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TWO

Ancestral Eccentricities

My mother’s older brother, John, fascinated me most. He was tall and bald, with peculiar, deep indentations on each side of his forehead. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles and resembled the renowned Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. He chain-smoked unfiltered Park Drive cigarettes, chewed gum, made long speeches no one seemed to listen to and drank tea from a large mug. When adding sugar to his tea, he loudly announced each teaspoon of sugar, only stopping when he reached ten. He claimed to like tea when it was strong enough for him to stand on it. He would lift me high in his arms and give me two gentle pecks on my cheeks, exclaiming, ‘Jelly and custard!’ My twin and I got the jelly-and-custard treatment each time he saw us.

He was thirty-six but looked older than his years and seemed somewhat detached from the world around him. He frequently used combinations of complex words and quoted extensively from the writings of Marx, Lenin and Engels. While those names sounded exotic and foreign to me, he also talked a lot about a certain James Connolly and, because Connolly was an Irish name, I assumed he was referring to a friend or neighbour. Years would pass before I understood the Connolly in question was the Irish revolutionary socialist executed by the British for his role in the 1916 Rising in Dublin.

On our eighth birthday, Uncle John took Damien and me on our first Sunday morning stroll along the Falls Road to Milltown Cemetery, Belfast’s main Catholic burial ground. The trip soon became a weekly routine, beginning before midday Mass and ending two hours later. Every time we walked through Milltown’s heavy wooden gates and arched stone entrance, Uncle John would point out the oldest headstones. Many were granite or marble, from 50 to 100 years old, commemorating prominent Belfast Catholics, whose wealth came from bookmaking and alcohol. In contrast, the Protestant City Cemetery, a short distance away, had more ornate headstones, honouring people who had amassed wealth from linen mills, shipbuilding, land ownership and politics. Catholics were essentially second-class citizens and their opportunities to generate wealth and move up the social ladder were restricted to a few business models and trades.

After inspecting several small tombs near the entrance, we visited some family graves, beginning with the Carsons. He never prayed but insisted we say an Our Father followed by three Hail Marys at each family member’s grave. He always showed us the Republican Plot and begin a familiar rant about the failings of Irish Republicanism, which he claimed was now dominated by ‘cowards’ and ‘dog-collared bastards’; the latter term he used for priests. For him, James Connolly was the only true Irishman, who would have transformed Ireland into a Socialist Workers Republic if the British hadn’t ‘murdered’ him. Instead, his death led to the emergence of a narrow-minded, Catholic Nationalist Ireland.

On the journey home, our uncle’s speeches became more intense and rambling. We never interrupted his tirades, believing they were part of his personality. Minutes from home, his ranting always tapered off, and he became jovial and funny. It seemed like an alarm went off in his head, telling him it was time to revert to his other persona. He would take a rounded bubblegum, known as a ‘Bubbly’, from his pocket, tear it into two equal pieces and give one to each of us. It was his idea of a bribe, and it worked because we never told our parents or our grandmother about his odd behaviour.

In those early years, I never heard my parents criticise my uncle or make fun of him. I was too young to realise just how different he was from the other adults in my life, but I trusted and loved him. He had idiosyncrasies and obsessions but wasn’t sectarian in a society ridden with religious prejudice. He insisted his political views were based on socialist principles that appealed to Catholics, Protestants and dissenters alike. Much of what he said did not make sense in my childhood.

I was unaware he had once been a prominent IRA activist. Like many Belfast Catholics of his generation, he was a teenager when the IRA secretly recruited him. He fell under the influence of older men with a history of political violence, and it took years for his parents to learn of his IRA affiliation. By then, he was too deeply attached to the organisation to heed the pleas of his family to leave it. His mentors, to whom he pledged total commitment, were IRA veterans from both sides of the Irish border. They treated him to political lectures and trained him in guerrilla warfare. Irish Republicanism so dominated his life, he ignored the effects of police scrutiny on his parents and siblings. It mattered little to him when the police launched regular midnight raids on his home. He was holed up in a safe house somewhere in Belfast. Sometimes, he watched the raids from the bedroom of an elderly female’s home across the street.

