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.
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
