The troubles with us, p.5
The Troubles with Us, page 5
Most years, Mummy dragged us along to the novena, nine successive days of mass each June at Clonard, a monastery situated in an interface area between the Falls and the Shankill. The novena became popular during the Troubles, the faithful spilling out into the grounds of the church as loudspeakers mounted to lampposts festooned with bunting in the papal colours of white and yellow played ‘Ave Maria’. On the streets surrounding the monastery, vendors hawked sacred heart statues and votives, and there was a Portakabin in the car park where priests doled out penance to those who couldn’t squeeze their way through the crowds to the confessional boxes inside. On sunny days, the congregation sat on fold-up chairs in the rose garden, children lying on the grass playing with their trolls and Tamagotchis, while their mothers bowed their heads and prayed for blessings. It was like Glastonbury for Catholics.
Protestants showed up too. For its ecumenical mass, Clonard would invite speakers from different churches to address the faithful. You still get thousands at the novena. They come from all over Belfast and beyond for one of ten daily services – Father Joe was fierce excited when the monastery went live on the ‘world wide web’ for the first time, allowing those who lived abroad or were unable to make it in person to participate. I told Mummy I’d do a virtual novena with her after I’d left home. I logged on to the Clonard website and there she was with my sister, in a row of seats behind the altar, holding up an A4 piece of paper that read, HELLO OUR ALIX!
When I was preparing for my holy communion aged seven and receiving the obligatory instruction at school on how to be a godly sort, I asked Mummy why Daddy Devlin didn’t go to mass. Didn’t that make him a bad person? ‘There are people who eat the altar rails every Sunday and don’t have a Christian bone in their body,’ she told me. Mummy did the novena each year, not out of a sense of Catholic duty, but because she liked the singalong the priests did on the final day and was moved by the service that featured the anointing of the sick. She was uplifted and humbled by the petitions and thanksgivings to Our Lady, which the priest would read out after his homily. Scribbled on pieces on paper by members of the congregation and popped into a wooden box at the back of the chapel, prayers ranged from ‘Dear Mother of Perpetual Help, can you make sure Celtic win the title next season?’ to appreciation for the staff working in the intensive care unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital: ‘They took such good care of my baby before your son decided it was time for her to go up to heaven.’
The years she wasn’t feeling it, when it was too hard to muster gratitude, she didn’t go. Irish Catholics are often criticised for their à la carte approach to religion. Apart from Christmas and occasionally Easter, I rarely attend mass, but I can never pass a beautiful chapel without popping in to light a candle for a special intention. I’m not sure where I stand on my faith. I think I believe in God, but I’m pro-choice, spent years on the pill and am angry as hell over the child abuse scandals. Yet I still got married in a Catholic church, christened my babies in one.
It comes down to identity, I suppose. Traditionally, Ireland is a Catholic country and, by and large, Catholics living in Northern Ireland identify as Irish. Religion has become an essential part of who we are, even if we don’t subscribe to all its tenets. One of my best friends had a secular wedding (you’d be surprised how rare that is in Ireland, even now). She didn’t care about atmosphere or pleasing her parents – the excuses we lapsed Catholics like to peddle to justify our hypocrisy. To her, getting married in a church would be giving tacit approval to everything she abhorred. I can’t argue with that point of view, with those who say, ‘It’s all or nothing, folks – you’re either a committed Catholic or nothing at all. Take your pick.’ Mummy doesn’t share this internal conflict. She says she can disagree with the church and take what she needs from it, and doesn’t need to justify herself to anyone.
God, grandparents, ice cream – we had it all in Andytown. There was no need to leave unless you were going on holiday. Occasionally, when we were feeling adventurous, we ventured east – east Belfast, that is. Our dentist, a friend of Gogi’s, was based next door to the Ulster Unionist Party headquarters on the Belmont Road, a smart suburb inhabited by well-off Protestants. A few doors down was a shop selling bibles and other Christian paraphernalia, sandwiched between two tea rooms – middle-class Protestants love a traybake. Mummy also took us to less prosperous parts. The residents of the Cregagh Road were more demonstrative in their appreciation for the union, the red, white and blue of the UK’s national flag serving as a reminder to outsiders of where allegiances lay. That didn’t deter my mother. She took her Halloween parties seriously and Aunt Sandra’s Candy Factory did the best toffee apples in town.
