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ONE

Belfast – Early Family Roots

My mother insisted she preferred her children on her knee than on her conscience. It was her way of saying she agreed with the Vatican’s ruling that artificial birth control and abortion were mortal sins. As a consequence, she had ten of us, starting with me, Martin, and my fraternal twin, Damien, followed by seven girls and the last in line, a boy named Patrick. The girls were Frances, Ursula, Mary, Monica, Imelda, Attracta and Bernadette. Starting with the eldest, I learned to rhyme off their names in that order.

Irrespective of my mother’s commitment to Church dogma, she really wanted lots of children, and like many Catholic women of her generation she never considered motherhood a burden. I tend to believe my parents paid little attention to the Catholic version of birth control called the rhythm method. My mother believed it was God’s will she had a large family. For her, marriage and the sex act were not only about pleasure but also about procreation.

While born Mary Teresa, she was always known as Maureen, one of eight children born to Edward Clarke and Margaret Clarke, née Carson. Her father, Ed Clarke, was a troubled individual, who was abusive towards his wife and children. Some people said he was angry with the world because one of his legs was shorter than the other, which required him to wear a heavy, ugly boot. It left him with a pronounced limp, and sometimes children poked fun at him in the street. He was from Ballymanagh, a townland close to Ballina, County Mayo, in the West of Ireland. He became estranged from his family at an early age and ran off to London where he worked for a decade in the famous Saville Row garment district, becoming an expert men’s tailor. Years later, he moved to Belfast where he met and married my grandmother, Margaret Carson. They settled into No 4 Ross Place, a two-level, brick house opposite St Peter’s pro-cathedral in the Catholic, Lower Falls area of West Belfast.

Ed’s story of how he left his family was shrouded in mystery, and my mother’s narration of it when I was young had all the ingredients of a nineteenth-century novel. According to her, he was wrongly accused by his father of stealing family savings and was so incensed by the accusation he left home, giving up his right to inherit a mansion and a large farm with racehorses. My mother was often the butt of jokes about her description of the Mayo Clarkes. My father hinted that the Clarkes’ West of Ireland home probably looked like a mansion to my mother when compared to her tiny house in Belfast.

It took me decades to learn he was wrong. He had no knowledge of Mayo in the 1920s and 1930s when my mother spent summers with her father’s family. In fact, my father only went to Mayo in the late 1960s, and by then, there was little evidence of the mansion or the racehorses. Only while writing this book did the truth emerge about the Mayo Clarkes. Painstaking research by my cousin, Eddie Clarke, revealed Ed’s family members were big landowners from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1930s. They lived on a large spread called ‘Brickfield’, named after a brick-producing factory they owned. The soil on the western end of their property was the best in the region for not only making bricks but also delph and china. They were known as the ‘Lord Clarkes’ because only English Lords had their kind of wealth and a large stable of racehorses.

She often used colourful language to enhance her stories about the Clarkes. By the time I was old enough to enjoy her stories, her father was dead, and she had lionised him to erase every unsavoury aspect of his personality. She ignored the heavy drinking and gambling that led him into debt and almost bankrupted him. As a consequence, the small family home in No 4 Ross Place had to accommodate his tailoring business, his wife Margaret, their eight children, and Margaret’s older sisters, Sarah and Bridget Carson. He even conducted the tailoring from a downstairs backroom during the day, depriving the family of privacy in their daily lives. My mother overlooked the hard times he heaped on her and her siblings because she believed he redeemed himself by giving up alcohol and gambling before he died. She saw salvation in his ability to conquer his demons, and it allowed her to highlight his reformation when I was old enough to ask questions about his darker side.

My mother’s storytelling ability was just one aspect of her vivacious personality, which endeared her to the young men of her generation. She later admitted she wasn’t the most beautiful girl in St Peter’s parish but she was the liveliest, with a great sense of fun. Photos of her when she was eighteen show a girl with a full figure, a radiant smile and a shock of auburn hair. ‘My hair was my crowning glory,’ she would say as she got older, adding, ‘and my pins weren’t too bad either’.