In January 1939, while Britain faced the prospect of a war in Europe, the IRA planned to strike at its old enemy – England. It was a reckless and unjustified endeavour driven by bitterness and a crazy belief the British could be forced to abandon Northern Ireland. The IRA leadership decided the most successful strategy was to bomb Britain into submission. When the British received an ultimatum to leave Ireland or face the consequences, they dismissed it as farcical. But the danger was real. To the British government’s shock and horror, bombs exploded in eight major English cities, including London and Liverpool, on 17 January at 6 a.m. Units from the IRA’s Belfast Brigade took responsibility for some of the explosions and for many more that followed.

The bombing campaign was ultimately a failure. It antagonised many Irish in Britain, who soon found themselves under suspicion and ostracised by their English friends and neighbours. Good police work led to the rounding up of IRA operatives throughout Britain, and my uncle John was among them. Due to lack of evidence, he was deported to Dublin after he claimed Irish citizenship. The IRA promptly sent him north to re-join its Belfast Brigade. He was quickly re-arrested in a massive round-up of IRA activists, sympathisers and left-wing trade unionists, all of whom were imprisoned without trial on an old naval vessel, the Al Rawdah, anchored in Belfast Lough.

Two years later, he was transferred to Crumlin Road Prison. While there, he protested his confinement without trial, refusing to vacate his cell for the preferred safety of the open yard during German air raids. He tried to encourage other IRA prisoners to join him, but they refused. Prison warders, the majority of whom were Protestant and anti-IRA, vented their anger at his rule breaking by assaulting him in his cell. Their brutality left a lasting impression on my mother, who accompanied my grandmother during prison visits. They were not permitted to see him after beatings. Instead they were handed his bloody clothing and told to take it home and wash it.

By the time Uncle John left prison in the spring of 1944, nothing remained of the young ideologue of the pre-war era. He returned to No 4 Ross Place deeply depressed and rarely went outdoors. Before long, he began denouncing the IRA, its Belfast leadership, the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Vatican. His anti-Catholic rhetoric puzzled his family, but they weren’t unduly concerned by his antipathy towards the IRA. Belfast’s IRA leaders knew all about John’s terrible prison treatment, yet none of them visited him after his release.

As the months passed, his bitterness increased. He would look out from the living room window into the street, hurling abuse at the priests of the parish and the IRA. Somehow, all the knowledge he had acquired from reading socialist literature and attending political lectures in prison transformed him from a Catholic Nationalist into an atheistic socialist. His disintegrating personality also made him a disgruntled and angry individual. Ironically, his striking political transformation was a reflection of a similar metamorphosis, which infected the IRA less than a decade later. In the 1950s, the organisation transitioned into two factions: one advocated traditional Irish Republicanism, while the other promoted a Connolly brand of socialism with some Marxist-Leninism included for good measure. That metamorphosis within Republicanism was particularly manifest in prison debates in the mid-1950s when Republican veterans expressed disillusionment with the IRA’s attachment to Irish Catholic Nationalism. I believe, however, the genesis of that political divergence can be linked to an earlier period when my uncle and a small number of Republicans emerged from prison articulating what many Catholics branded a ‘godless philosophy’. In my uncle’s case, his newfound socialist ideals sounded like a reasonable alternative to Republicanism when he spoke about it in short bursts. Over time, the bursts lengthened and his mind gave way to depression and a mental chaos exemplified by obsessions with the Pope, the IRA and the British Royal Family.

My grandmother Clarke blamed her son’s depression and ‘craziness’ on the beatings he received to the head from prison warders. After my grandfather Clarke died of cancer in May 1944, his wife and her sisters, Bridget and Sarah, could not cope with John’s noisy outbursts, which sometimes lasted the whole day. Frustrated, they turned to Dr Gray, the family’s physician. He regretfully told them he could not do much for her son and referred him to a psychiatrist. Had Uncle John been alive today, he would have simply been medicated. Sadly, he lived in an era when the world of psychiatry had a horrific solution to mental illnesses – the pre-frontal lobotomy. This was the cause of the two peculiar indents on Uncle John’s skull, which caught my attention as a child. The lobotomy left my uncle worse off mentally and increased his paranoia.

