This one time, Daddy lifted a car. My eldest brother Dara was twelve, and had popped outside to grab his cello from the boot of the red Volvo 240 my father kept as a smaller, less mortifying vehicle when journeys didn’t require a twelve-seater minibus. The boot lock was broken, so Dara thought it best to start the car, engage the electrical release switch inside, grab his preposterously large instrument and be on his way. Inevitably, the car then started to roll, sending him instantly to ground and trapping his leg in the wheel arch. Daddy heard the screams from the kitchen and ran outside to find Dara sprawled beetle-fashion on the concrete, trapped under a cello that was roughly his own size, and a Volvo now intent on breaking his leg, inch by inch. Seized by adrenalin, Daddy raced to the car and heaved at the advancing wheel arch with his bare hands, lifting 1.2 tonnes of Swedish engineering off the ground long enough for Dara to free his foot. It’s a feat of strength that defies comprehension, and one my father maintains he doubtless could never have done had he not been so energised by the panic of the moment. Even Daddy was stunned by his own exertion, and the thought of what would have happened had he not managed to perform this mystifying feat of strength. But such introspection was short lived, and he was soon giving Dara, shell-shocked but miraculously unscathed, a thorough treatise on the correct use of the electronic release mechanism. ‘You don’t need to key the ignition,’ he said as he helped Dara into the house, ‘you just have to turn it to 1 to allow power from the battery to the electrics.’ Dara nodded, invisible now behind the cello he was carrying on uneven feet.
This story has the air of one of those myths children tell about their dads, based on an unerring belief that their own father is the God who built the world and everything in it. I mean, it is one of those things but, conveniently, it’s also something that really happened. This is proven by my father’s reaction when I ask about the incident three decades later, which is to spend roughly forty seconds recounting the act of lifting an actual car off of someone, and a further eight minutes explaining how electricity is drawn from a Volvo’s battery.
My father’s reluctance to reflect on such achievements has been a challenge while writing this book. That’s not to say that he’s without conceit, of course. He is, in many ways, the most maddeningly self-assured person I know. It’s just that he is a ridiculous man who takes pride in ridiculous things. He has an overweening regard for his ability to communicate with dogs, or to relate the biographical details of every single priest in Ireland. He takes great pride in recalling the licence plate of every car he’s ever owned, and will dispense this list so readily it’s hard not to think he occasionally practises it. He is alarmingly cocky when it comes to his skill at killing mice, a species he hates with a malevolent, black-hearted glee. It’s an odd facet of his character; a man regarded by his friends as one of the kindest, gentlest humans on Earth, and by mice as Joseph Stalin. He takes particular joy in improvising weapons for the purpose, and has killed rodents with a shoe, a book and at least one bottle of holy water shaped like the Virgin Mary. He famously dispatched one with a single throw of a portable phone, without even getting out of bed. I know this because he woke us so we could inspect the furry smudge it left on his bedroom wall, before ringing my auntie in Spain to relate the entire tale.
He is much less forthcoming about the things other people praise him for, like lifting cars or battling through bereavement to raise eleven kids by himself. On this latter point, he’s particularly dismissive. ‘Which of you was I supposed to give back?’ he replies any time we ask how he managed it, which is more often than you might think. It’s a disarmingly sweet stock answer that’s only slightly undercut by our usual response, which is to immediately begin suggesting suitable candidates.
Because of all these traits, his incredible strength of will and heart, and his litany of peculiar preoccupations, telling stories about Daddy – to each other, or to anyone who’ll listen – is a common pastime for everyone in our family. But getting information directly from him can be tough, especially if he thinks you might use that information elsewhere, say in a book, for example. Some things he doesn’t remember, others he doesn’t like to talk about and still others he has actively forbidden me from mentioning. Luckily for me, and any potential reader, those things he considers too scandalous to print are usually wildly outside the range of anyone’s interests but his own.
I have, alas, been sworn to secrecy on the arcane processes by which this or that cousin acquired this or that plot of land. You will not encounter within these pages even one scurrilous passage about the lengths to which my father may or may not have gone to avoid the roadworks near Castleblayney on long drives to Dublin. He makes up for these proscriptions with boundless generosity regarding material he believes should be included. When it comes to genealogy, dates or the names and designations of machines, townlands and priests he has known and loved, he’s like the Library of Congress, and shares this information with the zeal of those people who work at Yahoo! every time someone accidentally uses their search engine. He has even, for the first time in my entire life, started calling me on the phone, to offer other information he deems relevant, should it pop into his head. ‘We got the new caravan in 1990,’ he’ll say as I pick up the phone, my hands clammy with sweat out of fear that someone has died. Prior to this period of my life, all telecommunication with Daddy resulted from me calling him, unless it was family news like births, deaths or the arrival of an ominous-looking debt letter in any of his children’s names.
