Two months after the exorcism I sat the eleven-plus examination. I did not make the grade; my concentration had suffered as a result of the ‘visitor’. The homework, during the period of haunting, rarely got completed and Master Bradley administered the beatings as usual. The burden of not being able to explain to him the real reason for my negligence was yet another injustice to be borne.
At any rate the Master had not encouraged success in the classroom. Lisnamuck primary school inspired neither confidence nor excellence in its pupils. Since we were mostly the progeny of farmers and labourers it was assumed that the collective aspirations of parents and pupils were not very high. This unspoken ethos excused abysmal teaching methods and crushed the hopes of an untold number of bright pupils.
The priest, the doctor and teacher had absolute power in those days. No one challenged their despotic status within the rural community. My parents accepted without question the brutality of the Master. Those frequent episodic sicknesses, sore heads and sore stomachs that excused us from school were viewed as a malingering tactic rather than with the concern they deserved. It never seemed to occur to my elders that such obvious ‘unhappiness’ must have had far deeper psychological roots. My father had been beaten by his own teacher and he reasoned that what was good enough for him was good enough for his offspring. We stopped looking for his sympathy when we discovered, to our great dismay, that his general response was to give us a further clout for having ‘upset the Master’ in the first place.
Mother, being a woman, was more disposed to discussion than attack. Never once, however, did she bring the Master to task. He was left to continue his sadistic practices while his innocent pupils bent and buckled under the tyranny.
The torture did finally end – in June 1971 – when I left that awful school and the ire of Master Bradley for good. The scourge had been expunged from my life, but the damage to my psyche would take longer to heal.
However Master Bradley was not the only teacher employed in the ritual abuse of pupils at that time; my Uncle Robert, also a headmaster, was dishing out the same brutality to the innocents of Altyaskey, another parish school in the vicinity of Draperstown.
Robert, my father’s older brother, had been the chaperon on my parents’ honeymoon and their ‘spirited’ tour guide to the sites of Dublin. He had also been confidant to Great-aunt Rose and, as such, bursar to the family fortune. Much of his income derived from two establishments of alcoholic refreshment in Draperstown. Both pubs were bequeathed to him by his Uncle Mark – Rose’s brother – on his demise. Apart from all this, he owned three farms, even though he would have had difficulty distinguishing a turnip from a sprout.
He had a real talent for attracting money into his bank account, did Robert. He was always in the right place at the right time, somehow contriving to be near a ‘profitable’ deathbed and guiding a trembling hand in its final scrawl. As the occupant croaked himself into the hereafter Robert would emerge into the light of day, a triumphant smile softening his stern face.
My uncles rarely smiled. It was as if to do so showed weakness. Worse still, it might have indicated a willingness to forget themselves completely and part with some of their precious cash. Money was for hoarding, not for spending or – God forbid – giving away. So they lived their lives:
Keeping the soul unjostled,
The pocket unpicked,
The fancies lurid,
And the treasure buried.
Robert, though, in his defence, proved to have a wealthy store of knowledge as well as money. He was an avid absorber of literature, had astonishing retentive powers for precise figures and facts and – what impressed me most – he carried around a repository of grammatical knowledge that would have put the most learned linguist to shame. I had reason to mine this seam when during a university course I sought his sagacity in differentiating the properties of the transitive and ditransitive verb. He solved the mystery with a studied casualness that impressed me no end. Oliver Goldsmith would have recognised his sort:
The village all declar’d how much he knew;
’Twas certain he could write, and cipher too:
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,
And e’en the story ran that he could gauge.
It was clear to me that he possessed a prodigious intellect; yet he chose to live, for purely monetary reasons, an irrational life. Intelligence and common sense did not sit comfortably in his head. As for spirituality, well how could it even get a look in? Oh yes, he went to mass and attended to his duties, so to speak; the actor on that votary stage ‘receiving’ every Sunday. Sure what would the neighbours say if a man missed mass? A body could not be seen to be lying in his bed on a Sunday of all days, boys a dear.
