarious. It was just that Robert Dalton told him that Reservoir Meats, the meat-packing plant about a mile from our house, ended up briefly closing because of it, which reduced Daddy to tears of ungovernable laughter, while the bandages were still wet in his hospital bed. Robert – the kindly farmer who was good enough to take me out for a day on his tractor when I was six – was a very dear friend of my father. As well as farming, he had a job as the local meat inspector, surveying the premises of slaughterhouses, packing plants and abattoirs, making sure they stood up to government code, which placed him in that rare bracket of health and safety officers who might mark down your workplace if it had insufficient sharp objects and too few vats of animal blood. Most of his time was taken up, I gather, scrutinising the cleanliness and work practices of large blood-stained buildings in Derry and the north-west, making sure people weren’t licking the carcasses or incorrectly storing barrels filled with hooves.

Reservoir Meats was something of a community success. Many Northern Ireland businesses don’t have mixed workforces of Catholics and Protestants, even today. Sometimes this is a function of geography, but it’s also a legacy of sectarian hiring practices that worked as a barrier for Catholics. For decades it was, for example, prohibitively difficult for a Catholic to work in Belfast’s shipyards or gain entrance to trades through apprenticeships, as these were often closed to papists. Reservoir Meats was, by contrast, an egalitarian employer, one in which working-class Catholics and Protestants sat side by side all day, chopping up animal cadavers with giant cleavers, passing their time in an atmosphere that bordered on bonhomie.

This was despite, or perhaps because of, a culture of bristlingly offensive discourse between groups. Where other workforces might slag off each other’s chosen football team or questionable fashion choices, here the jokes threw off references to punishment beatings, political murders and tit-for-tat killings amid a demographic of people who more than likely had direct experience of one or more in their own immediate families. Both of my brothers would come home from their shifts, white-faced and staring, having spent eight hours squeezed between huge men with hands like shovels, their own willowy, teenaged forms almost comically tiny and mute compared to their beefy neighbours with scarred knuckles and paramilitary tattoos, tearing meat apart as they traded withering barbs.

‘Is your cousin still missing, Gerry?’ one might say to his opposite, provoking laughter from the whole room and from Gerry himself, suggesting that the abduction and murder of a family member was not just an allowable subject for humour, but one even its target had to agree was, at the end of the day, hilarious. All such jibes were taken in good humour, or rather something like the blithe nihilism that becomes general in any place where people have lived through thirty years of violent conflict and now dismantle animal corpses for a living. These were men who might, at one time, have been at war with each other. Now they sat together pulling raw beef from leg joints and shoulder sockets all day, and would drink, bet and play darts with each other afterwards. This was some strange, blood-splattered version of peace in our time, so what harm was there in throwing off a joke about your disappeared cousin?

In comparison, ridiculing the pope’s death should have been small potatoes. Given John Paul II’s declining health over that year, it was entirely predictable. The Protestant workers’ most waggish contingent had already been singing mock Latin when news had come in that Il Papa was too weak to give Easter Mass. By the time he died, and they showed up wearing black armbands, Robert told us it was received with relative equanimity by the other side, except for one particular group: the plant’s thirty Polish workers, who, quite aside from being ardent Catholics, were particularly invested in the first-ever Polish pope. It appears likely that the everyday jibes had passed them by, since they so often centred on local politics and personal histories and were delivered in that machine-gun Derry accent that’s only variably comprehensible to people from Northern Ireland, let alone the Baltic states. During the minute’s silence that was held, it was harder for the Poles to ignore their workmates’ jeering shouts of ‘fuck the pope’ and ‘dirty Polish bastard’. Quite rightly horrified, the Poles went on strike, grinding the plant to a halt for days, interrupting the meat supply to the region and putting the entire business in jeopardy.

It was this story, delivered in Robert’s signature south Derry monotone, that had my dad in literal and figurative stitches in the amputation ward. Despite being a Catholic who loved and admired Pope John Paul II, who had even sent two of his daughters to sing for the man, my dad found the whole thing unaccountably hilarious for exactly the same reason I did: so many horrific, depressing and awful things have happened in Northern Ireland in his lifetime that whatever joy can be taken from incidents in which no one was physically harmed will be seized with both hands.