Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? A Memoir(55)

‘4 Catholics Shot Dead on the Ormeau Road’ or ‘The RUC are appealing for information, regarding the murders of 3 Protestant men near the Glenshane Pass this morning’.

You could have spent your life curing polio or inventing the Harrier jet, but as long as you were a non-famous Northern Irish person murdered by paramilitaries, your childhood attendance of a Church of Ireland school was paramount. Only in other cases – weird cases, involving non-Northern Irish casualties – would something like normal reportage prevail. When the IRA killed two Australian lawyers in the Netherlands, in the mistaken belief that they were off-duty British soldiers, it made no sense to report those people’s religions; unlike me and my family, they hadn’t been stupid enough to be born in Northern Ireland and thus had not, at birth, been signed up for the whole bizarre charade.


Robert was a good friend to us, even those of us who weren’t gifted young farmers. When my mother died, he came to the funeral even though the rules of his organisation expressly forbade attendance at any Catholic event. This sounds like a commonplace act of decency, but my father was immeasurably touched by it, and touched too by the work friends and neighbours of that persuasion who, though refusing to enter the church itself, stood vigil outside the building for the duration and re-joined the cortège thereafter. Their friendship naturally extended to Robert’s being at my father’s bedside in hospital, just in time to tell him about the goings-on in Reservoir Meats.

My father’s diabetes should have been spotted earlier, since his diet had been pretty bad for a while. Never particularly keen to begin with, he’d started swearing off vegetables entirely, declaring that he’d only ever eaten them so that we would. To this day he can’t say the word broccoli without mock retching. Brussels sprouts he calls ‘wee green round bastards’. Throughout my childhood, he insisted on a forensic examination of Christmas puddings every year, eating a different one each Sunday in the weeks and months running up to the big day, recording his findings and debating their qualities with us, so that through this exacting process we could crown a winner. We eventually noticed that this tournament was starting earlier and earlier each year, with preliminary rounds beginning in September and even August. By the time of my brother Shane’s wedding, he’d taken to keeping a stash of fizzy drinks in his bedroom, hidden in a wardrobe as if they were heroin or plastic explosives. He had, paradoxically, lost a lot of weight, and his circulation had clearly deteriorated. At the ceremony I noticed a cut on his hand from fixing a mower at home. By the time Shane and Becky had returned from honeymoon several weeks later it hadn’t healed.

Things progressed from there. I was at university in Dublin when I heard a cut on his foot had become severely infected and the toe would need to be removed, then several toes, then the whole foot and then further and further up. The entire saga was obviously a huge shock to my dad, who had not been aware of the seriousness of his condition, but, losing time to the spread of infection, it was he who said he was prepared to get ahead of the problem by having the surgeons cut just below his right knee. There would be a long hard road from there on out, with the physical and emotional strains of recovery, rehab and adaptation to his prosthesis, but he attacked it with the same unshowy stoicism with which he’d tackled everything else, barring broccoli, the death of Joe Dolan or the four out of ten I once gave a Tesco Finest Melt-in-the-Middle Chocolate and Salted Caramel Christmas Pudding for Six.


In the immediate aftermath of the surgery he was bullish and confident, although a lot of that might have been the effects of shock and/or morphine. There was also the sense of what could have gone wrong, since the amputation had, after all, averted possible death. When I came home to see him I was a complete wreck, and quizzed my brother Shane through nervy tears.

‘How is he?’

‘He’s grand,’ breezed Shane, before adding with a beam, ‘He wants the other leg off!’

This was the first time I had laughed since hearing the news, but it took Robert to get the first laugh out of Daddy. For the most part, people were extremely nervous around him, scared of how serious the problem had been, and perhaps of the physical horror of amputation. My dad had hated pity as a widower and now hated it as an amputee, and so insisted on thrusting his stump out of the sheets and into full view of any person who walked in with their sheepish mouth and trembling hands. Once you’d been through it, it was fun to watch others be subjected to the same. This was his own version of slaughterhouse wit, the gallows humour that kept the horror at bay.

It was immediately apparent just how many phrases and aphorisms revolve around feet, as when my sister Maeve made reference to the staff nurse keeping Daddy ‘on his toes’ and making sure he ‘toed the line’, two phrases I can’t imagine her using in any other circumstance. The delightful Sister Francistine, the nun who was the principal of our primary school, came to counsel my father and ended her visit by agreeing it was no use being negative. ‘You just have to take each day as it comes,’ she said, ‘and put your best… face… forward.’ We said nothing. ‘Um,’ she added so quietly it was hard not to laugh in her face, ‘is that the phrase?’ Whether it was before, it certainly was after, and has been a favourite in our family ever since.

My dad’s resilience was remarkable, and within a few weeks of coming home from hospital he had mastered his prosthesis to the point where he could ride a bike fairly easily. This was particularly surprising to us, since he hadn’t been seen on a bike for maybe upwards of a decade and hasn’t been seen on one since. When he returned to work, he didn’t make a big fuss about what had happened, and didn’t bother telling his more casual acquaintances, who often had no idea about the prosthesis and presumed he just had a slight limp. This led to complications once, when he slipped and fell on an office visit to Belfast. It was, luckily, a minor fall, more embarrassing than anything else, although it momentarily dislodged his prosthetic leg. As he winced on the floor, pride dented but physically unharmed, a colleague took him by the hand and looked in horror at the unwelcome right angle that had formed in my father’s trouser leg. ‘Jesus!’ he said, thinking my father hadn’t yet noticed his shinbone snapping in two. ‘It’s a bad fall, Joe.’ You might not find that story funny, but when I tell it to Northern Irish people, it kills.