My father first set eyes on her in 1939 when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. He was a regular visitor to 4 Ross Place because her brother, Gerard, was his best friend. The two-year age gap allowed her to dismiss him as ‘the kid’. It upset him because he had a secret crush on her and was too embarrassed to admit it. Instead, he publicly chided her for trying to look pretty, and that caught the attention of her older brother Willie Joe, whose moniker was WJ. He was an astute young man, who would later set up his own tailoring business on the Falls Road. For some time, he had observed young Gerry Dillon’s fascination with his sister and realised he was besotted with her.

‘He who slights the meadow buys the corn,’ WJ told him one day, using a proverb that went to the heart of the issue.

A short time later, my father plucked up the courage to ask my mother for a date. She turned him down, saying, ‘You’re just a kid. I wouldn’t be seen dead going out with you till you’re eighteen.’

While she genuinely thought Gerry Dillon was too young, her rejection of him was punishment for the times he loudly made fun of her appearance. He took the put down in his stride and continued to arrive at her home every evening on the pretext of looking for her brother. She never wavered in her refusal to go on a date with him until the evening of his eighteenth birthday. They went to a local ice cream parlour and briefly to a dance studio. Decades later, my mother joked with me that there was ‘no hanky-panky’ during their first date, and he behaved like a ‘scared kid’.

In 1943, my mum had just celebrated her twentieth birthday when cancer struck her father. To help her mother financially she worked in a factory, making items for the war effort. Her father died when she turned twenty-one, and she married my father four years later in 1948. They spent the first six months of their marriage living with my grandmother Clarke and her sisters, Bridget and Sarah. They then rented No 7 Ross Place, across the street from No 4. They were in their new home three months when my twin, Damien, and I were born. It was 2 June 1949, and my father was 24 years old. In his brother Vincent’s eyes, his days as ‘the fancy-free kid’ were over though he didn’t quite know it. According to Vincent, my father did not realise how living opposite his mother-in-law and her sisters made him the focus of their scrutiny.

He began training as a watchmaker and lived a quiet life until he joined colleagues one evening after work, returning home drunk. My mother was emotionally devastated. Perhaps suppressed memories of her late father’s drunkenness and abusive ways were suddenly unlocked. She ran across the street into No 4 and began crying uncontrollably. Her mother decided this was a marital problem that had to be nipped in the bud and walked straight to my grandmother Dillon’s, a mere five minutes away in Lesson Street. Granny Dillon was a tall, dark-haired woman in her early forties who gave birth to my father when she was twenty. Her name was Frances, and her children called her Francie as though she were their sister or friend. Sadly, she would die of cancer on her forty-ninth birthday, five years after I came into the world. She possessed a gentle personality and was highly respected as a caring mother. When she learned her newly married son was drunk she was horrified.

The two grandmothers made their way to 4 Ross Place where they drank tea and discussed strategy. According to my uncle Vincent, they let my father ‘stew in his own juices for several hours until he was sober enough to take his medicine’. The medicine took the form of a long lecture about life and his responsibilities as a husband and father of twin boys. My father later admitted, ‘Awaiting the arrival of my mother and mother-in-law was punishment enough.’ He said he felt like Kafka, facing the wrath of two determined women. In Kafka’s case it was his lovers, Stella and Vanessa. In my father’s, it was two traditional Catholic grandmothers who knew my mother was pregnant with her third child.

They must have scared the daylights out of him because he joined the Pioneers, a Catholic lay organisation of men who pledged not to drink alcohol so they could be closer to God. He also became a member of the Society of St Vincent De Paul, dedicated to doing charitable works and helping the poor and sick. My father was recognisable as a Pioneer by a heart-shaped pin displayed on his jacket lapel, signifying dedication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For a young man who had never been troublesome or fond of alcohol, being a Pioneer was a mammoth step towards a more conservative lifestyle – a step he later considered served him well, as he fathered eight more children. With such a large family there was no room for alcohol or for ‘good times with the boys’, he would later say. His decision to ‘take the pledge’ provided my mother with reassurance he would behave himself. Twenty years later, however, he put the Pioneer pin in a drawer and began a love affair with French wine, a passion he shared with my mother until her death.