‘As I say, it wasn’t 1989 – I found the bill of sale here. And the full length was twenty-six feet. Do you need the licence plate?’
I always match his enthusiasm, not least because I don’t want him to feel like Yahoo! staff do when it inevitably transpires that their new user is just searching the word ‘Google’, but the things he deems noteworthy expand by the day. When it comes to more personal issues, or his emotional response to the trauma of our lives, it’s like getting blood from a stone, but there is no upper limit to the entirely unrelated topics, phenomena or events that will prompt a cheerful ‘you have to put that in the book!’ He issued the directive when the actress Courteney Cox visited Derry, and is fond of ringing to describe a particularly funny political skit he’s heard on local radio. He’s extremely active in campaigning for the inclusion of any and all stories relating to dogs, and specifically his current dog, Sally, such as the spellbinding time she went all the way round the house and looked at him through the window. My dad is quite well read, so I can only speculate as to why the movements of dogs and priests, and detailed third-hand descriptions of Northern Irish radio comedy are deemed so essential. I have repeatedly explained that the central thesis of my book – in fact, all books that have ever been written – precludes these topics from playing a major part in a narrative, but also say that I’ll see if I can fit them in.
These statements too are met with scepticism.
In a sense, my siblings and I were lucky, in that we were less inclined to take our dad for granted than other kids. We had first-hand experience of life and death, and generally doted on him. My blasé, cynical schoolfriends would have been appalled to see the glee with which we greeted him when he came home from work, or the delight we took in fussing over him on Father’s Day well into our teens. But we didn’t always regard him as a godlike hero, because we also had to accompany him to the shops, which was more than sufficient to ground him in our eyes. Daddy can be a difficult customer. On one occasion, he spent so long arguing with a pleasant young cashier I think my soul actually left my body. The items he was trying to buy were not, she insisted, part of the deal he was citing, and if he’d just hand over the extra £2 that was due – really not that much at all, if he thought about it – we could all be about our business. Daddy remained, both literally and figuratively, unmoved. ‘The deal says three for two,’ he declaimed, with the haughtiness of an archduke on the Titanic demanding spots on the lifeboat for him and his eight fur coats.
‘That’s for the smaller packs, sir,’ she replied. ‘If you would just read the—’
‘I did read it,’ he said with great exasperation, as if we were not holding up an entire shop’s worth of customers, and this woman were not a cashier but a free-roaming lunatic who had entered his home and demanded he set fire to his trousers.
‘I read the small print,’ he repeated, ‘and that’s not made clear anywhere.’ He had already been holding up the line for a few minutes, but it was clear he was just warming up. I think I had spotted this might happen earlier, since my dad’s gaze had seemed shiftier than usual, as if he knew he might be skirting the rules a bit and was preparing for the confrontation.
There could have been another way, I’m sure. Had the cashier approached the issue with a light touch, or a note of good humour, my father could have been argued down. She was open-faced and pretty – which made this experience all the more painful for my thirteen-year-old self – but resolutely unwilling to haggle. She also hadn’t realised she was standing face to face with God’s one, true, perfect miser, one whose frugality was radicalised any time he felt fobbed off or ignored. She had fallen into his trap by suggesting he hadn’t read the wording on the deal when, by the time he got to the checkout, my father would know the deals of any shop as if they had been tattooed onto his skin at birth. So here we were, feeling the slow, steady tick of time trickling into an endless stalemate. My father wore the expression of a man who intends to count to six million. Tutting was audible behind us, and those shoppers who enjoyed the company of their own children began steadily decamping to other lines in the hope they might see them again before they died.
We were in West Side Stores, which had formerly been a supermarket called Crazy Prices. When I think about the evolution of Derry, I’m less likely to think of things like border checkpoints and armoured cars – both of which saw a precipitous drop in numbers during my childhood – and apt to recall places like Crazy Prices, and the shop that went there after, before it became the Quayside Tesco that stands there to this day. Crazy Prices, as its name suggests, was a shop whose branding might seem slightly, or perhaps wildly, insensitive nowadays. Its titular conceit was that the store’s contents were so bafflingly discounted, so preposterously inexpensive, that they raised very real questions about the mental health of the proprietors. Their staff, and possibly their customers, were also implicated in this contagion of madness, branded throughout their locations with bulging eyes and outstretched tongues.