Indeed earlier in life Robert had actually contemplated the religious life. At 18 he had aspirations for the priesthood and was sent to Maynooth College to realise them. I do not believe this to have been a genuine vocation. Personally I never saw him display those attributes – love, kindness and compassion for one’s fellow man – which surely must be uppermost in one who wishes to answer such a calling. However, in those less enlightened days, a family’s reputation was greatly enhanced if a son or daughter submitted to the dog-collar or wimple. I am sure lots of bullying was carried out – vocation or not – by those parents eager to acquire that pious sheen of respectability.
After two years Robert left Maynooth, and went to college in London to study English, emerging four years later with a passport into the teaching profession. The reluctant prelate was to become the hesitant schoolmaster.
Yet, for all his achievements, the most enduring image I have of him is of his substantial presence blocking our kitchen doorway. He’d lean against the frame, the thumb of his left hand tucked under a lapel, like an Old Bailey barrister about to deliver a crucial summing up, observing mother as she laboured in the kitchen. She rarely sat down to talk to him. She was always busy – baking, cooking or washing – and the Master seemed to have all the time in the world. In retrospect I think she should have told him to bugger off, but she didn’t dare.
He had a perpetual air of unease about him, and I sense this was due to the fact that in 40 years he had not allowed a penny to be spent without regretting it. Unfortunately he carried around the evidence of each of those painful transactions in his long face, his overbearing stance and his eagerness to eschew all those social occasions where he might be required to part with a bob or two: the parish hall jumble sale, the variety concert for political prisoners, mutual congress with a fellow drinker over a pint in the pub.
You could feel the chary diction running through him: ‘Give them an inch and they’ll be in on top of me, cleaning me out of house and home and land and all my folding money, and then where would a body be atall, atall?’
So the guard was always on duty about his person; he might as well have hung a ‘keep out’ sign round his neck.
Uncle Robert might have been rich by anyone’s standards but his fortune was rarely debited, even for necessary items. He drove cars and wore clothes until they literally fell apart. He had a ‘funeral’ suit and a suit for everyday wear. Over each he’d put on a grey raincoat, buttoned to the neck even on the hottest day. Though this layer of plastic acted as protection from the elements, I suspect that its primary function was to conceal a rather cavalier attitude towards personal hygiene.
Following the passing of his Aunt Rose, Robert moved from the house he shared with his brothers James and Edward into the cottage he’d inherited from her. Edward joined him there soon after, having discovered that he couldn’t live in amity with the fussy James. James, for his part, was more than happy to be rid of both brothers; now he could lay sole claim to the bleak dwelling that was the parental home.
My uncles were like feral cats in the face of their diminishing kin, coveting all they could from the recent dead to the detriment of a weaker sibling. They all lived and languished and died in the place of their birth, fearing that to stray into the wider world to live constructive, fulfilling lives would mean a smaller share of the spoils in the end. So they chose to stay stuck, frozen in a permanent winter, waiting to move in for the kill, no matter how long it took, willing another to die first and blaming everyone but themselves for the fatuous choices they had made.
I have never understood this. Surely life should be about changing and progressing and righting the wrongs of past generations, rather than repeating their transgressions. However, lessons are not so easily learned when one chooses to remain blind to the needs of others.
After he retired from teaching – and making life thoroughly miserable for the pupils of Altyaskey primary school – Robert continued an existence of structured monotony. Each morning he would drive his blue Ford Anglia at a steady pace to Draperstown, his white hands clutching the steering wheel in a firm ten-to-two grip, the eyes steady on the road ahead. He took his vehicle and his life seriously, not wanting to lose either prematurely. He had too much money to look after, and this responsibility had nurtured a keen sense of self-preservation.
It became an obsession with him. He admitted to mother once that, before using a pedestrian crossing in Belfast, he preferred to wait until a good crowd had gathered; then he’d ‘get well into the middle of them’ before crossing. He reckoned that if you happened to be on the margins you ran the chance of being clipped and tossed by a reckless motorist. And then where would a man be atall, atall?
