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.
THREE
Gerard Dillon: The Making of an Artist
In his early teens, Gerard was highly influenced by Molly and Joe, two siblings determined to pursue creative careers. As a boy, Joe had expressed a desire to be a priest, but in his teens he chose instead to pursue a career as an opera singer. Molly dreamed of being a costume designer and Gerard, who loved drawing and painting, had ambitions to become an artist. Gerard had to settle for a job as a house painter, but he confided to Molly that it enabled him to learn to use paint and colours.
By then, he was a shy 18 year old with a gentle personality and a sense of humour that hid a deep secret. He was gay and troubled by awful feelings of guilt, stemming mostly from a religion that branded homosexual acts mortal sins – the kind of sins that would send him straight to Hell. In an effort to deal with his emotional pain and apparent ‘sinfulness’, he naïvely turned to the Catholic Church for help. During confession in Clonard Monastery, he sought absolution for harbouring deep emotional desires for young men. The priest angrily told him it was not enough to confess his sins. If he did not change his ways, he would burn in Hell for all eternity because his desires were ‘unnatural’. When Gerard explained he could not change how he felt, the priest threatened to physically eject him from the confessional.