These prices, they implied, were so dribblesomely inscrutable that even to glance in their direction posed a very real risk of derangement. These prices weren’t merely cheap, you understand, they were crazy, and any attempt to comprehend them was as pointless as considering the chasmic, gnawing depth of infinity itself. ‘You must understand,’ their day-glo ads seemed to say, ‘if you step inside, you may never recover from these prices.’ In every aisle, alongside shoulder joints for less than a pound and earthenware cooking sets for a fiver or less, it was heavily suggested you’d find people fitting and foaming at the mouth from the value of it all. To step into the produce aisle was to take your life in your hands, since you were as likely to see ten-penny apples as you were to find a random fellow customer, driven hopelessly demented by the discounts on offer, avidly shitting himself as he rolled around the floor. These were not Unreasonable Prices. Questionable Prices were not what this place was about. This was Crazy Prices, motherfucker. Grab a basket, a nappy and a straitjacket, and may God have mercy on your soul.
But this was as nothing compared to what came next. After Crazy Prices merged with Stewart’s, another locally owned supermarket chain, it became West Side Stores. The name fascinated me throughout its tenure on the Strand Road, since it was never clear why it was called West Side Stores. It was known that the merger necessitated a fresh start with a new brand identity, one that didn’t favour either the Stewart’s or the Crazy Prices fraternity. One presumes Stewart’s, who seemed as though they had a bit more sense about them, rejected portmanteaus like Batshit Stewart’s or Big Stew’s Mentally Ill Bargain Bin out of hand.
Whatever the case, they landed on West Side Stores, perhaps because this first store was on the western side of the city. Or maybe their numerous locations outside of Derry were all in the western part of Northern Ireland. The exact meaning was opaque, but the supermarket further muddled things by leaning into the west part of that name, specifically by branding each of its stores with the tropes of the American West. Everything was western-themed, from Westside Sam, their giant cowboy mascot, to the famed Cowboy Supper meal that became a local delicacy. Produce was laid out around the stores on prop barrels, and staff names were displayed on little sheriff’s badges. Deals were presented with names like the ‘Back to School Saddlebag Special’ or the ‘Honest Injun Health & Beauty Hoedown’.
It’s odd to think that there must have been sober meetings about all these bizarre marketing decisions, but in any case it worked, since this baffling combination of discount retail and cowboy puns was such a hit that the store remained in Derry for five or six years. Such was its cultural impact, Tesco retained the Cowboy Supper there, and there alone, for many years afterwards. But what irked me most of all was that even if one presumed that the western branding was a vote-winner in nineties Northern Ireland, it still didn’t make sense. West Side Stores, as I pointed out to my dad on several occasions, was clearly a pun on West Side Story, meaning the appropriate terrible exercise in branding that they should have gone for was that of mid-century New York, Manhattan gang wars and musical theatre.
Not that these feelings of righteous indignation were much consolation as I experienced just one of those many small-scale ego deaths that define a teenaged life.
‘Now, are you going to honour the deal or not?’ my father continued doggedly at the Stetson-wearing teenager who glowered across the counter.
This scenario would have been embarrassing enough, but the shopping in question, the trolley load holding up today’s order of business, was a Yee Haw What’s Wrong with Your Bowels, Pardner? hyper-multipack of toilet rolls. Plain white non-quilted toilet rolls, and in a quantity that was, as always when we bought anything in these kinds of shops, not just large but alarming. Buying toilet roll is uncomfortable at the best of times. There is always that fear, silly but present nonetheless, that my server will glance disgustedly at the paper I’m purchasing and give a look like they plan to pin my photo to a noticeboard in a back room somewhere, lining up profiles of all the disgusting people who live locally and still do shits. So standing beside a trolley that bore a precarious tower of toilet roll, so tall it dwarfed my father, myself and the steadily growing line of discontented fellow shoppers behind us, was worse still. I could feel my heart drying out and curling up inside my chest. As my father continued his dissertation on why he should be spared a two-pound surcharge for the six thousand toilet rolls he was buying, the cheapest such product available at that time outside of the former Soviet Union, I could picture in every corner of the shop an endless line of boys who were more popular, or girls I fancied, turning to see me standing there, the puny, acne-ridden progeny of this incontinent Scrooge.
Beep. The cashier rang the items through at the price my father had suggested, and he motioned for me to get them ready for transportation. She had blinked, and to anyone there who didn’t know us, we must have seemed like a father-and-son team of hucksters, the kind who would have been seen pushing a cart filled with scrap through dustbowl-era Kansas but who, in Derry, were reduced to selling their ill-gotten gains on the lucrative black market for discount toilet paper.