There were other benefits to living on the Falls. The area was patrolled by the IRA, who doled out kneecappings as punishment to local youths who crossed the line. (To be clear, we weren’t into vigilantism, though my father found the RUC’s response to the theft of his third lawnmower somewhat lacking. When the burglaries suddenly stopped, he half wondered if the ’RA had got wind of his predicament and had had a friendly word with the would-be horticulturist.) Due to our unique judicial system, official bods tended to steer clear. Which is why virtually no one living on the Falls and its environs had a TV licence – the inspectors were too afraid to enter the area to enforce it. It was only when Daddy, who at this stage had his own production company, was about to submit a tender for a commercial aimed at clamping down on TV licence fraud, that he decided the optics weren’t great and signed us up for one.
5
The mad woman of Andytown
My mother could be strangely sentimental. The Manse, where she lived from the age of sixteen, and our home when we left the Glen Road, had a huge attic, packed with photo albums and trunks of clothes belonging to Mummy Devlin. Over the years, Mummy added boxes of mementoes from our childhood to the clutter, including the stitches used to piece back together my sister’s cheek after she fell through a roof when she was seven.
We were trying to catch a glimpse of the swimming pool in the garden next door to Daddy Devlin’s house by clambering on top of our grandfather’s log shed. My great idea. Its roof was covered with alternating corrugated iron and acrylic panels, and our Toni stepped on the latter, plummeting straight through and tearing her cheek open. I ran to the house to get Mummy, who wrapped Toni in a blanket and bundled us into the car, the whole time shouting invocations to God, Our Lady, ‘Sweet be to fuck Jesus’, whoever he was.
A disembodied voice came from the other side of the hedge. ‘In our lord’s name, is there anything I can do to help?’
Mummy thanked the voice, then sped off to A&E.
Toni was fine. She still has a scar that turns purple when it’s cold, reminding me of my failings as an older sibling.
In the middle of the room was a large snooker table we rarely used; in fact, we rarely used the attic at all. Daddy did it up in the style of a gentleman’s club after we moved in, in the hope that he and Mummy might entertain friends at the top of the house, but even when the red velvet curtains and embossed wallpaper had been removed, the space remained defiantly Mummy Devlin’s.
A small garden filled with blue and white hydrangeas and a rose bush that Mummy Devlin had planted when she moved in, my mother’s pride and joy, ran along the side of the house. The back was a less formal arrangement – a large rectangle of lawn surrounded by shrubbery. For a while, we’d a homeless man named Podge living in one of the hedges. On the nights he couldn’t get into the local shelter, he’d arrive with his sleeping bag, waving through the living-room window as he passed. Podge was a cracking raconteur. Mummy would bring him out clothes and food, and he’d tell us stories about his time in the ’RA during the ‘hairy days of the war’. Often, his tales didn’t add up. I asked Mummy if she thought Podge had really been in the IRA. She said it didn’t matter whether he was or not and to go along with it, that being kind is more important than the truth. ‘But what if the truth is the kindest thing?’ I asked her. She didn’t answer.
Toni and I spent a lot of time in the back garden, wheeling and dealing. The oak trees were ripe with fat chestnuts and we capitalised on this bounty, selling them to local lads for up to 50p a piece from my Early Learning Centre market stall. Despite her discomfort at my shameless attempts at profiteering from Andersonstown’s conker shortage, my sister went along with it, as she did most of my schemes. There’s just two and a half years between us, but Toni would defer to me on all matters, saying nothing the time Moira’s daughter Saoirse and I dressed her up as a sumo wrestler and tied her to a lamppost as a social experiment. (An experiment in what, I’m not sure.) Eventually, she realised I didn’t have all the answers, and these days has no qualms putting me in my place, but her loyalty has never wavered.
