The twins turned out to be two hefty baby boys and another one followed within eleven months. I didn’t even know I was pregnant again ’til three months had gone by. My body hadn’t lost the slight softness they had left behind before it was filled up again. Each son was more gorgeous than the last, all dark hair and wide little backs, their clavicles like the buds of angel wings. I called the twins Eugene and Marius; number three was Shane. I gave birth at home with Bridie to help me; the thought of going all the way to Omagh Hospital seemed ridiculous. John paced up and down outside the door ’til Bridie cleaned up before he brought Serena in to meet each new member of the gang.
– Do you remember me being born, Dada?
– Of course I do! Sure that was a great day!
John Johns greeted each arrival with a glow of pride and talk of having to extend the house again. He lifted them off me as soon as they were dry and kissed them over and over, anointing their perfect fingers and toes. The boys became ‘my boys’, just as Serena had become ‘my girl’. I vowed each baby would be the last but I couldn’t resist the smooth skin over the muscles in his back as he held himself above me. He always waited for me to turn back to him again in the bedroom where he was tenderness itself as he licked the pearls of milk from my nipples.
Although every one of them would tie me to Johns Farm for longer and longer, they took my heart in their tight little fists when they were born and would never let go. I would not have coped without my daughter and Bridie – Bridie my saviour who did all she could to help me rear them – but I still fell into bed every night exhausted. We battled wind and juggled bottles and Serena carried them around on her back to get them to go to sleep. Bridie wasn’t getting any younger and her arthritis was getting worse so she took to swallowing her painkillers with Guinness to ‘protect the lining of her stomach’. She was often drunk and high in charge of a toddler or two.
John did all he could outside without my help. We had fallen so easily into the roles I’d watched my parents play out over the years. The big animals were his domain, the big fields of hay and grain, the big machinery and miles of stone walls. Mine was the little house and the street, the children, the chickens, the orchard and the garden. We were so well rehearsed we could go whole days without more than a hello.
I was glad, because I needed every spare minute to worry; it was a worm inside me. Every time I looked at their delicate necks the sight of Sean McCourt’s mother came to mind. She haunted the back of the chapel, bald and skeletal, reaching out to embrace anyone who had known him. She was a wreck around babies; they had to be handed over for her to hold too tightly and it was difficult to get them away from her. Her fingers had to be unpicked one by one. Both of her breasts had been removed already but the cancer was still eating her up from inside. It’s amazing what the human heart and body can withstand.
Boys grew up to take sides and they had to answer for their choices. When the worry was bad enough to make me shake, I could almost feel the bullet travelling through Sean McCourt’s head and keep going for one of mine. They had become targets as soon as the umbilical was cut.
The Troubles, the backdrop to my whole life, came screaming into focus all guns blazing. Northern Ireland boiled on all around us. The cocoon of Johns Farm shook to its very foundations during Marius and Eugene’s first birthday party. I had made a rather sad, flat little cake and it had two candles, one each. When we blew them out a bomb went off in the town and scared the bejesus out of the two of them! They roared the house down and didn’t stop shaking for an hour.
John nursed one while Serena nursed the other one. Bridie took a fit of crying and limped away to her blue roses. I had no room on my lap because Shane was trembling at my neck. He was so small still, just eight weeks old, and already his poor wee ears had had to withstand such a bang. We all waited for the sound of the Saracens on the river but none came; it must have been Catholic premises that was flattened.
They couldn’t have been born into a worse time. Every day the television brought news of deaths: them and us. A lot of RUC officers and British soldiers were killed in the late 1980s and so were a lot of IRA. I added the SAS to my long list of acronyms. The Special Air Services took out eight IRA men who had just bombed an RUC base at Loughgall in County Armagh. By way of retaliation the IRA let off a bomb at a Remembrance Service for military dead at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. The bomb was meant to kill a whole parade of UDR soldiers but the timing was wrong. Ten Protestant civilians were killed and one police officer. Sixty-three people were injured. The IRA said they had made a mistake! A mistake is getting yourself pregnant, a mistake is forgetting to put self-raising flour in a cake because your eyes are crossed with tiredness, a mistake is thinking life will be what you always wanted one day.
