There’s a story my family tells around Christmas. As kids, that time of year was obviously pretty manic, but made more so by the fact each of us fancied ourselves as having prominent careers in showbusiness. We all sang in choirs at one time or another, and some of us in several at the same time.
I was less involved than most, yet even I sang in choirs for at least ten years, and the Christmas period was a time of constant shuttling between different masses or meetings or festive performances. Most of us were then also in school shows, nativities or orchestra recitals, and in the run-up to Christmas, a few of us even did the fully produced commercial pantos in town. I somehow never made the cut for those things, which I found odd because my kind eyes and easy way with people reminded many of a young Marlon Brando.
In any case, quite aside from the rigmarole of cooking and presents and the management of infant expectations that Christmas would demand from a single parent of eleven children, my father was rushed off his feet getting us to and from these various functions, and dealing with the preparations for overlapping performances. Walking through our house over Christmas was like a trip through the Warner Bros. lot in late-seventies Hollywood, only instead of showgirls and spacemen there would be assembled children dressed in their Sunday best, or as shepherds, or in the costume of some brutally crowbarred topical character favoured by school plays at the time. Many will remember my delighted turn as Reuben, the inexplicably French brother in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, not least for my having done the entire thing dressed as Eric Cantona.
The main event was our primary school choir performing Christmas carols in old folks’ homes and hospices, out of some misguided belief that the reedy timbre of our childish voices would provide balm to the elderly and dying. I remember finding the experience nice, in a way, although it was hard to gauge reactions since their clapping was generally quite slow and methodical, and having been told not to stare at the people with tubes connected to them, we decided to not look at anyone at all. My dad would be waiting for us to be done so he could take us home or, more likely, drive to the next place for another of us who was due at a similar engagement. It was actually worse if you didn’t have anything to do, since you’d still be going all over the place and waiting in the car while everyone else was performing, which was way more boring than singing ‘Frosty the Snowman’ to the infirm. One of those Christmassy mornings, my brother Shane was singing at three Masses in a row. That’s the 10, the 11 and the 12:15. After each, my dad would talk to a few fellow parishioners here and there, and pick up others of us who were at other Masses or concerts nearby. Owing to the comings and goings, headcounts got twisted, and on the drive back Shane turned round, surveyed the contents of the minibus and noticed that Dearbhaile was missing. She had been there in the chapel after the service but had obviously stayed too long chatting to a friend, and Daddy, understandably frazzled and depleted, had taken off without realising she wasn’t on board.
He turned tail and raced back to the church to pick her up. He was furious. ‘How did none of you notice she was missing?’ he fumed, and everyone felt chastened at their lack of awareness, imagining her now crying on the steps of the church alone, or worse, in the company of scandalised and judgemental parishioners – or clergy – wringing their hands, apt to be telling tales very soon about the poor, rudderless O’Reilly clan, demented by grief, incapable even of counting themselves. When the bus finally reached Dearbhaile, however, she was smiling and happy, and neither in the company of some sour-faced scold among the congregation, nor alone.
I was standing there, unmissed, beside her.
Having lived in more normal-sized social environments since leaving home, a lot of my childhood seems as insane to me as it might to an outsider. I grew well used to separating out the many personalities in my family, discerning how each interacted with the others, how they formed into groups or reacted to the groups of others, but when I actually think about the ordinary, daily life we led, I find myself asking the same questions strangers ask. How did any of us get to use a bathroom in the mornings? When did Daddy sleep? Were we ever actually alone?