On rare occasions mother would send me with Robert to Draperstown to buy some item she’d forgotten or was low on, such as tea or sugar. You might wonder why the Master couldn’t have run the errand himself. It never seemed to occur to him to offer, and mother was probably too timid to ask.
I hated those tense, silent journeys. He had the annoying habit of halting before corners and sounding the horn several times before moving on. Once, I had the temerity to ask him why, and he took his hands from the wheel.
‘See, if I didn’t do that,’ he said in all earnest, ‘a young gype could be round that corner like the divil, and could be into us like that.’ He stressed the last word with a loud clap of the raised hands.
There were many corners between Robert’s house and Draperstown so the jaunt was a lengthy one. You could have walked there and back faster.
Sadly that Anglia would never realise its dashing potential under Robert’s guidance. On finally reaching the town he’d crawl onto High Street and devote all his energy to the formidable act of parallel parking. This was a complicated business involving much mirror work and signals, the head roving from side to side, gauging distances and checking for those ubiquitous ‘young boys’ who were all, he’d convinced himself, out to do him damage. The steering wheel would be twisted and fed through his powerful hands, and all the while the rustling raincoat swished and swore in protest.
Robert’s own grocery list reflected the lacklustre menu he and Edward enjoyed every day: bread and butter, bacon and eggs, sausages, potatoes and milk. He marched from greengrocer to butcher to baker, conducting the transactions over exchanges of gossip concerning the weather, politics, and who had died – or was about to. Being the schoolmaster he was accorded the same respect as the doctor and the priest; this daily intercourse with the town’s shopkeepers was the pivot on which his whole day turned.
He’d buy the Irish News last and, after he’d stowed the provisions in the boot of the car, would sit and scan the obituaries column for news of God’s most recent withdrawals from life’s great piggy bank. All the adults around me – my parents included – took a morbid interest in death. This had little to do with the contemplation of their own mortality, because if it had then they would surely have led more productive and happy lives, packing in as much as possible before the final curtain. To paraphrase Dr M Scott Peck: In order to learn how to live, we have to come to terms with our own death, because our death reminds us of the limit of our existence. Only when we become aware of the brevity of our time can we make full use of that time.
When Robert scanned the deaths column, Dr Peck’s reasoning did not figure. He was hoping to discover a name he knew. His joy lay in being the first to impart the ‘bad news’ to mother or the neighbours and observe their shock. There was satisfaction to be had in relaying the sad tidings just so long as they didn’t affect the bearer. Such are the compensations of an empty life.
That newspaper was not only fodder for his morbid curiosity but had an astonishing assortment of other functions. Yellowing copies were employed as seat covers in the car. More pages protected the table at meal times, and he used others to light the fire, and dry the dishes. I don’t doubt that it also did duty as toilet roll in the outside privy, although I cannot confirm this, having neither need nor inclination to visit it.
He’d usually stop by our house on his way home from town and take up position in the kitchen doorway, obstructing our passage from house to yard. If we children were indoors when he arrived then we were virtually under house arrest, and if we happened to be in the yard then we’d have to prolong our play until he left. Either way we were too afraid to squeeze past him.
He’d give mother the lowdown on the latest gossip. He carried with him an encyclopaedic knowledge of every family in the parish, seemingly stretching back to St Matthew’s book of generation, when Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram. …
Robert was in his element if he had a death to announce. He’d stand there, my captive mother nodding and sighing, while he rattled out a tracery of the deceased’s ancestral connections with all the skill of a master genealogist. He’d pick up tributaries of names and details, and join them to the main family flux with facts and dates, while mother listened patiently. She had somehow to simultaneously keep track of the rising scones and those convoluted histories without causing offence.
‘His mother would have been a Martha McAtamney from outside Ballymuck,’ Robert would intone, ‘who got married on a son of the Buffer McVeighs – or were they the Butcher McVeighs? Anyway they owned a couple of farms out by the lough shore until one of the Mickey McSquirtys married into them in nineteen and fifty-two and that was the end of it all.’