Months after doctors performed the procedure, Uncle John returned home without medication. Three years later, he entered my life as the ‘custard and jelly’ uncle. Sadly, our relationship was short-lived because he was cruelly snatched from my life one Sunday afternoon, following a trip to the cemetery. I watched terrified from our doorway as two male nurses in white linen coats dragged him out of No 4 in a strait jacket. They bundled him into the back of a van with metal grills on the windows and slammed the doors shut to silence his cries. When I asked my father why my uncle was being taken from us, he claimed he had threatened my grandmother, and it was better for him to be in a secure place where he would be properly looked after.

Doctors confined him to Purdysburn, a hospital on the Saintfield Road outside Belfast, where he had been institutionalised years earlier. The facility, also known as the Villa Colony, had opened in 1895 as an asylum for the ‘lunatic poor’. For the next three years, two Sundays per month, my father, Damien and I visited my uncle. We brought him unfiltered Park Drive and Woodbine cigarettes, a packet of Virginia tobacco, a bottle of lemonade, several containers of cigarette-lighter fuel and six Bubblies.

I can still recall my first visit. Men and women wandered aimlessly throughout the grounds, some talking loudly to themselves the way Uncle John did on our Milltown trips. A few stared at us, wild-eyed, but bowed their heads when we returned their gaze. I stayed close to my father, fearing we would never get out of there alive. He said the strangers were like our uncle and meant us no harm. We found Uncle John in a large brick building that smelled of urine and disinfectant. He was thrilled to see us and lost no time filling his pockets with the gifts we brought him.

‘Can’t be too careful,’ he smiled, dutifully concealing cigarettes inside the lining of his jacket. ‘They’re all nuts in here, and they’d steal the eyes outa yer head.’

He was funny and lucid for an hour until he lapsed into a familiar rant about the IRA, the Pope and the Queen of England. After two years of Sunday visits, it became clear his continued confinement angered him. He talked of plans for a new life, stressing no one had the legal right to keep him locked up. He declared his intention to settle in The Irish Free State, promising to make his home in Dublin or Ballina. The way he spoke implied it was going to happen soon. My parents and family insiders dismissed his plans as ‘wishful thinking’, pointing out he could be released only if my grandmother signed the necessary legal papers and she was unlikely to do that because she was too frail to cope with him.

It shocked everyone when he walked out of Purdysburn three months later and vanished from sight. Local police launched a manhunt but abandoned it after forty-eight hours. Ten days later, my grandmother received a postcard from Dublin with ‘I’m free in a free part of Ireland’ written on the back of it. A letter followed in which he revealed he had simply ‘strolled out of The Burn’ and took a train to Dublin, outside British jurisdiction.

The most astonishing aspect of the escape was his legal knowledge. While in Purdysburn, he discovered if he could live for six months outside the institution without committing an offence he could not be institutionalised again against his will. The only way he could do that was to leave British jurisdiction for that period of time. The money for the trip to Dublin came from cigarettes Uncle John sold at a discount rate to the ‘screws’.

Seven months after his escape, he did the unthinkable and returned to Belfast. Right away, he travelled to Purdysburn, dressed in a second-hand tweed suit and a pair of leather brogues. In the main office, he brazenly demanded payment for the three years he toiled in Purdysburn’s vegetable gardens. It was not a large sum, but he informed the staff he was entitled to it, and, being fully aware of his civil rights, would take them to court if they did not pay him. He even produced a letter from the Irish police confirming he had been living lawfully in Dublin for over six months. He correctly pointed out he had proven he could function as a useful member of society. Neither the screws nor psychiatrists had the right to detain or institutionalise him, he declared. Having delivered his demands, he made a little tour of his usual haunts in the asylum and shook hands with patients he liked.

‘The inmates thought my return was second only to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,’ he later told me.

Within a week of Uncle John’s return, the institution paid what they owed him, and he was back in No 4 with his mother. In the years following, he received no offers of treatment from medical professionals. Nevertheless, he functioned as a useful member of society, working occasional jobs and living with his mother’s sister, Bridget, after his mother passed away in 1962.