It wasn’t long before the locals started to resent this exploitation and decided they’d rather spend their pocket money on Taz bars instead of conkers. They began sneaking into the garden to throw sticks at the trees to relieve them of their treasure. When we caught them in the act, one of them flashed at us. We told Mummy, and the next time they came around she chased them down the street with the hurling stick my dad kept beside their bed (everyone in Andytown kept a hurl beside their bed). Grabbing one by the collar, she said if he touched her trees or exposed his penis to her girls again, she’d lob it off. They called her ‘The Mad Woman of Andytown’.
If her reputation as an oddball bothered Mummy, she never let on. In fact, she seemed to welcome the disapproval of others. My mother believed firmly in three things: not turning up to someone’s house with your two arms the one length (one arm should be weighed down by a gift for the host), breastfeeding your children off to school, and the daily airing of one’s genitalia. She attributes my recurring yeast infections to my refusal to strip off. ‘I did not raise my daughters to wear pants in bed,’ she admonished me, when a few years back I confessed to keeping my underwear on beneath my pyjamas in winter.
Her naturist leanings weren’t exactly orthodox in 1980s Belfast, and I’ve often asked myself how much this played a part in her implacable belief system, this going against the grain. When Auntie Roseleen said it was cruel to deprive us of chocolate at Easter, Mummy spent all day making eggs out of carob. We arrived at Grandma and Papa’s house on Easter Sunday, in matching Laura Ashley dresses (I was twelve), carrying elaborate baskets decorated with handknitted bunnies and chicks.
‘Look, Roseleen!’ Mummy gestured at her handiwork. ‘Delicious and good for your teeth. Isn’t that right, girls?’
Toni bit an ear off a carob bunny and spat it out.
My mother didn’t do girlfriends. She had plenty of them when she was at school, but with the exception of Moira, she let her friendships fall by the wayside over the years. Head of Drama at St Mary’s, Daddy’s alma mater, Moira coached her students with the zeal of a Premier League football manager, and it showed – her annual musicals were sell-out affairs and many of Moira’s boys went on to glittering careers on the London and Dublin stages. Her other passion was Ireland and the promise of its reunification. Linguistics mattered to Moira. It was always ‘the north of Ireland’, never ‘Northern Ireland’, a coded identifier that told her all she needed to know about who she was talking to.
Moira was there for all the big events. After my parents’ wedding, she flew to London to see them off on the final leg of their honeymoon to Barbados. I think she wanted to make sure Mummy got on the plane. It was the first time she’d left her family to fend for themselves since Mummy Devlin died, and the days leading up to the wedding were a flurry of bread-baking and stocking up on toilet roll. Moira called round to pack Mummy’s suitcase with sundresses and jackets she’d worn on her own honeymoon, my mother watching on in disapproval.
‘I’ve already got something for the beach, Moira,’ she said, gesturing at a sexless navy one-piece on the bed and removing a pair of high-legged white bikini bottoms from the pile.
Moira snatched the bottoms off her and refolded them, taking a drag of her cigarette with two perfectly manicured scarlet nails. ‘Don’t give me any shit, girl. You’re taking both bikinis. And for fuck’s sake, buy yourself a razor, would you? It’s like the Black Forest down there.’
My mother wore the bikinis. And the sundresses and the jackets. I see her looking at the photo album of her honeymoon sometimes, her finger tracing the tanned and smiling woman in a white kaftan (ignoring the mullet-ed man on the sand beside her in the world’s smallest Speedo).
Whenever Moira visited, Toni and I were expected to hang out with Saoirse. We explained to Mummy that Saoirse would perch on top of the Wendy house in our playroom and demand we ‘beat the living crap out of each other’ for her delectation, just as we explained to her that the son of one of my father’s colleagues decapitated my favourite My Little Pony with his bare hands that time we all went on holiday together to Spain. Our mother didn’t want to hear it. (Years later, I worked with a guy who was big into child-led parenting. He told me he and his wife drifted from friends who didn’t share their views on raising humans, and wouldn’t dream of pushing their children into a friendship merely for their own convenience. My parents and their generational cohort were not of this school of thought. If a friend popped round for a cuppa, nothing short of a stab wound would persuade them to intervene in the enforced bonding of their children. Toni and Saoirse are now best friends, Toni godmother to Saoirse’s daughter. For Mummy, this unexpectedly happy outcome has vindicated her theory that most parenting philosophies are a ‘load of dick’.