The SAS popped up again when they killed another three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar and then, to cap it all, the UDA’s Michael Stone opened fire at their funeral in Milltown Cemetery in Belfast, killing another IRA man and two civilians. We all shook our heads in disbelief around the fire at Johns Farm. We hugged our children tighter, cupping their delicate skulls in our hands as if that would save them, and Bridie prayed and prayed and prayed. We shouldn’t have let her pray; God was not listening. He hadn’t been listening for years.
Just days later two off-duty British soldiers were shot when they accidentally drove into an IRA funeral procession. Our jaws were on the floor and our spirits were at an all-time low. Once again the Catholics were as bad as the Protestants, and the Protestants were as bad as the Catholics; nothing was sacred any more. Bridie threw her rosary beads into a drawer and slammed it shut.
We heated milk to mash into rusks, changed nappies and washed the downy heads on our three small boys as the Lisburn van bomb killed six more soldiers in County Antrim and the Ballygawley bus bomb killed a further eight soldiers in County Tyrone.
I forced myself to check with John that ‘the situation’ was getting worse? He assured me it was: I wasn’t just feeling increasingly panicky because I now had four precious lives to protect and I was lost as to how they would live in such a madhouse! If I couldn’t get myself out of Northern Ireland how would I get my children to safety, to a new life?
Their arrival in my life had changed me utterly. When Serena was born, I only worried about ordinary things like nappy rash and colic, doing all I could to settle her. But with the boys, the whole world suddenly intruded. Sectarian hatred loomed at every turn, every bullet carried their names, every bomb would get bigger until the fallout landed right outside the half-door.
I took to putting them in the orchard for their naps in big navy-blue prams with hoods in case a helicopter crashed into the house. I told John that I, too, needed to be out and about; the walls were closing in on me. He nodded and let me work beside him between bottles and burpings until Serena needed meeting from the school bus at 4pm. I held posts while he tamped them in with a sledgehammer. I carried staples to secure wire. I walked back to the house for a flask of tea when we were both parched. It felt safer somehow as we worked together, cutting the binder twine, throwing bales, and pulling the musty hay apart to push it into the silos.
The victims piled up. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse the IRA revisited the use of proxy bombs. They weren’t new – both sides had stooped to use them in the 1970s – but somehow the horror of them drilled into my brain as I was breastfeeding Shane. The proxy involved tying collaborators – any unfortunate soul who associated with British security forces, maybe even just selling them petrol when they were off duty – into cars packed with explosives and setting them off on their merry way, some of them knowing that their families were being held at gunpoint as they drove to a near-certain death and murder.
Three human bombs were set up to explode on the same day, 24 October 1990. The driver and six soldiers died at Coshquin, near Derry; the driver escaped and one soldier died at Cloghoge on the border with County Armagh; the Omagh bomb failed to detonate.
Omagh was where the hospital was, Tyrone’s county town, where Bridie went to get her pains and blood checked out. It was where the mart was, where we bought and sold cattle. It was where Woolworths sold Pick’n’Mix. It felt so wrong to even have it mentioned on the news. My milk dried up practically overnight and I was pregnant again by the time Margaret Thatcher was forced out of Downing Street. She had a little cry in the car as they drove her away in November.
Daniel was born in a matter of hours at home, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was made to have children. I was back on my feet and back in front of the range frying eggs when he was barely dry. The bombs, firebombs, mortars, bullets and bullshit were still flying thick and fast as Daniel cut his first tooth. He was up toddling about and falling happily on the concrete when the IRA bombed the Baltic Exchange in London. The news reported the endless talks that were taking place behind closed doors between all the parties and the British government. Someone’s not listening, says John Johns. He was right.