In the mid-1960s, he made several trips to see relatives in the US and had no qualms about staying at the YMCA in New York. He also worked as a porter in London hotels for three years to finance multiple trips to East Germany and Russia. In 1972, when I was a young journalist with the Belfast Telegraph, I received a postcard from Moscow displaying Lenin’s corpse in a sarcophagus at the Lenin Mausoleum. On the back of the card was written: ‘Dear nephew Martin, at last I’ve seen Lenin. Isn’t he a lovely corpse? I’m now off to East Berlin. See you soon.’ He signed his name in Gaelic.

I was a bit concerned about the card, knowing some Loyalists working in the Telegraph might associate anything from Russia with the Official IRA whom they regarded as a bunch of Marxists. I mentioned it to my uncle when we next met, and he fixed me with a wide grin.

‘You missed the point,’ he told me. ‘There were revolutionaries in Ireland long before these Provisionals, who are now claiming to be our saviours. In fact, you might be surprised just how many Protestants working beside you in the Belfast Telegraph are descendants of the Presbyterian rebels of 1798. There’s more than a little revolutionary spark in the Protestant and Dissenter traditions, you know.’

My love for my uncle and his eccentricities made me conscious since childhood of the importance of being tolerant and compassionate. Too often, I witnessed my contemporaries dismiss my uncle as crazy, dumb or dangerous. On the contrary, he was funny, eccentric and insightful and never presented a threat to me or any strangers. That did not excuse what he may or may not have done while he was in the IRA. When I look back at his life, I find him to be a striking example of a political romantic, seduced like so many of his generation by tales of gunmen, heroes and assurances that force alone would bring about a United Ireland.

His older brother, Willie Joe, or WJ, was one of the notable eccentrics of his generation in West Belfast. He was a tailor, who learned his skills at his father’s knee in the back room of No 4. After his father died, WJ moved the family tailoring business into a shop 200 yards away on the Falls Road. He had inherited his father’s West of Ireland flair for colourful language and through the years developed a keen interest in the history of Ireland. He insisted on using the term, ‘the history of Ireland’ because, according to him, it encompassed two traditions on the island, namely the Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists, whereas ‘Irish history’, by its terminology, was restricted to material written only to glorify Nationalist culture. History, he once told me, required from honest historians a firm degree of balance and detachment. He was fond of quoting from the works of both historical camps and loved expressing his personal political thoughts in verse, which he read to friends and customers alike. It was rare for him not to have at least one of his latest poems in his jacket whenever customers entered his shop.

By the time I was eight, he was a successful tailor with wealthy Protestants and Free Masons for clientele. He drove a Jaguar, and in the working-class Lower Falls neighbourhood his display of wealth made him a celebrity. He often stood at the door of his shop, shouting greetings to everyone who passed, and if a person stopped to exchange pleasantries, WJ reached into his jacket and proceeded, without encouragement, to read his latest poem about a long-forgotten episode in Irish–British history or a current international event. The reason he attracted a lot of attention was his business slogan, ‘Tailor to the Intelligent Man’, which appeared in local newspaper advertisements. He even had it emblazoned on the gable wall of his house. If you ask me, the slogan should have read ‘Intelligent Tailor to the Ordinary Man’, but his version denoted his natural wit.

Aside from tailoring, WJ loved gardening, cooking and all things French. By chance, an elderly Frenchman living in Belfast was one of his clients, and through him he learned to speak French fluently. I was twelve when he first took me to his rented, whitewashed cottage in the townland of Raholp about forty miles from Belfast. WJ called it ‘St Patrick’s country’ because Patrick settled in nearby Saul on arriving in Ireland. At the rear of the cottage, WJ planted a large garden where he grew vegetables and herbs used mainly in French cuisine. He was the first person I ever saw cook with wine, and he used it liberally. His early influence encouraged me to take a keen interest in French cooking and French wines.

Unfortunately, his role as ‘Tailor to the Intelligent Man’ ended all too soon in the 1970s when the Troubles reached into the Falls area. He was forced to close his business because his Protestant clients, who had contributed significantly to his livelihood for over two decades, were too frightened to enter a Catholic district controlled by the IRA. He opened an ice cream parlour on the borderline of Catholic and Protestant enclaves on the Springfield Road, but mobs soon fought pitched battles near his new business, and he had to close it too. As he got older, his years of weekends spent cooking elaborate meals in his country home came to an end. Nevertheless, until he died in his mid-seventies, he continued to cook French meals and to tend a small vegetable garden in his West Belfast home.

