My experience of the artistic was developing through the poetic image. I began to observe beauty in the commonplace as I trudged to and from school with my brothers Mark and John.
I began to sense an energy that riffled nature to new heights. The wind breathing through the trees; greens variegating from dark to light; a fence with the snagged wool of sheep on the barbs; the swell and fold of the Sperrin Mountains shifting under the sun; purple foxgloves straining proudly; a dazzle of windscreens; the glitter of raindrops on ferns; a fence post rotting at a tethered gate; wet leaves varnished on the road. My heart expanding, my eyes truly seeing for the very first time.
I knew I irritated my brothers when I’d stop continually to study an unusual piece of foliage or the play of light on a bramble.
‘What’s keepin’ ye?’ John would say. ‘Would ye hurry up, would ye? Sure it’s only an oul’ bush!’
On wet days we took the bus. The features of this area of Ballinascreen were less arresting than those I encountered in my earlier days, no doubt because we used the main road between Tobermore and Draperstown. At that period, in the early seventies, quite a number of families who didn’t work the land had moved from the rural areas to the newly built council estates in the town.
The old-style shacks that had accommodated the likes of Jamie Frank and Great-aunt Rose would soon become the deserted relics of a long-flown time; fallen tombstones that spoke their ghostly histories through crumbling walls and broken doors.
The road was ours no longer; there were more cars and buses than ever before, so we traipsed in single file, tramping on one another’s heels and standing well into the hedge when we heard the thunder of a lorry. There were few Mary Catherines to detain us. But, to compensate, we had the weird and wonderful Norrie.
Norrie was a transvestite – though at the time I was unfamiliar with the term. To me he was simply a man who liked to ‘walk out’ dressed as a woman. Given what I now know about those less enlightened times, I realise that Norrie was fearless. He was also polite, happy and inoffensive – or a ‘harmless cretur’, as my mother used to say.
The gossip fingered Norrie’s mother Maggie as the architect of this situation. She wanted a girl child and, on giving birth to a boy, could not accept him. She thus condemned the infant Norrie to years of frilly boyhood and the adult Norrie to a life of long-line bras and scent. I’d see them at close quarters on the late bus I sometimes took from school. Maggie made a brash statement without speaking; her face was a powdered mask of panstick pink, her hair as black as a raven’s wing. She swelled out of high heels and tight frocks, carried a handbag in front like a Highland dancer’s sporran. Being a teenager, stilettos and handbags interested me greatly. Once I peered into the gaping mouth of Maggie’s bag as she paid the bus driver. Inside I saw a collection of surrealism that would have inspired an entire Dali series: a make-up bag, a pension book, a pair of worn tights, a pound of pork sausages, an upper row of dentures and a clock.
Since Norrie lived just a couple of fields away from us, I had the opportunity to observe him at close quarters. His daywear collection consisted of ‘safe’ biscuit-coloured separates: a belted raincoat, polyester slacks, a buff-coloured handbag and matching Scholl sandals. He wore a felt beret to conceal his baldness and a powerful amount of slap and powder to conceal the traitorous evidence of a razor.
In fact, if you’d sat him down in a hip London nightclub, he could easily have passed for the artist David Hockney, similar glasses and beret being the Hockney signatures at the time.
This bland mode of dress in public was deliberately adopted to neutralise the impact of his cross-dressing. On seeing Norrie for the first time you tussled with the dilemma of how to pigeonhole him – not quite a man, but then again not really a woman.
Most of us hate nonconformity; we judge and label and box everyone we meet in order to still the panic that sheer eccentricity can bring. Norrie knew this all too well; consequently he dressed ‘down’ in public so as not to cause offence, and ‘up’ in private when all those judgemental eyes were looking the other way. The Norrie I’d observe through the meadow gate when idling on a Sunday afternoon was not the colourless figure who shared those bus journeys from school. He’d have emerged from the drab chrysalis of that dowdy raincoat and metamorphosed into an exotic butterfly that shimmered and flitted within the safe confines of his garden.
His summer collection – his ‘private’ wardrobe – looked as though it had been put together in a darkened room by a myopic seamstress. Norrie would parade about his garden, committing every sin in the fashion bible. There was a crêpe-de-Chine frock in a furious cadmium orange (I knew my palette now with all that painting); a satin blouse with fearless flounces rampaging everywhere down the sleeves, round the cuffs and opening onto a hairy chest. He favoured preposterous shoulder pads, long before Nolan Miller put them on the dames in Dynasty and Dallas. There were skirts of the floaty, pencil and A-line variety, and all finished with pairs of stilettos that looked even higher than the Yankees’. Polka dots fought with checks, and violent reds screamed at timid pinks. This was courageous dressing at its best – or worst, depending on which side of the fence you were leaning. Norrie could have shown those staid ladies of the Women’s Institute a thing or two.