Every single evening for the first ten years of my life, I spent some part of it with at least nine of my siblings, in one house. We are similar enough in ages that we now all feel like peers, but I have to make myself remember that, as children, the age disparities were sufficient to make each of us feel we had little in common with at least half of our siblings. This was, I’m sure, more pronounced for the eldest three, the Big Ones, who must have felt put upon by the babysitting demands that fell on them precisely when they felt least like looking after children. Few tasks could be less appetising to a freshly minted teen than supervising one of six or seven younger siblings who held them in varying states of awe. I don’t have to intuit this, since they said it quite openly all the time. When Dara and Shane were smashing themselves up on BMXs and sneaking fags, I was still using the tiny blue scissors to cut out pictures of dinosaurs that I could put in the cereal box of prehistoric bits and bobs I termed, rather grandly, my dinosaur den. I was as ignorant of their lives as I was of taxes, politics, or girls – although, in between snips, I do recall wondering why the latter’s bums went all the way round. Despite this, at my father’s insistence, I spent an inordinate amount of time with my older brothers. They already had to share a room with my little brother and me, which was probably not ideal, since when they were sixteen and fourteen years old, we were six and three, sleeping at the bottom of two bunk beds placed side by side. The room therefore operated on two different strata; on the top level, talk of football and fights and discos and illegal fireworks, while Conall, on the lower level, would be getting very detailed explanations about the dinosaurs I would point out to him – but never let him touch – in the snazzy cereal box he doubtless coveted.
Dara and Shane were charged with taking me into town or to football matches, probably just to give everyone a reprieve from my manic energy. They were less than thrilled about being seen in public with a small, strange ginger boy, and the fact that I carried around a box of dinosaur-related miscellany probably didn’t help. But take me they did, and I almost always returned home safely. It’s a curious thing that when time came for me to greet fatherhood at the age of thirty-two, I fretted a lot about whether I possessed the maturity and will to look after a child. I’d forgotten that so much of the guardianship I experienced in childhood was from children who actively resented my company. And in return I loved them more than anything.
I was well into adulthood before I realised most other people don’t have to list their family in one long run, and always in age order – Sinead-Dara-Shane-Orla-Maeve-Mairead-Dearbhaile-Caoimhe-Fionnuala-Conall – because they will, otherwise, leave someone out. Even though this is true, I still reserve the right to be offended if anyone asks if I know all my siblings’ names, which happens roughly a third of the time I mention the size of my family.
‘Well,’ I’ll say, to some friend of a friend, in between bites of tapas, ‘there is one brother whose name I’ve never caught.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, tall guy, lovely fella all things considered,’ I’ll say, spooning the last bit of tapenade onto a pitta, ‘but it’s just gone on too long. I’d feel rude introducing myself now that we’re all approaching middle age.’
As children, our family’s internal subdivisions were useful for keeping track of the different age groups. Like all class systems, it was instituted by those at the top, ostensibly as a shorthand for keeping things in order, while also conferring a certain irrefutable status on those who invented it. Being a Big One was just different from being a Middle One, no matter how old you got. Their seniority travelled with them, as if it were a ladder of power pulled up behind them as they climbed, out of reach to those who followed. Sinead, Dara and Shane were aristocrats, custodians of an unearned but unimpeachable moral authority that was rarely challenged or even considered, least of all by me, a Wee One through and through. Each of them had already left home for university by the time I started secondary school, an absence that only added to their cachet. The Big Ones had, after all, lived through that odd period of time when our family was relatively small, and watched first hand as it ballooned. To me this meant they might as well have been present at the birth of the Universe.