The Clarke clan had a big influence on me in my childhood and early-teen years but so too did the Dillon family, which I believe raised the eccentric stakes even higher. My grandfather, Patrick Dillon, and his seven siblings lived at 26 Lower Clonard Street, not far from the Clarkes. It would be cumbersome for the reader if I referred to my grandfather’s siblings as Great Uncle Gerard, who became a famous Irish artist, or Great Aunt Mollie. I shall simply call them Uncle Gerard and Aunt Molly, as I did in my childhood.

Apart from memories of Patrick Dillon, whose love of fishing I inherited, my most vibrant memories are of his younger siblings, Joe, Molly and especially Gerard, the baby of the family born in 1916. Their mother was, by all accounts, a formidable woman steeped in a strict Catholic tradition, yet she allowed them to be nonconformist in their social behaviour and fashion. She encouraged them to love drama, music and dance and ran a little theatre in their tiny home in the Lower Falls. Neighbours regarded them as ‘odd’ or ‘strange’ children because they were constantly ‘in costume’, delivering Shakespearean monologues, singing Irish ballads or dressing up as Arabs and clowns. Uncle Gerard told me his mother produced some of her ‘little dramas’ outside their house and embarrassed him by insisting he play female roles. He never forgot the first time he walked outdoors dressed as a girl. He became a laughing stock for the boys in the neighbourhood.

My great-grandmother ran the Dillon household, and she dominated her husband as she did her children. Her husband, especially late in life, was a gentle, almost withdrawn figure, who sat in a corner of the living room reading the newspaper from cover to cover, trying to appear invisible. He and his wife did not see eye to eye about most things, and their bitter disputes were political, often at her instigation. She was an Irish Republican, who liked to voice her distaste for all things British, whereas he was proud of his service as a British soldier in the Boer War. He cared nothing for talk of a United Ireland and told her the IRA was full of murderers and criminals. He would say if he had his way he would hang them all. When friends arrived at the house and he was absent, they concluded he had gone to the local pub to avoid a tongue lashing from his strident wife.

The artist, George Campbell, who regularly visited 26 Lower Clonard Street when my Uncle Gerard was young, told me my great-grandfather had been a heavy drinker and an abusive husband in the early years of his marriage. As he got older, he mellowed and frequently expressed regret for his past sins. Life had not been easy for my great-grandmother. In the early 1920s, women had no rights, and too many husbands abused their wives. Wives had virtually no recourse to the law, and their priests and ministers turned a blind eye to the issue. Gerard put his thoughts about this on paper years later:

According to my mother, any woman who did her duties and kept her dignity in spite of the hammerings her husband gave her was a saint. ‘That wee woman’s a regular saint,’ she would say about a woman who had just left the house. ‘She’ll get a big crown for it when she dies.’ She was talking as much to herself as to us. ‘Another woman wouldn’t stick it, she’d just up and fly away, but she’ll be rewarded. God is good.’ It was difficult for me to imagine all these ‘wee women’ as saints. I could not see some of them in crowns – some of them were ugly and wore shawls, and didn’t comb their hair and snuffed and wouldn’t suit crowns at all. I thought and thought how could you be sure you would become a saint when you died? The only thing was to grow up a woman, get yourself a bad husband, never neglect Mass, Confession and Holy Communion, and have loads of children. That was according to my mother. But how could I grow up to be a woman?

His sister, Molly, was only eight when Gerard was born, but she quickly saw herself as his protector after she dropped him on his head one day while playfully tossing him in the air. At first, she thought she had killed him. But when she discovered he was alive, she formed a special bond with him. She claimed she cared so much about him that she had an urge to tell the nun in charge of her school she couldn’t love God without first loving her ‘little Gerard’.

She and Gerard were very attached to their sister Teresa, who suffered from tuberculosis. Teresa never left the house and lay in a bed near a window from which she could see her siblings performing their dramatic roles on the pavement and roadway. She was twelve when she died, and her passing forged a unique bond between Gerard and his sisters, Molly and Annie. This closeness to his sisters, rather than to his four brothers, encouraged boys his age to regard him as effeminate. However, his dislike for the rough and tumble of male play may also have helped shape that perception of him. In some respects, he resembled his older brothers, Joe and Vincent, who were both effete and uninterested in sports. In contrast, the two eldest boys, Patrick, my grandfather, and John, were as tough as any their age. They joined the British Army, and John was a professional soldier for most of his working life.