Often on lazy Sunday afternoons his mother and he, emboldened by the sun and sparseness of the traffic, would stroll out to the end of their lane, and venture onto the public highway, or the ‘county road’ as we called it. Those were acts of bravery. On these occasions Norrie would camouflage his baldness with a brassy, blonde wig or shelter under a straw hat the size of a griddle. At a distance, with the light behind him, he looked positively female. A short-sighted motorist would not have suspected a thing.
I also used to see him shopping in Draperstown with his mother on Saturday afternoons. In my early teens those trips to the town were the highlight of my week. Morose and silent as usual, father would taxi mother and me between the shops. First the grocer, Mr Kelly in High Street, where she bought the flour and tea and sugar and whatever other basic foodstuffs were needed. Her purchases were always basic.
The shop had shelves going all the way up to the ceiling, filled with tins and bottles and packets of every description. It was a fascinating panoply of colourful labels which took my eyes for a walk and relieved the boredom of having to listen to those adult conversations. There were bottles of Camp coffee and Sanatogen wine; tins of Birds custard, and Ovaltine and Horlicks which mother sometimes bought to help her sleep; there was Persil washing powder and big yellow cakes of Sunlight soap.
A door set into a section of the wall opened onto the hallway of Mr Kelly’s home. Both door and wall were festooned with various items of haberdashery and first-aid. You were not aware of this gap, until his wife would come in through it, creating a magical breach and setting all the dangling zips, plasters and whatnots in motion.
Mother would read from her list and Mr Kelly would fetch the items. Often he’d have to climb a ladder to reach the otherwise unreachable, his expert hand plucking the products from the shelves. As he stretched and leaned outwards I’d giggle to myself, thinking he resembled a skilled monkey up a tree.
He wore a snuff-coloured shop coat and always had a pencil lodged behind his ear. When all the groceries were assembled on the counter he’d free the stubby pencil and lick its tip. Mother always asked the same question.
‘What’s the damage, Hugh?’
And he’d proceed to tot up the bill, mumbling to himself as his eye roved over the purchases and mother stood waiting for the bad news.
Our next stop was the butcher for the Sunday cut. I didn’t go in there because I hated having to look at all that dead flesh, too visceral and too malodorous for my young sensibilities.
The last stop was Burns’s clothes shop, which I loved. It smelled of new fabric and fine leather and its long, cool interior stretched itself around a corner on two levels. It had counters polished to a high sheen, used mainly for measuring and cutting cloth. This shop was the final gasp of the Drapers Company, set up all those centuries earlier. The rails of overlapping garments were mustered in ranks and files, the more expensive items swathed in protective layers of cellophane. The shoeboxes were stacked to the ceiling and labelled to correspond with size and sex.
Upstairs in the ladies department mother would chat to Miss Quinn, the elegant assistant, and try on whatever coat or dress caught her eye. Miss Quinn was tall, slim and perfectly groomed. She had long nails and long eyelashes and I knew my mother – who was probably not much older – felt like a dud beside her. I was in total awe of this lady. She replaced the Yankees in my head, holding up a picture of polish and refinement that I dreamed one day would be mine too.
I’d linger among the rails of clothing while mother fitted on various ‘costumes’ and covertly watch Miss Quinn touch up her lipstick. Sometimes she’d catch me peeking and would flash me a smile; I’d quickly turn away, feeling guilty, and gaze out of the window at all the hurrying Saturday shoppers.
Finally the curtain would swish back and out mother would come, looking proud in the chosen outfit. She’d wheel and shift in front of the large mirror, her head going this way and that, advancing and reversing as the praise flowed from the assistant.
‘Mary, it’s lovely,’ she’d hear. ‘It’s really you, just perfect for your colouring and dark hair.’
And mother would smooth down her stomach and say: ‘Are you sure it doesn’t make me look fat?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Miss Quinn would lie glibly, lifting a finely arched eyebrow and adding helpfully: ‘But if you want I can let you have the latest Playtex eighteen-hour girdle at a good discount.’
So mother would muse and flirt with the idea, a conflict of figures and desire and what-would-he-say going on in her head. She’d always err on the side of caution.