The Middle Ones, though only slightly younger in real terms, lacked this perspective, and so we held them in less awe. But they also knew the game was rigged. Unbeknownst to us at the bottom, at some point closer to the dawn of time the Big Ones had told Maeve and Orla that after a certain point – say, finishing primary school, or making your confirmation – a Middle One would progress to being a Big One. In reality, as each milestone came and went it became clearer and clearer that the divides were impermeable, and no such social mobility was possible. By the time this betrayal was realised, the Big-Middle-Wee heuristic had been intractably established. So much so, in fact, that when the Wee Ones reached those same milestones seven years later, it was with no concept that such a promotion was even being denied. Fuelled by resentment toward their social betters, the Middle Ones thus contrived deep distinctions between themselves and those below. In so far as four members of a family arbitrarily grouped together by age can be said to have an ethos, theirs might have been something like ‘we are not Wee Ones’. Maeve and Orla set the rota in which our daily labours were enshrined. Dearbhaile, closest in age to the Wee Ones, and perhaps nervous this would place her position at risk, was particularly vigilant, and took to policing our bedtimes with the iron fist of a prison camp guard. These were delineated in increments, informally attached to the Australian soap operas they followed each weeknight. It was generally agreed that even the dewiest babe-in-arms should be permitted to stay up until the day-glo charms of Neighbours finished at 6 p.m. Staying up to watch the slightly more self-serious Home and Away was a privilege enjoyed only by those over twelve. The true Rubicon for emotional maturity was being allowed to watch Heartbreak High, which owed its place as our natural watershed to the fact that some of its characters had nose rings and disliked school. At each of these shows’ end there would be an audible swivel of heads, as attention was brought to bear on whosoever had not yet decamped to their respective rooms for the evening. Were one of us Wee Ones bold enough to stay up later than was allowed, it was presumed we would be murdered, probably by Dearbhaile. Perhaps only Mairead didn’t seem especially bothered by the ins and outs of who was where or what, maybe because she was technically the Middle Child and free from such insecurities. Although one does wonder if her placing merits the traditional distinction, when middle here means being the sixth of eleven.
For our part, being a Wee One meant being subject to a sort of benign servitude, but also free from the politicking that came from finding oneself so close to and yet so far from real power. We enjoyed a lessening of responsibility born of the fact that we were more likely to be considered, essentially, giant babies than functioning people, and this well into our older years.
We also benefited in another, less immediately obvious way. It’s inarguable that my father relaxed with age, gradually loosening the grip in which he held his children as each managed to survive school trips, hospital visits, exam schedules and nights out without being maimed, murdered or featured in newspaper articles in which neighbours said we ‘always seemed perfectly normal before this’. As younger parents, Mammy and Daddy adhered to a strict code that was largely absent by the time I was growing up. In fact, the televisual rubric I just described would have been unthinkable while my mother was still alive. She was not a lover of television, unlike my father, who loves the medium so much I’m pretty sure he can still see the 5USA logo when he shuts his eyes. It’s likely that Neighbours became the staple of our TV diet since it was originally the only show that Mammy permitted us to watch, and even then only at lunch time during school holidays. It was supplemented by Glenroe, a gently diverting rural melodrama that ran on Sunday nights in Ireland for two decades on a budget roughly equivalent to a tube of Pringles. For me and every other Irish child, it was the last thing we were allowed to watch each weekend. Once we heard the strangled fiddle music that brought each episode to a close, we’d have to face the trudge towards bed, and the school week ahead. Which meant we’d sit through thirty minutes of crag-faced people in wellies having affairs near barns just to keep our weekend alive.
My parents had been stricter in other, more meaningful ways too. The Big Ones describe their adolescent years as if they were parented by the Stasi. Each tells tales of my dad sitting in his car outside teen discos, waiting for the last chime of music to sound. At this, he would blare his horn until they marched into his Volvo, red-faced and sullen, for their 9:30 p.m. ride home. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I was pretty much allowed do what I wanted, and regularly stayed out all night and into the small hours of the next day. So long as I was bright and chipper, and my school results didn’t suffer, nothing was said. No doubt this was partly due to my father becoming less fearful of our independence as successive waves of his children took to their own two feet without disaster. But it’s also likely that the thrill of acting as our private taxi service was beginning to dim.
Some things about having such a large family are stranger than people even think to suggest. I remember standing with my father in the kitchen of Nazareth House convent, waiting on them to deliver the truly gigantic turkey they cooked for us every Christmas. Officially, they were cooking the self-same large turkey we had brought over, since our own oven was too small to cook something big enough to feed the entire clan. But, in practice, they gave us a brand-new, much larger turkey, bearing little resemblance to our own. The turkey we were handed by Sister Angela, which had gone in the size of a rucksack, was now the size of a Fiat 500, resplendent in garnish and trimmings. It was the kind of thing you could imagine being taken out of the oven by a forklift, rather than a kindly nun, but that’s underestimating Sister Angela, a lovely, burly woman from the west of Ireland who had a smile that could melt glass and forearms that bent steel. She was effectively Popeye in a habit, and seemed to enjoy nothing on Earth more than preparing us a turkey that, once eaten, we could happily strip to the bones and convert into a back bedroom.
