a surrealistic vein. They employed the compelling images of Pierrots, or French mimes, hiding behind masks. Behind those masks lurked sadness, loneliness and confusion – mirroring Gerard’s own alienation from the world and the confusion he felt in his personal life. Many of the works, mostly oils and collages, exude an emotional power which evokes strong feelings. He depicted his own drama, as well as human folly. He dressed his Pierrots extravagantly, revealing his love of the theatrical and the dramatic.
I did not see much of my uncle when I was a boy, but he kept in touch with my parents, writing letters to my mother and to his brother Joe. I was especially conscious as a child of their preoccupations with mortality and their frequent use of the words ‘cancer’ and ‘coronary’. The death of my paternal grandmother disturbed our family deeply. Francie, as my father and his siblings called her, was a devout woman who refused to take pain medication when she was dying of cancer. She believed her suffering was atonement for her sins, meaning it was potentially a passport to get her through Heaven’s gates.
More tragedy struck when Uncle Joe had a slight heart attack. From that event until his death, he feared he would die at any moment, alone during the night. He visited my parents every evening, staying late to listen to classical music on a wind-up gramophone and drank lots of tea. He would often leave at two or three in the morning.
In 1961, news reached my parents from London that Uncle Gerard was unwell and suffering from chest pains. I was eleven and soon to embark on a career path Uncle Joe had once considered for himself – the priesthood. There was already one priest in the Dillon family whom I had never met, Uncle Joe’s brother, Vincent. He was a Passionist Father, based in Latin America, and he rarely visited Belfast. My mother described him as tall, dark, distinguished and highly intelligent, though she made it clear she was not his greatest fan. She joked he was more like a passionate Father than a Passionist Father.
She was astonished when he strolled around Belfast dressed like a rich, tanned foreigner in a well-cut suit and no clerical collar. The word ‘effete’ comes to mind when I look back on how she described him. My Uncle Gerard’s biographer, the distinguished art historian, James White, told me over dinner in my home in 1991, he was assured by impeccable sources that Uncle Vincent, the priest, was also gay. George Campbell also confirmed it for me. Gerard, Joe and Molly were gay, so the news about Vincent hardly came as a surprise to me. In contrast, however, the two other Dillon brothers – my grandfather, Patrick, and John – were heterosexual, as was their sister, Annie, who immigrated to Canada and died there.
Uncle Joe supported my decision to enter a seminary at Romsey in Hampshire, England. He bought me new clothes and provided my parents with financial support to pay the monthly tuition fees. A decade later, Uncle Gerard shared with me that if he had been living in Belfast when I was eleven, he would have made sure my parents ‘never offered me to the Church’. In his view, the priesthood was not a career for any sane or creative individual.
A major change occurred in Uncle Gerard’s life in 1968. The lease on his London flat expired and George Campbell persuaded him to move to Dublin and buy a house with Arthur Armstrong, a Northern Ireland painter they both knew well. Gerard considered Arthur an ideal companion because he had ‘no notion of marrying’. He and Gerard bought a house in Ranelagh, a short distance from George and his wife Madge’s place. Dublin had a bohemian spirit, as well as a vibrant art scene, and Gerard soon felt much better physically and emotionally living there. That was good news considering a year earlier he had written a sombre letter to my father after being hospitalised for a month with coronary problems. In it, he wrote, ‘I feel like I’ve walked the path of life onto the lane that leads to the tomb. There’s no doubt about that. Looking around me here, I can see that death has put his hand of each of us.’ Living in Dublin meant Uncle Gerard was subjected to daily radio and television reports about the deteriorating political situation in Northern Ireland. At times, the media accounts zapped his creative energy. His presence in Dublin, however, gave me the opportunity to spend some time in his company.
In April 1971, Uncle Gerard visited Belfast to arrange an exhibition of his works in the Caldwell Gallery. While staying with his friend, the pianist, Tom Davidson, he had a mild stroke and spent several weeks in the Royal Victoria Hospital. I visited him there, and to this day I treasure the memory of sitting on the edge of his bed, chatting about my job as a news reporter. He warned me to be careful on the streets and expressed deep sadness about the bitterness enveloping his hometown. I reassured him he would recover quickly and we would soon be seeing each other in his home in Dublin. He tried to appear confident, but I read fear mixed with sadness in his eyes. In a gesture, which spoke to his desire to be walking in the fresh air, he pointed to the daffodils outside his window. Embarrassed by the way the stroke had twisted his mouth, he was happy to have me do the talking. Within a fortnight, he was transferred to the Adelaide Hospital in Dublin, and I travelled with my parents to visit him at weekends. His illness did not dampen his sense of humour because he drew a sketch of himself with tubes up his nose. During one of my visits, he was thrilled to learn his Belfast exhibition was a huge success.
‘How is Moneybags?’ he asked me when I walked into his hospital room one morning. It was his nickname for George Campbell, who had a knack of selling more work than Gerard. I told him George was fine and had promised to visit him despite his phobia about hospitals.
‘That’s not the only phobia he has,’ noted my uncle, in no way offended by George’s unwillingness to visit him. George did indeed have many phobias, though perhaps that is not the best way to describe some of his eccentric behaviours. Each morning, even in late spring, he insisted on wearing a jacket before he sat down to a breakfast of tea and toast with honey, followed by a Spanish cigarette. He would complain about Dublin’s air, saying it ruined his sinuses and gave him chills unlike the clean air of Spain, where he lived four to six months annually. After breakfast, he used to put on his beret and fill his pockets with old batteries to throw at neighbourhood dogs while he strolled to the centre of Ranelagh to buy the Irish Times. He disliked the mutts who poked their heads between garden fences to bite him.
When I was in public buildings with George, he always refused to use lifts, complaining he suffered from claustrophobia. He made me promise to make sure when he died he was ‘really dead’ before anyone put him in a coffin. He was afraid of being buried alive. In the event of his demise, I should install a window in his coffin lid and place in his hands a bottle of John Powers Gold Label whiskey and a glass. Then I should insist his coffin be buried upright with the window visible above ground to assure friends he had entered the afterlife with ‘the right priorities’. Hospital visits and wakes rated highest on his list of phobias.
One afternoon, the hospital allowed Uncle Gerard to leave for a few hours. At his request, my father and I drove him into County Wicklow to see Sugar Loaf Mountain. He was frail and did not talk much. At one stage, he asked me to buy him an ice cream, saying it would remind him of his childhood when ‘a day out was only special if there was ice cream’. That got me talking about my childhood in Belfast and how I loved a shop in Sandy Row where the owners displayed a massive, beautifully decorated chocolate egg in the window every Easter. Uncle Gerard loved storytelling and wanted to hear more of my childhood memories. That afternoon, all of a sudden he nudged me.
‘Tell me the one about the perfume,’ he said.
It was a story my mother had told him years before, but he wanted to hear my version of it. I began describing how as a boy I saved the few pence or shillings I earned for cutting sticks for my grandmother’s fire and running errands for my elderly aunts and their friends. In January 1959, I began saving earnestly to buy our mother a special Christmas present as a thank you for her hard work and kindness. I decided I had found the perfect gift for her when I spotted a bottle of perfume in a chemist’s window in Albert Street. I passed by the shop at least once a week to make sure it was still there.
One day I plucked up the courage to go into the chemist. Instead of asking for the price, I announced I was going to buy it for my mother for