‘Oh, it’s lovely, Anne,’ she’d say with a tinge of sadness, ‘but it’s too dear; I couldn’t afford it. He would go mad if he seen it.’
And Miss Quinn, being kind, and eager to make a sale, would bat in with that well-aimed sale clincher.
‘Nonsense, Mary! Don’t worry about him or the price. Sure you can put a deposit on it and pay it off.’
And with that mother’s mind was settled, the deal was done. Miss Quinn would expertly tear a swathe of brown wrapping paper from a roll by the counter, fold the garment into a neat parcel and secure it with a length of string. Mother would give that ‘to hell with it’ smile as we left the shop. I knew she was experiencing that rare and sudden rush that comes with blatant misbehaviour.
She bought most of what we wore in this way, paying in instalments, making the odd purchase for herself which she’d hide from father’s disapproving eyes until she found the appropriate occasion and time to wear it.
Now and again, especially at sale times, I’d see Norrie and his mother in the ladies department, rooting through the lingerie. Norrie couldn’t try the items on – for obvious reasons – and you were greeted with the bizarre sight of him holding up in front of his chest a succession of bras and slips. All would be done as quickly and furtively as possible, and all for his mother’s approval.
Burns’s shop provided me with some prize items which made me feel very special too. Those communion and confirmation frocks, a green coat with a shiny buckle which I adored, and a pair of patent-leather shoes which were so beautiful I could hardly bear to wear them. I kept them in their box under the bed and, if I felt sad or bored, would take them out and caress them, standing them on the tissue paper to admire. Those shoes were only for wearing on very special occasions.
After these Saturday forays we’d like as not arrive home to find one of our neighbours on the doorstep: John Mallon, who regularly ceilidhed on a Saturday night.
John was a sober bachelor, just like my uncles. He wore a long serge coat, in dubious black – the colour of choice for the wifeless man, since it didn’t show the dirt and therefore excused the need for care and attention. Like Robert’s raincoat it covered a multitude. Even on stiflingly hot summer evenings I never once witnessed the shedding of that weighty coat. He accessorised it with a pair of matching wellingtons and a cap that bore the lustre of a decade’s wear or more.
John Mallon’s modes of transport were rather unusual – not least because the demands of driving a car had obviously proven too great and forced him to adopt inferior, and rather imaginative, alternatives.
He had a Bella scooter to begin with, the very poor relation of Eddie’s BSA. It was a beige-and-maroon affair and it heralded its slow approach with a long, low, thrumming note. That unusual yet all too familiar sound on a Saturday evening never failed to bring all us children to the window and mother to the edge of despair.
‘God,’ she’d complain, ‘it’s not that John Mallon again – coming on a Saturday night, of all nights, when I haven’t a wain or a stitch washed for mass! Me heart’s a breakin’; I may give this place up.’
But there he’d be, making his gradual approach on the Bella, the black coat winging out leisurely at his sides. In the twilight glow of those summer evenings he could have passed for an overweight Count Dracula (if you can imagine Dracula in a flat cap). His generous frame dwarfed the little bike so much that it appeared as though he moved towards us under some supernatural propulsion.
From the Bella he graduated to a bubble car, a curious little vehicle; it had a windscreen that looked like the bulbous eye of some intergalactic monster. This three-wheeler was steered by handlebars, had a large, front-opening door and a top speed of 35mph.
It was designed and built in 1953 by one Ernst Heinkel, the man responsible for the Heinkel-111 bomber. The story goes that after the war the Germans, their struggle having ended prematurely, were left with a surplus of forward turrets from their Luftwaffe bombers. In the interests of economy they employed Mr Heinkel to come up with a solution and his answer was the bubble car. It was in production for four years, after which time the Germans sold the design to Dundalk Engineering in the Irish Republic – and so it was that Mr Mallon acquired his Heinkel bubble car.
Of course I was unaware of its history back then. John used to give me a lift from school in this contraption which, even as a child, caused me great embarrassment. I was not to know, as I sat in the bubble watching the hedgerows gliding past, that the humble plexiglas dome I gazed out of might well have soared above the cumulus and borne witness to the fear and fury of some hapless RAF fighter pilot as he screamed his way towards eternity.