I first met Aunt Molly when I was sixteen. She stayed at our house in Chestnut Gardens. I was struck by her masculinity and her love of tweed suits. Within a week of her arrival, she had changed the names of my seven sisters. It was not an uncommon thing to do in the Dillon clan because Joe had changed his name to Brian when he first moved to London, claiming Brian sounded more Irish than Joe. For Molly, the Catholic names of four of my sisters, Imelda, Attracta, Bernadette and Ursula, were ‘common, much too Catholic and inappropriate’. She renamed them Barbara, Amanda, Samantha and Jane. When my aunt announced she was returning to London a month into her visit, my mother was relieved.

My earliest memory of meeting Uncle Joe dates back to 1958, when I was nine and he was fifty-five. He had been back in Belfast for a decade, having lived in London, and was in his celibate, churchgoing state. He called his Dachshund, Heine, his constant companion, and the small family Dillon house at 26 Lower Clonard Street was his home. I formed a close friendship with my uncle and regularly ran errands for him. He was slim and dapper, and sported a year-round tan that I now believe was as much due to make-up as his love of sunbathing through spring and summer. Indoors, he wore an expensive silk dressing gown with matching pyjamas and slippers, or an embroidered smoking jacket and well-pressed trousers. His rounded, half-rimmed gold spectacles were as well polished as his bald head. My most vivid memories are of entering his house to the sounds of opera or classical music playing on a wind-up gramophone and the smell of ground coffee brewing in an Italian percolator. His daily routine included a walk with Heine round the drab streets of the Lower Falls and the nearby Dunville Park. His gait was as eccentric as his personality, and he minced rather than walked, always dressed in a finely tailored suit with polished, laced shoes. Looking back, I suspect he would not have been out of place on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in James Joyce’s day. He had very few paintings by his brother, Gerard, in his small ‘kitchen house’, but the blind on his downstairs window was a painted canvas – a gift from Gerard. I can recall Uncle Gerard arriving one summer day to wallpaper the tiny living room and staircase. He completed the task by using watercolours to draw heads and abstract shapes on the wallpaper.

Owing partially to his dream of becoming a professional singer, Joe had moved to London when he was younger. While he’d been blessed with a superb tenor voice, he lacked the money to pay for classical training, and his ambition quickly evaporated. Still, his love of opera brought him into contact with creative, bohemian types and provided him with a busy social life. This allowed him to live freely as a gay man – something he kept secret from his family back home. Ironically, after he returned to the family home in Belfast years later, he had a falling out with Gerard when they discovered they loved the same man – a prominent, married pianist. Initially, the pianist had a secret affair with Joe for several years until he met Gerard at a party Joe was hosting, and he fell madly in love with him. The pianist dumped Joe and began an affair with Gerard that lasted for a decade. The pianist was Joe’s last lover for reasons he never explained.

But other more compelling reasons may have prompted him to change his life so drastically, to the point he became celibate and a regular churchgoer. His health was declining, and he was obsessed with his mortality. He feared the dark and began a pattern of staying up till four in the morning and sleeping until midday. In some respects, I believe the early religious indoctrination he received from his mother found him again and convinced him Catholicism would bring him peace. Further, celibacy undertaken as a penance would save him from God’s retribution. The man, who once considered the priesthood, was undertaking the priestly requirement of a life without sex.

Of course that metamorphosis was nowhere on the horizon earlier in his life when his sister Molly joined him and Gerard in London, saying she, too, needed to escape the parochialism of their native Belfast. She chose London primarily to fulfil her dream of becoming a female underwear designer.

By any stretch of the imagination, the siblings made a strange trio. Joe was lean, sophisticated and high-camp, while Gerard was small but robust and slightly effeminate. Molly was very butch and loved wearing tailored men’s suits. Much to Gerard’s dismay, she still regarded herself as his guardian and emotionally smothered him with her forceful personality. In the late 1940s, after their parents died, Joe declared he was tired of the London scene and returned home.