This subterfuge was, of course, never directly acknowledged. The nuns knew my father to be a proud and dignified man, and for us to mention they’d been switching the bird every year might have made things awkward. They were soft on my dad not just because he was a lovely man who had done so much for us, but also because he donated so much of his time and effort to the community. Despite working full time as an engineer, and seeing to the upkeep, recreation and extracurricular activities of his eleven children, he also served on the parish vocations council and as the school’s treasurer, and was always on hand to perform any number of other duties, like recording school events on his camcorder so they could be distributed to parents.
This combined my dad’s two favourite things: helping people and contriving excuses to use new technological apparatus. He took to it with the same zeal and professionalism with which he attacked all tasks. So it was that an offhand request that he record one school concert quickly snowballed into a multi-term commitment to record each nativity, musical and choir recital that ever took place while his children attended the school. For a man like my dad, this also entailed securing a rudimentary editing desk and tape-splicer, and buying multi-volume manuals on transition effects and video graphics.
My father’s first camcorder came just before I was born, and made its debut at my christening in November 1985. This film is best known among our family for featuring the tail end of my dad’s brief adventure with facial hair, as prolonged exposure to footage of his ill-advised moustache led him to shave it off during the editing process. By the time he was using his camcorder skills for school occasions, his efforts had progressed beyond the realm of mere recording, reflecting the swagger and dynamism that comes to a director once he’s bought eighteen issues of What Camera? magazine and a highlighter pen. Solos are zoomed, entrances panned from one side of the stage to the other, and audience reaction shots captured with unflashy brio. My father was self-taught, but even the most discerning cineaste would have to admire the star wipes and drop-shadow WordArt title sequences, made famous by Bergman and Scorsese.
My wife has become mostly inoculated against the boredom of me breaking out this or that or another story, no longer looking for new ways to respond to the same old questioning. She can spot the subtle movements of my mouth as I wait for my turn to speak, so that I can win – win at having a big family. It’s a bit like a party piece, and I’ve long since perfected its rhythms: get in there with the big family stuff but make sure to introduce the fact my mother died early on, since it can make people awkward if they ask about my parents and I haven’t already said. Sometimes this happens with spectacular results, like when my friend Charlotte introduced me to her fabulous Swedish mother, who was particularly fascinated by the size of my family.
‘Oh mi gott,’ she said. ‘How did your mother cope?’
‘Well,’ I said, with the calm, don’t-worry-about-it air I’ve perfected for this question since my teens, ‘she actually died when I was very little.’
‘Cuh!’ Charlotte’s mum broke in with the greatest response I’ve ever heard. ‘I’m not surprised.’
For years I’ve been told that my family must be such a treat to write about, since there’s so much material. Well, there is, but there’s also something narratively problematic about having so many people in one place at the same time. For one thing, it’s hard to hold that much information in your head. Jesus had twelve apostles, and despite more than twenty years of religious instruction, services, prayer groups and sing-songs, I can name four, maybe five at most.
There’s a reason Mark Twain didn’t write a novel in which Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and eleven other named individuals sailed down the Mississippi on a raft. Maybe Friends would have been just as popular if every episode opened with eighteen pals sitting on five different couches, all speaking at once, in a dangerously overcrowded Central Perk. Perhaps, having been forced to accommodate this new, more perfect cast size, the camera would retreat back around eight feet so you could only just about make out the antics of Joey, Phoebe, Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Alan, Percy, DJ Hype, Polly, Gary A, Gary D, Stinky, Jackie, Jack, Jacquie, Boris and Claire, although you’d be surprised to discover they’re all still white. No, once you start to examine storytelling dynamics, it’s clear that few stirring or memorable tales are better served by tripling the number of characters in every single scene. It’s often easier to focus on the real star of the show, my father, especially since I can’t be bothered remembering the others’ names.