On stopping in our yard John would raise the car door and emerge from his bubble like a chick hatching. He’d ceilidh for a good hour or two, dispensing the stories and latest gossip of the day. In winter he carried an oil heater in the little car and would transfer it indoors on arrival. This heater was as weird looking as the bubble: it was a large, round dish-like affair – much like today’s TV satellite-dish – with a tiny, red mantle at its core. John would sit at the roaring range with the heater strategically placed between his legs (central heating of another mode entirely) and discourse with father at length.
Their tedious conversation was the remit of all the visitors to our house. There were no heated discussions on Darwinian principles of natural selection here, I’m afraid; no debate on the importance of Cocteau’s contribution to European modernism, or even Kandinsky’s influence on abstract expressionism in the 20th century. No, sadly there was little to send my imagination rampaging down new thought-provoking paths.
What I got instead from father and Mr Mallon went something like this.
Mallon: ‘Saw a son of Johnny the Digger’s up on the brae face with a brand new tractor and a buckrake this morning. Aye, a brand new one, no less. The gleam of it would damn near have blinded a body, so it would.’
Father: ‘Boys a dear, is that the nixt of it? They’ve a lot a call for that, sure there was nothing wrong wi’ the wan they had.’
Father rarely approved of anyone spending money. In his book farm machinery especially should last over several lifetimes.
Mallon: ‘Aye, ye know what’s wrong with that crowd? Too much ground under them. Sure them young boys are not content unless thir rippin’ and tearin’ and roarin’ the guts outta cars and trucks and God knows what else. That tractor got fierce abuse, so it did. No wonder it didn’t last.’
Mr Mallon made the noises father liked to hear. Extravagance and the follies of ‘young boys’ were favoured topics.
Father: ‘Aye, ye may quet the craic. There were less new tractors in my day, I’m tellin’ ye.’
Mallon: ‘Now you’re talkin’, Mark.’
Then mother might weigh in.
Mother: ‘Saw Josie the Digger at mass last Sunday. She’s a trig blade, Josie, so she is. Hat on her the size of a cartwheel. Johnny doesn’t mind spendin’ a bit of money on his wife, I’ll say that for him, John – not like that man in the corner.’
John, not wanting to get embroiled in a marital dispute, would counter.
Mallon: ‘Now, Mary, you’d look well in anything. Josie the Digger needs all the help she can get. No matter how much paint or powder, begod, even if they hung the crown jewels round her there’d be no difference.’
Then poor Josie’s physical appearance would come in for a mauling.
Father: ‘Funny lookin’ head on that Josie wan.’
He’d lean back on the couch and wait for the prompt that would allow expansion and a laugh from Mallon.
Mallon: ‘Has she now, Mark?’
Father: ‘Aye. When she’s walkin’, the head’s way bobbin’ out in front of her and the rest of her’s comin’ behind. You’d think somebody was pullin’ her on a bloody lead, so ye would.’
Mallon: ‘Aye, she’s in a wile hurry to get first to the altar, y’know.’
Father: ‘Couldn’t she sit at the front then? Save all that runnin’.’
My mother would then attempt to stick up for her sex again.
Mother: ‘Josie wants to show off her nice clothes, y’know. That’s why she sits halfway down the chapel. And I’d do the same if I had Josie’s finery, John. But there’s not much chance of that. That man’ll not spen’ a ha’penny, so he won’t. You know how copper wire got invented, don’t ye?’
Mallon: ‘How’s that, Mary?’
Mother: ‘It was when two of them McKenna brothers were fightin’ over a penny between them, and neither would give way.’
Mallon: ‘Boys a dear, Mary, that’s a good ’un!’
John would laugh loudly and father would look sour.
Father: ‘Sure clothes niver made anybody. What’s a lock of oul’ pallions for anyway?’
Mallon: ‘Only for covering up the naked truth.’ (More like the dirty truth in Mr Mallon’s case.)
Father: ‘Now you’ve said it, John.’
And they both would laugh and John would clap his hands for emphasis, bathing in the afterglow of his own wit. He couldn’t bear those irksome silences that followed as the laughter died, and would whistle through his dentures and contemplate the ceiling as he riffled through his memory for fresh fodder. Inevitably, if all else failed, he’d come up with a subject that guaranteed enough mileage and mirth to keep the pair of them going until morning: our neighbour Mrs Potter.
