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