He would pause for breath and emphasis, and to test mother’s attentiveness. If there was one thing Robert disliked it was inattentiveness in his audience. Too many years spent in front of oscitant pupils had made him uncompromising. Mother had learned this lesson too and was ever alert.
‘Is that so?’ she’d say. ‘I thought the McSquirty girls were fine lassies.’
‘Not a bit of it! Didn’t the Lily wan turn the young boy’s head completely, put him to the bad altogether, lost the head and the two farms and the pair of them drunk it out. Aye, a bad pack. It was in the breed of them that wee weakness was there. Then another of them married a Dan McFadden. Dy’mine him? I say he was a Dan McFadden!’
The voice would have risen to a whine because mother had turned, perhaps to rescue a scone in the nick of time. But in a second she’d be back, feigning interest yet again with a placatory comment.
‘You don’t say, Robert. Is that so?’
‘Aye, them McFadden crowd weren’t up to much either.’
The litany would continue. Each sentence marching out to the beat of an invisible drum.
‘He was a son of a cousin of an uncle of Stuttering Paddy’s. Y’mine him, a low set, stout boy with a squint, dragged the leg a bit, nivver out of the pub either. Used to see him spraghalling up Mary Pat’s back, stotious.’ (By which he meant that he’d often observed the character in question staggering into Mary Pat’s public house by the rear entrance.) ‘Couldn’t get enough of that drigging. His mother would have been a half-sister of Jamie the Snout’s. She would have been a Thompson to her maiden name.’
‘Thompson, that sounds like a Protestant name, doesn’t it?’ mother would say with sudden attentiveness.
‘Aye, it is, but the oul’ boy was a turncoat, back in nineteen and forty-seven. He had an illegitimate wain to a daughter of Johnny the Slap’s, a wee fat lady, wasn’t too right in the head. A kind of a clatt of a blade from up the country or y’know deed begod it could have been down the country, can’t mine right, put him astray altogether. The priest had to be called and didn’t they fine him dead in a sheugh outside Ballygosidewards at half five in the morning on the fifteenth of June nineteen and thirty-six, stiff with drink more than anything else.’
‘Is that so Robert? God, that drink’s a terrible curse.’
‘Aye. Sure they say when a man gets a feed of that poison he doesn’t know whether he’s living or dead. Tarra stuff. … A bad crowd, aye. And that was the end of that.’
There would follow an uneasy silence while mother ingested all this information and Robert raised his cap, to scratch his crown with the middle finger. He’d replace it an inch or two more towards the back of his head with an air of satisfaction, pleased to have had his say so heatedly and eloquently.
‘Aye, that’s the way the oul’ thing goes,’ he’d remark while studying a patch of ceiling.
My mother, eager for closure and fearful he might start up again, would offer something like: ‘God, I can’t believe that Wee Jamie’s gone. He was a harmless cretur.’
‘Aye, that’s the way it goes,’ Robert would add after a long pause. ‘Comes to us all, boys a dear. S’pose a body would need tae go tae a wake and funeral – on account of Big Frenkie. And that means a mass card havin’ to be bought. Pity a body couldn’t buy a wheen of them in bulk; you’d save a quare bit, so you would.’
There was the phantom Frenkie again; his name seemed always to emerge when someone had expired. Either he was a very gregarious man or had spread his seed far in the course of an ill-spent youth.
On one occasion, however, Robert got things confused. He announced to mother that a mutual acquaintance of theirs – one Lizzy McCrudden or ‘Lizzy the Dizzier’ – had died. In a state of shock she sped posthaste to Draperstown to buy the obligatory mass card. Imagine her astonishment when on the return journey she met Lizzy pedalling her bike into town. There had obviously been two Lizzy McCruddens in the locality – either that or Robert, disgusted at the slow death-rate in the parish and having no shocking news to report, had made it up by way of compensation.