Elizabeth Potter, a widow in her early seventies, was the cause of many wagging tongues in the locale, largely because she didn’t fit in – and, in a place like Ballinascreen, that would never do. She was the sister of Mary Catherine, the spinster-angel on the great bike, she who plied the roads and prayed for all. Mrs Potter disowned her. She’d left the area and gone to the USA, where she married a wealthy man. On his death she’d grown homesick and returned to her birthplace. But while Mary Catherine dwelt in her lonely little cottage, Elizabeth resided in what she referred to as ‘my beautiful bungalow’, entertaining the neighbours and ignoring her sibling. My mother was sometimes invited to Elizabeth’s soirées, and I was allowed to tag along. We weren’t invited in the interest of generosity or friendship but more in the spirit of showing off to the yokels Mrs P’s sense of style and how things should be done.
The bungalow had been specially built to her exacting specifications, and was bedizened with the tat of her travels. As a child I was transfixed by the bric-à-brac that crowded every surface and room in the house. The gallimaufry in Helen’s place wasn’t a patch on this. There were ornaments and figurines of every description everywhere: maidens, angels, fairies, dogs, cats, soldiers, dolls and teddy bears, fashioned in every material imaginable. Mrs Potter was like a latter-day Miss Havisham, surrounded as she was by the detritus of childhood, trying vainly to preserve the memories of that lost innocence through this welter of trinkets and knickknacks. Touching any of them was strictly forbidden, which was difficult for a child like me, having been raised in a house devoid of such trappings.
Mrs Potter was eccentric in her manner and had a peculiar way of dressing. She sagged in out-of-season separates, wore ganseys with frayed elbows, skirts whose hems fell down at the front and rode up at the back, exposing mottled flesh and stocking-tops. Her shoes, cracked and down at heel, had angry upturned toes. She wore what looked like a tea cosy for a hat.
Meeting her for the first time you got the impression of casual, slovenly eccentricity, but she immediately doused such ideas with her gimlet eye and cunning manner. She burned with envy and bad faith; spread sweet praise like icing-sugar in public, chopped everyone to pieces in private. ‘Lord in heaven, Mary, that Biddy McStay is intolerable.’ I was afraid of her and would quail at the very sight of her, scurrying off to play or hide when she came to visit mother. She had the same effect on me as did Uncle Robert.
Soon after the acquisition of that beautiful bungalow, Mrs Potter bought a brand-new Mini Cooper, a status symbol in the late 1960s, much in the manner of today’s BMW. Mrs P, however, bought the car before securing her driving licence, which proved rather an oversight. Being advanced in years, she was sorely tested by motoring. She lacked concentration and aptitude, and her eyesight was poor. Driving lessons were needed, and she ended up spending a small fortune on them. It was rumoured that her instructor was able to build an extension to his house and purchase a second car on the back of Elizabeth’s incompetence.
She finally realised her ambition on the sixth attempt. John Mallon, ever the sceptic, claimed that she had bribed the examiner, which may not have been too far from the truth. I can just picture the frustrated inspector sitting beside the calamitous Mrs P, conscious of his worsening odds in the mortality stakes and thinking to himself: I cannot endure this another time.
In short she was to driving what Norrie was to the fashion industry: a magnificent disaster. For whatever reason, Mrs P had decided unwisely at 72 to take her life in a whole new direction, steering haplessly towards a world of fearsome gear shifts and shuddering hill-starts. Some of her takeoffs from our yard were spectacular events – much more enjoyable than Eddie’s motorbike. We’d stop our play and watch the Mini buck and jump for a good five minutes before suddenly shooting off like an out of control lawnmower. Mother warned us not to accept lifts from Mrs P, no doubt imagining the prospect of having to arrange a funeral. And on our leaving for school she would caution that if we saw the widow coming we were to stand well into the hedge. We took her advice to heart. At the sight and sound of that ominous Mini we would scramble for the safety of the grass verge and wait until the ‘killing’ machine had passed.
Often on our way home from mass we’d see the stranded vehicle by the side of the road, where Mrs P, having experienced yet another ‘unexpected difficulty’, had somehow found the extraordinary courage to abandon ship.
She provided John Mallon and father with a reservoir of gossip that never ran dry. The bubble car and Mini had had a number of near hits it seemed. So they’d drink the compulsory tea and blether about her to fill those lulls. They verbally ravished the neighbours with the ferocity of lions round a carcase. The wives and spinsters of the parish were the frail flesh they fed on before moving on to gnaw the more pithy hearts and bones of their fellow males. Father was an expert vitiator. No one escaped him.
Global events never featured in their talk. A nuclear bomb could have dropped on London and no one would have noticed. As I listened to those conversations I was given to understand that everybody except my father was deeply flawed. Such negativity cried out for a counterbalance; I found this in my art.