My childhood memories of my mother can best be summed up with the words, ‘dedication’ and ‘love’. She was dedicated to her growing family and to her Church, and she loved her husband, children and God with much the same intensity. She had an ability to describe situations and people with exactitude and wit, allied to a peculiar idiomatic use of language and imagery, a talent I may have learned from her. Her ability to find humour in the midst of hardship never ceased to amuse and intrigue me. With ten of us children sharing one bedroom, she would joke with friends, saying she, ‘stacked us in beds and cots like a deck of cards’. Her command of language, coming from a young woman with little formal education, was impressive. When a friend suggested she must surely be proud of the success of her ten children, she replied, ‘Yes I’m proud of all of them. But some have the spark of genius, and the rest have ignition trouble.’

In my formative years, I was very close to her even though my father watched over my school homework and took me for long walks over Belfast’s Cave Hill and in the Divis and Black Mountains. I saw in her a gentleness and an inner strength I rarely witnessed in other women later in life. She managed to maintain a youthful spirit, matched with boundless energy. Twenty-four hours after the birth of one of my sisters, she was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floors of No 7. Her greatest joy was her belief she was married to the ‘best-looking guy in Belfast’. She insisted he was the spitting image of Cary Grant. With any saved money, she paid her brother, Willie Joe, to make tweed jackets, which my father wore until they were threadbare.

She never offered me an explanation for her yearly pregnancies. But after the birth of two of my sisters, my father felt it was time to bring me and my twin, Damien, then aged seven, into his confidence. He took us for ice cream and it became an annual ritual I later noted in a journal:

THE DAYS OF ICE CREAM AND MYSTERIES

There was nothing mother ever said to encourage questions. She had the same rounded belly and ungainly walk, but we knew something was happening. Father, too, was silent until it was time for ice cream. It always seemed like summer when he clasped our hands, dragging us into his longer strides. A secret was in his dark features and in the heart beating steadily behind his woollen shirt and tweed jacket. He ate his ice cream without ever licking it. ‘Your mother’s going to have another baby, and its God’s will,’ he would mumble. God and my mother! It was too miraculous to contemplate. And what of my father’s will? I couldn’t quite formulate that question in the days of ice cream and mysteries. I would have to find out for myself.

My parents were deeply attached to Catholicism and a strict observance of its rules. I have often asked myself whether their devotion, which bordered on the obsessive, was a response to deep convictions or the proximity of our home to St Peter’s pro-cathedral. The whole family attended Mass and Communion every morning. I firmly believe she thought it elevated us religiously to a cut above the rest.

‘A family that prays together stays together,’ my mother would assure us, restating the Catholic Church mantra of the time. Sadly, it would prove not to be the case. When we got older, many of us drifted apart, some of us never to speak again because of perceived slights and inheritance disputes.

One of the curious things at that time was the excessive amount of time my father spent in Fr Armstrong’s confessional every Friday evening. Subsequently, I learned any confession with Fr Armstrong had the potential to be a lengthy experience, more akin to an interrogation. He liked to talk and was curious about the minutiae of the lives of his penitents. As an altar boy, I had first-hand experience of his eccentricities, or more pointedly his obsessive-compulsive behaviour, especially when he handled the bread and wine during Mass. Later, I would recall these early experiences with Fr Armstrong:

THE ALTAR BOY

I poured water into Christ’s blood as the chalice turned 180 degrees in Father Armstrong’s gnarled fingers. He talked into it before holding it aloft, waiting for its energy to find the rest of us. When he wiped it clean, not a speck of the Body or Blood was left behind. I carried it into the sacristy, its coldness expelling warmth in my tiny hands, terrified to look inside for fear a voice would speak to me from Calvary.

When I walked to my grandmother’s in No 4, I would gaze up at the twin spires of St Peter’s towering over the Lower Falls. I asked my uncle, WJ, why the spires were so tall, and he jokingly replied they were there to remind Protestants in the nearby Shankill area we Catholics existed. Protestants, I felt, needed no reminder since there was a Protestant church fifty yards from my home on nearby Albert Street.

It still puzzles me why St Peter’s needed such towering spires in a tiny area like the Lower Falls. It was perhaps as much a political as it was a religious statement in a city where two communities shared a competitive fervour. When I was seven years old, I developed a fear of those sometimes dark, foreboding spires, each capped with a metal cross. On wet days when rain made it hard to see the tops of them, I held my mother’s hand tightly on the way into church. My fear was heightened by a large hawk that visited the spires from time to time and left pigeons’ carcasses splayed across the church steps.