Yet fate was to get its own back on Robert. He himself made the pages of the Irish News, though not the obituaries column. One bright August morning, while he trundled along ’twixt Draperstown and his homestead, rations in the boot and eyes steady on the road, Robert’s car was hijacked.
As the Anglia mounted the first hill out of town, a man toting a gun jumped from behind a hedge and ordered Robert to stop. He’d been hijacked by a member of the Provisional IRA. The Provo took possession of the car and sped off, leaving the Master dazed and stranded in the middle of the road, his arms raised in an attitude of surrender.
Mother was out at the clothes-line at the time, awaiting Robert’s regular visit. She was astonished to see the Anglia flying past the gate, doing, she estimated, a very respectable, rip-roaring 90mph.
The car was found two days later with everything intact, save the groceries; the gunman had obviously been hungry. Robert dined out on this story with tremendous frequency in the days that followed, re-enacting the drama for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker and whoever else would listen.
He’d play the twin roles in the drama: himself and the Provo. My mother and I heard it more often than we cared to.
‘He jumped out of that hedge like a fox,’ Robert would tell us yet again. ‘“Get out quick, out quick, out quick,” says he. Begod, y’know I think he said it five times. Aye, as if a man needed to be told five times, wi’ a gun pointin’ at his head.’
‘God, what did you do atall?’ mother would enquire yet again.
‘Well, what could a body do but put me hands up in the air? And I put them up good and high too, and y’know, God, he was in the car and away like a whitred before I knew it, the rips and roars of him, you’d a heard him in Cork, begod. That wee car’ll niver be the same again, so it won’t.’
‘To hell with the oul’ car, Robert, isn’t your life more important than an oul’ tekelin?’ my mother would say, voicing my own thoughts.
‘Aye well, I suppose,’ he’d venture, not at all convinced.
‘Well, did you get a good look at him?’
‘Aw aye. A young hairy bugger, down the back and round the face and everywhere you looked. Should have been in a zoo, aye locked up. A zoo would have been the best place for that boy. God, it’s a wile thing when a man can’t conduct a wee bitta business without havin’ to come through the like a that. What’s the country comin’ to anyway, anyway, anyway? The whole place’s gone to hell completely.’
He’d then wait for the praise and sympathy he felt was his by right. Mother wouldn’t disappoint him.
‘God, Robert you’re a tight one. I would of died on the spot, so I would, as true as God.’
For weeks afterwards Robert was the hero, and the humble Anglia had at last experienced the passion and fury of life in the fast lane – something Robert would never know.
Life in Northern Ireland has changed a great deal since that incident. So much so that it’s alleged that the same hirsute, gun-toting Republican became a member of our recently formed Legislative Assembly up at Stormont, pronouncing with gravitas on the morals of the nation. I can feel Robert beginning to rotate in his grave as I write these lines.
Occasionally the Master had other reasons for waylaying mother. He needed her help when dealing with his problem brother Edward. Edward had a liking for an alcoholic beverage or two – which was not at all surprising given that he had to share living quarters with Robert, which cannot have been easy. The Master rarely touched a drop himself. Edward’s relationship with the booze was therefore sporadic and for that reason all the more intense when he got the chance. Robert could not ‘be doing with this atall, atall’. He spent a great deal of his time pronouncing on the morality of others, after all, and could ill afford the taint of Edward’s profligacy.
It is a pity that the austere and abstemious Robert never allowed himself the pleasures of drink or courtship. Frivolity was a stranger to him. I feel sad that Robert, with all his money, knowledge and that dry sense of humour he had, did not permit himself the joy of sharing it. He might have had a different life entirely. In fact I’m sure of it.
You could easily tell when he’d come to discuss the misdeeds of the errant Edward rather than a death or the weather. He’d adopt a brooding stance in the doorway, his florid face and uneasy manner signalling a deviation from his fixed routine. My mother, reading him accurately, would ask what was wrong, and he’d simply respond with: ‘It’s him.’
It was an idiosyncrasy of father and Robert that they’d never use the other’s first name. The personal pronoun was employed instead, which often led to some confusion. So mother would have to lob a guess.
