are witnesses of Time with a duty to reflect the past without bitterness.
– Martin Dillon
PART ONE
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