When Eugene and Marius were getting excited about going to school and practising their letters with Serena at the table, the IRA killed two children in Warrington; the UDA killed five Catholic civilians on a building site in Castlerock, Derry; and Bishopsgate in London was hit by the IRA killing just one person, religion unknown.
Lizzie Magee married someone called Kenny McGuckin, a Derry man who was waiting out the Troubles in London just like she was. I’d tucked my invitation into the frame on my bedroom mirror as soon as I’d written to say I couldn’t make it. Too busy with children and cows; she understood. I hoped I’d see pictures of her in the biggest white meringue she could find! We had promised we would be each other’s bridesmaid when it came to living happily ever after, another dream dashed. We’d had a collection of frocks snipped out of magazines that peppered the mirror in Lizzie’s bedroom. We changed our minds so often on which one was the most beautiful, which one we’d wear to make sure our big day was perfect. We were old enough now to know that there was no such thing as perfect.
Dessie and Sheila wouldn’t cross the water. That’s all she wrote and I knew that her heart was broken that they didn’t make the effort. I couldn’t believe that the mad pair I’d known wouldn’t crawl there if they had to? They thought the sun rose and set on Lizzie. What had kept them at home?
Bridie found poor auld Brandy dog dead under his favourite tree. He got to live his life, she said and make it to being an old man. His head was on his paws as if he was only asleep. John put him under the ground where he lay and we dragged a big granite slab over the clay to mark another sadness. The children broke their hearts over it and we bent the house rules such as they were and let them all jump in the bed with us that night. Me, him and Bridie all gave up on sleep around 5am. We met in the kitchen and toasted Brandy dog with a whiskey as the sky glowed orange over Sessiagh.
The SDLP’s John Hume and Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams issued their first joint statement. The IRA voiced their concerns via the Gaelic newspaper An Phoblacht, urging the British government to stop its futile and costly war in Ireland and pursue the path of peace or resign itself to the path of war.
– Didn’t they just bomb the bejesus out of London?
– They did, says John.
– And cause millions of pounds’ worth of damage?
– They did, says John again.
We still weren’t chatty but the boys and Serena filled the house with laughter and light that was hard to block out. We spoke through them and about them. They meant the world to the both of us so we got used to having common ground to stand on. Thoughts of an existence outside the madness of Northern Ireland still intruded with every death reported but inside the border of Johns Farm, a kind of peace descended as we did our best to give the children and Bridie a happy, natural life. Some days I had a job reminding myself that I was unhappy, that really I should be somewhere else.
There would, it seemed, be no more children because without any discussion John started using condoms. I could hardly tell him that I loved being pregnant, that I loved babies. They were the only thing I had ever produced which made me feel as if I was worth something. But if I exposed myself like that, John would be within his rights to point out our deal didn’t extend to me having what I wanted. I had been taken on to provide him with what he wanted and when. Worse still, I missed the silken nakedness of him more than I cared to admit.
Much, much worse than even that, John learned to talk so that he could lecture me. I was failing him again, falling short of some standard he had set. His family was complete now so it was time I went back to the world, the world I had been so furious to give up. It was his only song and he had it on repeat.
– The waynes will be fine with Bridie if you ever want to go out? Or go to night school? No? Too happy by the fire, Mary?
– What are you going to do with yourself when the waynes go to school? Anything? Nothing? Cat got your tongue?
– Waynes don’t last forever, Mary, you need to find something else to do with your life!
– Is there any chance at all you might leave the waynes and go off to Derry with Kathleen when she’s been begging you for months? It would do you good to see something other than these four walls!
He didn’t seem to understand that I couldn’t leave them! What if something happened? What if the RUC lifted their father off the street when I was gadding about with my sister? What if I was killed in Derry, just another civilian caught in the crossfire? I couldn’t risk it. I stayed at the range and cooked three square meals a day as they all careered around me. Time meant nothing as long as they were all happy. My life would start again one day when they were grown up and could look after themselves. When they could get on a plane or a boat and get the hell out of here.