And Robert would glare at her.
‘Naw, him!’ he’d retort. ‘That other boy.’
Since there were just the two of them it could only be Edward, so after an ‘Oh, Edward’ from mother, he’d move on.
‘I don’t know what’s to be done with him, anyway, anyway, anyway.’ Another mannerism was to put stress on the last word in a sentence and repeat it several times when voicing annoyance.
‘Went out the morning there to find him splayed out on the hay,’ Robert would continue. ‘Bottle of Powers up to the head, gluggin’ away like a dosser. What’s to be done atall, atall, atall?’
With the outburst over, mother would take control, and ring the doctor. Dr O’Connor would then prepare the necessary paperwork for Edward’s swift admission to the substance-abuse clinic in Derry. Later in the day the guilty Edward would appear at our house looking tired, emotional and – dare I say it – happy. Robert, accompanied by father, would convey him in the Anglia to ‘detox hell’.
Robert visited us by day; Edward would invariably show up in the early evening; we’d be part of his ceilidhing routine at the homes in the neighbourhood. He liked it best when my father was not around. He could drop his guard then and be himself.
Edward always seemed to me to be the most approachable, and the sanest, of the brood. A positive side effect of his desire for the drink was that it rendered him more genial than his brothers. He had spirit in more ways than one.
He worked and passed his leisure hours in bibbed overalls and a checked shirt whose collar points were permanently curled under the pressure of his chin. In Ballinascreen and the surrounding locality the customary headgear of the farming man was a cloth cap. It was a multipurpose item: it kept the hair in place, covered baldness and a slipshod grooming routine.
I saw Edward’s world as stretching no farther than home and farm. He plunthered and pedalled the lanes and roads, living within these narrow perimeters. He experienced the spring showers, the summer heat, the falling leaves and snow and was unaware that these shifts of the seasons were the only change he’d be likely to experience.
When given the tea he’d talk and slurp, pausing only to take alligator bites of the bread. It seemed that he’d have barely started before the cap would be shoved back onto his head. He’d lean back on the chair and belch loud his appreciation.
There were times when he’d lighten the monotony of his life with music. Particularly when laid low with the booze – and with our parents out of sight – he’d pitch high on the harmonica, squeezing out notes that surged into melodies we children could identify. That mouth organ brought forth his cringing inner self, a beauty that had never been allowed to breathe. Sometimes we’d spoil it all by joining in with paper combs, all of us sounding like a swarm of bees in a jam jar.
On hearing the latch lift and our parents’ footsteps in the hallway Edward would swiftly stow the instrument in the bib of his overalls, we’d discard our combs and reluctantly return to the heavy, gloomy atmosphere that preceded father like a thundercloud. With that, Edward would be gone, the ceilidh over.
And at one stage Master Robert, envying Edward’s musical skill and never one to be outdone, bought himself a fiddle. In the evenings he’d fill the doorway and our kitchen with a blare of rasping discordancies. He’d stand there, the elbow sawing wildly, the raincoat going crazy with such alien exertion, and so inveigle my hapless mother into a ‘Name That Tune’ contest she could never win.
After each frenzied movement Robert would stop and ask, ‘Now ye know what that’un was, don’t ye?’ And mother would try vainly with: ‘The Mountains of Mourne?’
‘Not atall,’ Robert would remonstrate heavily. ‘Boysoh, how could that be The Mountains of Mourne? What kind of ears have ye on ye atall, atall? It’s Are Ye Right There Michael, Are Ye Right? Here, listen again.’
And off he’d go with another torturous rendering. When Robert finally left, mother would heave a great sigh of relief and say: ‘God I hate tae see him comin’ with that bloody fiddle. Sounds like he’s scraping an ashplant over the arse of a bucket, so it does. Has he no sense?’
But Robert could neither accept defeat nor take a hint, no matter how many scoreless results mother had chalked up. He persisted until finally all the strings broke, much to his annoyance and her delight.