There were other friends in my mother’s life at various stages, bodies that filled rooms, sinking pints of Guinness and tapping their feet to the trad bands that played at my parents’ annual St Patrick’s Day party; that praised Mummy’s pumpkin pie as they huddled together in the back garden to watch Daddy nearly blow a hand off attempting to light a Catherine wheel every Halloween. For my father’s fortieth, Mummy threw him a surprise party. Five minutes after he left for work that morning, the marquee arrived. She found a pair of knickers in Podge’s hedge the next day and was delighted – drunken intercourse was the sign of a good night. It was another one of my mother’s contradictions: she preferred her own company, but no one could throw a party like her. Over the years, the parties became less frequent – eventually, they stopped altogether. I used to feel sorry for these unwitting victims of my mother’s culls. They never knew what crime they’d committed, which of Mummy’s red lines they had crossed (there was only one really – prying into her business, asking too many questions).
My mother’s shunning of conventions such as friendship – and appropriate attire – used to bother me. She’d drop us off to school without changing, standing beside the other mums in her dressing gown as she waved us off on day-trips. She did the same thing to Hil and Bernie. Couldn’t she be like everyone else? Mummy didn’t have time for friends, she’d say. She had everything she needed in my father, sister and me, in Daddy Devlin and her siblings – an unmerry band of misfits that somehow worked. Or I thought they did.
After Gogi, there was Mummy, who was eight years younger than her brother. Uncle Gerry came next. A moustachioed taxi driver, who set fire to post boxes in his wilder years (until the ’RA had a quiet word and disabused him of the notion), Gerry was disinclined to look on the bright side of anything, from politics (‘Shower of fuckers running the show’), to how Daddy glazed the Christmas ham (‘Honey instead of brown sugar? Fuckin’ despert, brother’). But there was nothing he wouldn’t do for us. When Mummy expressed a desire to travel across the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Railway, he said he’d procure a gun and go with her for protection: ‘Can’t trust those communist bastards, Anne.’ And when Toni and I were older and started to go out in town, he’d insist on picking us up at the end of the night, with the caveat, ‘If ya boke in my cab, you owe me twenty quid.’
My godmother, Auntie Hil, was a few years younger than Gerry. As horrified by her brother’s coarse assessment of society as she was by my mother’s refusal to adhere to its norms, she was forever chastising Mummy for not wearing a bra and Auntie Bernie for only wearing black ones. You could rely on Hil to get a party started, her infectious cackle announcing her arrival before she entered a room. They had a strange relationship, Mummy and Hil. Close, but fraught. Mummy often said Hil suited no one but herself, which, though not entirely inaccurate, seemed harsh. Hil never forgot a birthday or a graduation, marking every meaningful occasion in her nieces’ lives with one of her handmade quilts or trinkets.
She told me once the problem with Mummy was that she spent her life trying to please other people. ‘Yer ma was always running around. Making ballerina outfits, bringing the travellers in for tea and sending them away with care packages. Then there were all the bloody old people she went to visit. Everyone likes to joke that I’m selfish. I just know how to say no.’
I admired Hil’s chutzpah, her rejection of the role of dutiful daughter. Not that anyone expected her to land the part. Hil was fourteen when Mummy Devlin died. It was always going to be Mummy who filled their mother’s shoes. And although I never heard her complain about the cards fate had dealt her, I wondered what she might have done had she taken a leaf out of Hil’s book and said no more often. (I don’t have to wonder anymore. She told me not long ago she was set to spend three months volunteering in a kibbutz when Mummy Devlin got sick. They were all the rage in the seventies.)
There was just eighteen months between Hil and John, who, after a rocky start when Hil put a broom through the glass panel of the front door trying to whack her younger brother across the head, became thick as thieves. They made a peculiar double act, Hil the life and soul of the party, John grumbling from the sidelines with a whiskey in hand. Bernie, the youngest in the family, was a baby when my parents started going out. Twelve years older than me, she liked the good things in life – red wine and heavy metal. I used to lie on her bed, watching her gel her perm as she blasted Bon Jovi. I wanted to be Bernie when I grew up. Bernie and Kelly Kapowski from Saved by the Bell.