My eyes never left them. My heart never failed to lift for even the faintest smile on their face. How had my mother hit us so easily for so little? Mick was given a pounding one night after he’d fallen in a bed of nettles. He was clumsy and had to be shown the error of his ways. Most women would have run for a doctor but not Sadie Rattigan: she only ever ran for the stick. Daddy didn’t stop her. All he had to do was open his mouth, surely?
I couldn’t imagine John Johns standing by if anyone so much as looked cross at his children. They run through his long legs like pesky cats but he just steps around them. He takes the time to show them little things: a magpie feather, an acorn, a fledgling’s skeleton. Serena has a whole box of treasures; she keeps everything he touches and won’t let any of the boys near it even when they’re wailing the house down. I should give her a lecture on sharing but I can’t. Instead I think, good on you, girl, you keep whatever precious memories you can get your hands on.
John asked me every week if I needed anything but I always said no. The only thing I dearly wanted was something money couldn’t buy: another baby. I’d never recovered from thinking of myself as a charity case. I didn’t need many clothes; I didn’t go anywhere. I’d a pair of wellies that would last me another five years. My hair was long enough to be nearly straight; I wore a lick of mascara for Mass. Eileen and Kathleen always got me bath stuff for my birthday.
He shopped for all our food as I still had no love for Carncloon and its broken windows and British soldiers. The box of groceries was left on the table every Friday evening and had the Sunday joint wedged in between the few things we didn’t grow – some coffee, loose tea, flour and sugar, Bridie’s dried prunes.
The waynes got an auld KitKat or a Turkish Delight for a treat once a week. Bridie got a bar of Fry’s Chocolate Cream that she split with me when all five of the hallions were finally in bed and we had our aching feet up in front of the range. I always got a bag of candy but when John treated me to a quarter of cherry drops I had to tell him that I didn’t really like them.
He was astounded by the fact that I, Mary Margaret Johns, had been bettered by a boiled sweet and promised he would bring no more. Would he be safe enough if he stuck to humbugs and pear drops? Yes, he would. His gast was flabbered that he hadn’t known that the taste of cherries made me sick.
The sun rose and him and me rose with it. We always had a half hour in the kitchen alone together before the day got under way. I’d get the range up to boil the kettle and we’d have mugs of tea and lumps of buttered scone, now and again with an egg, other times with jam. We might go over what one or other of the children had said, whether or not they needed anything, or we might not.
Bridie waited to hear the thud of the half-door before she got up and stirred the waynes. He’d turn out our wellies in case there was a mouse in them or a spider and we’d pull them on and wander down to feed the cows.
On a good morning there were no sirens, no Chinooks churning up the air above us. We watched the yellow light widen across the Cloon Valley a thousand times. I loved that view; it was something for us both to focus on and we always rested for a moment as one before he unlatched the wooden gate on the river field to let it swing open to start the day.
I stopped thinking about America and I stopped thinking about what it would have been like to go there with Joe Loughrey. I thought of him now and again but always as the boy who had stood crying in the parochial house, never as the golden boy, flicking his perfect hair and knowing he was the bee’s knees.
I had no idea if John ever thought about England and Catherine the beauty. Every time he heard Sinéad O’Connor on the wireless singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, he took the trouble to walk over and turn it down until she was finished breaking every heart in Ireland including his.
I often studied him when he was squinting at the horizon but he never looked at me. Why would he? I hadn’t changed in the eleven years since he took me on; I was the same auld Mary only with fewer scales on my eyes. We kept the parts of ourselves we were willing to expose for the bedroom.
Life trundled on as inescapable as the five hills around us; we went from daffodils to roses and back to nothing beautiful blooming for months at a time, from haymaking to muck-spreading, and in that way the years marched on.