Most days, my grandmother Clarke’s sisters, Sarah and Bridget, sat by the fire in No 4, praying for the ‘conversion of Russia from Communism’ and for the ‘black babies in Africa’. My aunts raised other monies for the Church, believing they would be used to convert ‘Communist heathens’ in Russia, once a ‘God-fearing nation’, which had to be restored to the faith.

‘Why aren’t we praying for the Protestants on the Shankill Road?’ I once asked Aunt Bridget.

‘We’re not!’ Her reply was sharp and was intended to blunt my inquisitiveness.

‘Why not? Uncle Willie Joe calls them heathens too.’

She fixed me with a disapproving stare before responding. ‘You didn’t hear right. Your uncle probably called them hooligans, but they are probably heathens as well. Then again, that uncle of yours wouldn’t know the difference.’

She briefly allowed herself a smile, thinking my curiosity had been satisfied. But children have a tendency to be persistent.

‘Shouldn’t we just pray for Protestants to become Catholics?’ I asked, somewhat sheepishly.

‘No. You see, the difference between Protestants and Communist heathens in Russia is that the Russians were once Catholics, and Our Lady will return them to the faith. Protestants don’t have the faith and never had it.’

‘Couldn’t we give it to them?’

‘Yes, if they were willing to become true converts!’ With that she waved a finger at me to be silent as she reached for her beads to mumble a decade of the rosary.

In my youth, I spent a lot of time in my grandmother Clarke’s, while my twin preferred to play with friends in the street. My grandmother and her sisters rarely discussed their family history, but I often heard them describing the terrible events of 1920–2 when Catholic and Protestants slaughtered each other in what became known as ‘The Pogroms’. My aunts knew families that were murdered in their beds in the dead of night, and decades later their memories of the period still haunted them. Catholics believed their community bore the brunt of ‘The Pogroms’, but the reality was different. Of the 500 dead in Belfast, approximately 42 per cent were Protestants. Thousands were also injured on both sides, leaving a bitter legacy.

In my youth, I saw a great deal more of my mother’s siblings because they visited No 4 when going to or leaving Sunday Mass in St Peter’s. I liked St Peter’s, but I also had a curious attachment to nearby Clonard Monastery that had a lot to do with my mother’s sister, Vera, who lived on Clonard Street. She never seemed to mind when I stopped off on the way to the monastery to ride the rocking horse and play her piano.

Trips with my twin, Damien, to Aunt Vera’s took on a special significance after we grew a little older and became conscious of our mother’s yearly, unexplained pregnancies. Since no one discussed the origin of life with us, my brother and I had some unusual theories about childbirth. We were particularly fascinated by Aunt Vera’s extra-large breasts, which she made no effort to hide. On the contrary, she wore dresses and blouses enhancing her more than ample cleavage. Given we had never seen a woman’s breasts, or for that matter a naked female, the sight of Aunt Vera’s cleavage was sublime and a little confusing.

After one particular visit, I told Damien I might have solved the mystery of where babies come from – the deep crack between women’s ‘diddies’. He ridiculed me, saying our cousin, Don O’Rawe, who was two years older than us, had been assured by his mother that babies were born under cabbages. I decided to confront the issue head on.

‘What if Aunt Vera bends over some day and a baby falls from the crack between her diddies when we’re eating her sandwiches? What are we gonna do then?’ I asked my twin.

By the look on his face I knew my question troubled him. The following day, we went to see our cousin Don, and I presented him with my diddies theory. He thought it was hilarious, but nevertheless insisted that I take him to Aunt Vera’s so he could have a closer look at her bosom. Damien agreed, and off we went to her place. We sat on the floor, knowing a lower elevation would provide Don with an unobstructed view of her cleavage when she bent over to give us treats. When she bent down to hand Don a biscuit, he let out such an audible gasp she asked him if he was troubled with wind. He shook his head and stared at the biscuit, unable to find the strength to eat it. He still had hold of it when we thanked her for the snack and said our goodbyes.

On the way home, Don came up with a piece of logic that made perfect sense at the time. Women with bigger ‘diddies’, he insisted, had bigger cracks between them and therefore gave birth to bigger babies. He had been truly sold on my theory, and I was thrilled. For all my prurient interest in Aunt Vera’s bosom, she was one of my favourite aunts because she was kind and colourful.