‘godless philosophy’. In my uncle’s case, his newfound socialist ideals sounded like a reasonable alternative to Republicanism when he spoke about it in short bursts. Over time, the bursts lengthened and his mind gave way to depression and a mental chaos exemplified by obsessions with the Pope, the IRA and the British Royal Family.
My grandmother Clarke blamed her son’s depression and ‘craziness’ on the beatings he received to the head from prison warders. After my grandfather Clarke died of cancer in May 1944, his wife and her sisters, Bridget and Sarah, could not cope with John’s noisy outbursts, which sometimes lasted the whole day. Frustrated, they turned to Dr Gray, the family’s physician. He regretfully told them he could not do much for her son and referred him to a psychiatrist. Had Uncle John been alive today, he would have simply been medicated. Sadly, he lived in an era when the world of psychiatry had a horrific solution to mental illnesses – the pre-frontal lobotomy. This was the cause of the two peculiar indents on Uncle John’s skull, which caught my attention as a child. The lobotomy left my uncle worse off mentally and increased his paranoia.
Months after doctors performed the procedure, Uncle John returned home without medication. Three years later, he entered my life as the ‘custard and jelly’ uncle. Sadly, our relationship was short-lived because he was cruelly snatched from my life one Sunday afternoon, following a trip to the cemetery. I watched terrified from our doorway as two male nurses in white linen coats dragged him out of No 4 in a strait jacket. They bundled him into the back of a van with metal grills on the windows and slammed the doors shut to silence his cries. When I asked my father why my uncle was being taken from us, he claimed he had threatened my grandmother, and it was better for him to be in a secure place where he would be properly looked after.
Doctors confined him to Purdysburn, a hospital on the Saintfield Road outside Belfast, where he had been institutionalised years earlier. The facility, also known as the Villa Colony, had opened in 1895 as an asylum for the ‘lunatic poor’. For the next three years, two Sundays per month, my father, Damien and I visited my uncle. We brought him unfiltered Park Drive and Woodbine cigarettes, a packet of Virginia tobacco, a bottle of lemonade, several containers of cigarette-lighter fuel and six Bubblies.
I can still recall my first visit. Men and women wandered aimlessly throughout the grounds, some talking loudly to themselves the way Uncle John did on our Milltown trips. A few stared at us, wild-eyed, but bowed their heads when we returned their gaze. I stayed close to my father, fearing we would never get out of there alive. He said the strangers were like our uncle and meant us no harm. We found Uncle John in a large brick building that smelled of urine and disinfectant. He was thrilled to see us and lost no time filling his pockets with the gifts we brought him.
‘Can’t be too careful,’ he smiled, dutifully concealing cigarettes inside the lining of his jacket. ‘They’re all nuts in here, and they’d steal the eyes outa yer head.’
He was funny and lucid for an hour until he lapsed into a familiar rant about the IRA, the Pope and the Queen of England. After two years of Sunday visits, it became clear his continued confinement angered him. He talked of plans for a new life, stressing no one had the legal right to keep him locked up. He declared his intention to settle in The Irish Free State, promising to make his home in Dublin or Ballina. The way he spoke implied it was going to happen soon. My parents and family insiders dismissed his plans as ‘wishful thinking’, pointing out he could be released only if my grandmother signed the necessary legal papers and she was unlikely to do that because she was too frail to cope with him.
It shocked everyone when he walked out of Purdysburn three months later and vanished from sight. Local police launched a manhunt but abandoned it after forty-eight hours. Ten days later, my grandmother received a postcard from Dublin with ‘I’m free in a free part of Ireland’ written on the back of it. A letter followed in which he revealed he had simply ‘strolled out of The Burn’ and took a train to Dublin, outside British jurisdiction.
The most astonishing aspect of the escape was his legal knowledge. While in Purdysburn, he discovered if he could live for six months outside the institution without committing an offence he could not be institutionalised again against his will. The only way he could do that was to leave British jurisdiction for that period of time. The money for the trip to Dublin came from cigarettes Uncle John sold at a discount rate to the ‘screws’.
Seven months after his escape, he did the unthinkable and returned to Belfast. Right away, he travelled to Purdysburn, dressed in a second-hand tweed suit and a pair of leather brogues. In the main office, he brazenly demanded payment for the three years he toiled in Purdysburn’s vegetable gardens. It was not a large sum, but he informed the staff he was entitled to it, and, being 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