No 7. Her greatest joy was her belief she was married to the ‘best-looking guy in Belfast’. She insisted he was the spitting image of Cary Grant. With any saved money, she paid her brother, Willie Joe, to make tweed jackets, which my father wore until they were threadbare.
She never offered me an explanation for her yearly pregnancies. But after the birth of two of my sisters, my father felt it was time to bring me and my twin, Damien, then aged seven, into his confidence. He took us for ice cream and it became an annual ritual I later noted in a journal:
THE DAYS OF ICE CREAM AND MYSTERIES
There was nothing mother ever said to encourage questions. She had the same rounded belly and ungainly walk, but we knew something was happening. Father, too, was silent until it was time for ice cream. It always seemed like summer when he clasped our hands, dragging us into his longer strides. A secret was in his dark features and in the heart beating steadily behind his woollen shirt and tweed jacket. He ate his ice cream without ever licking it. ‘Your mother’s going to have another baby, and its God’s will,’ he would mumble. God and my mother! It was too miraculous to contemplate. And what of my father’s will? I couldn’t quite formulate that question in the days of ice cream and mysteries. I would have to find out for myself.
My parents were deeply attached to Catholicism and a strict observance of its rules. I have often asked myself whether their devotion, which bordered on the obsessive, was a response to deep convictions or the proximity of our home to St Peter’s pro-cathedral. The whole family attended Mass and Communion every morning. I firmly believe she thought it elevated us religiously to a cut above the rest.
‘A family that prays together stays together,’ my mother would assure us, restating the Catholic Church mantra of the time. Sadly, it would prove not to be the case. When we got older, many of us drifted apart, some of us never to speak again because of perceived slights and inheritance disputes.
One of the curious things at that time was the excessive amount of time my father spent in Fr Armstrong’s confessional every Friday evening. Subsequently, I learned any confession with Fr Armstrong had the potential to be a lengthy experience, more akin to an interrogation. He liked to talk and was curious about the minutiae of the lives of his penitents. As an altar boy, I had first-hand experience of his eccentricities, or more pointedly his obsessive-compulsive behaviour, especially when he handled the bread and wine during Mass. Later, I would recall these early experiences with Fr Armstrong:
THE ALTAR BOY
I poured water into Christ’s blood as the chalice turned 180 degrees in Father Armstrong’s gnarled fingers. He talked into it before holding it aloft, waiting for its energy to find the rest of us. When he wiped it clean, not a speck of the Body or Blood was left behind. I carried it into the sacristy, its coldness expelling warmth in my tiny hands, terrified to look inside for fear a voice would speak to me from Calvary.
When I walked to my grandmother’s in No 4, I would gaze up at the twin spires of St Peter’s towering over the Lower Falls. I asked my uncle, WJ, why the spires were so tall, and he jokingly replied they were there to remind Protestants in the nearby Shankill area we Catholics existed. Protestants, I felt, needed no reminder since there was a Protestant church fifty yards from my home on nearby Albert Street.
It still puzzles me why St Peter’s needed such towering spires in a tiny area like the Lower Falls. It was perhaps as much a political as it was a religious statement in a city where two communities shared a competitive fervour. When I was seven years old, I developed a fear of those sometimes dark, foreboding spires, each capped with a metal cross. On wet days when rain made it hard to see the tops of them, I held my mother’s hand tightly on the way into church. My fear was heightened by a large hawk that visited the spires from time to time and left pigeons’ carcasses splayed across the church steps.
Most days, my grandmother Clarke’s sisters, Sarah and Bridget, sat by the fire in No 4, praying for the ‘conversion of Russia from Communism’ and for the ‘black babies in Africa’. My aunts raised other monies for the Church, believing they would be used to convert ‘Communist heathens’ in Russia, once a ‘God-fearing nation’, which had to be restored to the faith.
‘Why aren’t we praying for the Protestants on the Shankill Road?’ I once asked Aunt Bridget.
‘We’re not!’ Her reply was sharp and was intended to blunt my inquisitiveness.
‘Why not? Uncle Willie Joe calls them heathens too.’
She fixed me with a disapproving stare before responding. ‘You didn’t hear right. Your uncle probably called them hooligans, but they are probably heathens as well. Then again, that uncle of yours wouldn’t know the difference.’
She briefly allowed herself a smile, thinking my curiosity had been satisfied. But children have a tendency to be persistent.
‘Shouldn’t we just pray for Protestants to become Catholics?’ I asked, somewhat sheepishly.
‘No. You see, the difference between Protestants and Communist heathens in Russia is that the Russians were once Catholics, and Our Lady will return them to the faith. Protestants don’t have the faith and never had it.’
‘Couldn’t 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