These kinds of experiences were a staple of my childhood, and fixed for me the image of my father as a miser, particularly when he would later instruct us on the usage of that very shipment of toilet paper. It was his contention, argued many times and at least once at the dinner table, that one sheet, judiciously used, was sufficient for most movements – I believe he even mimed specific foldings that could be employed in helping us achieve this feat. So, to some extent, this reputation was earned. He also never bought branded cereals or snacks; we feasted instead on those supermarket variants that were almost but not quite like the target brand. ‘Wow,’ we’d say, in between diffident bites of our Puffin bars, ‘Tesco must have really good lawyers.’ But this perception of him was massively unfair, since he worked extremely hard and earned a good wage by Derry standards, and spent all of it trying to manage an unreasonably large household. It’s striking how little I understood this at the time, which was a direct consequence of all the measures he took to make sure we never felt poorer than anyone else.
Considering he spent his adult life giving the staff at the Northern Irish Birth Registry premature arthritis, it’s surprising that my father was himself an only child. His mother’s name was Mary, and his father was a carpenter named Joseph (I know), and they lived in Belleek, County Fermanagh. My paternal grandfather died before I was born, and Granny O’Reilly when I was just two, after spending her final months in our family home. As a schoolmistress, Granny O’Reilly was a pillar of the community in Belleek, and my father tells stories of local men lining up to have their forms, applications or legal documents looked over and signed by her at a time when illiteracy was widespread.
The few photographs I possess of Granny O’Reilly show she was hard to age. It sometimes seems as though all Irish people from the past were born old and then proceeded to age like the pears you get in an all-night garage, accumulating freckles, liver spots and clicking noises at the bendy parts, achieving their final form by around the age of thirty-five. There are photos of my dad when he was seventeen and he already looks like a full-grown man. I’m thirty-five and dress like a toddler. When my father was a teenager, he looked as though he already had a pet name for his favourite stepladder. For older generations, this effect was even more pronounced. The photographic record shows that Granny O’Reilly began her life aged sixty-eight and proceeded to grow smaller and older from there. There are pictures of her with my father as a very small child, which logic dictates must place her in her thirties, and yet her wild hair and deadening glare present the steely mien of a woman many decades her senior. She was stern-faced with a shock of white hair and thick, scowl-prone eyebrows, which made her look like the sort of person who’d keep her arms folded on a trampoline. She was also my dad’s teacher throughout his primary education, a situation I don’t believe thrilled my shy and retiring father, and which added a certain frisson to the much-feared faux pas of calling your teacher Mum. In what seems like a cruel trap, any time he did accidentally make this fairly understandable lapse, he was upbraided for it in front of the whole class. By his actual mum.
Daddy might have been, by instinct, a more stoical, less effusive father, which makes not just his parenting but the love with which he undertook it all the more impressive. He had a lot on his plate, so maybe it’s OK that he occasionally held up supermarkets with toilet roll purchases.
He is almost comically square, and has more odd ideas about the ways of the world than I can fit in one book. Focusing on, say, that time he had a row with my brother for bumping into him while they were riding dodgem cars – coining the memorable exclamation ‘They’re called dodgems, not crashems!’ – allows us to humanise him for ourselves and others. The fact that my father’s ideal bumper-car experience is one in which dozens of stone-faced children carefully evade each other in total silence can surely only add to the esteem in which he is regarded. Slack-jawed awe is the default reaction I get when I talk about my dad and what he did for us, and rightly so, but my dad hates this kind of sentimentality – and its close cousin, pity – more than he hates traffic wardens, or broccoli. Luckily, he has a ready stock of foibles ripe for us to tease him about. Like all older Irish men, he marries a high-minded rejection of all things modern with a near-chronic addiction to trash culture. My father will roll his eyes when I say ‘cool’, as if lingo that bleedingly hip is an insult to the martyred poets of Ireland, and yet five minutes later will tell me that Nick Knowles has gone country, and the new steel guitar album he debuted on Loose Women sounds a marked improvement on his last.
He knows, vaguely, what a high-five is, but his handle on the concept is so loose he once announced one with a tender, hopeful cry of ‘slap my hand high up in the air’, a declaration that has become something of a family motto. The Christmas before last, he announced, and demonstrated, his total ignorance of rock, paper, scissors, as either a term or concept, and subsequently refused to believe it was a known thing. He has a similar reluctance to accept the existence of the Easter Bunny, which he claims was only invented in the last few years. Stranger still, of course, are those phenomena that do not exist, but which he believes in with every fibre of his being. My father holds horses to be malevolent, because one stood on his foot when he was a boy – this despite living near horses for most of his life, not least the rotating cast of ponies that have been put to pasture in the field directly behind our house. He choked on a fishbone when he was quite small, and the experience so scarred him that we were all told fish was an incredibly dangerous foodstuff and should be eaten only in fillet, finger or nugget form, if at all. To serve someone fish with any or all of its skeleton intact is, to my father, roughly equivalent to feeding someone the contents of a Hoover bag.
Sometimes my father’s eccentricities bend the world around him, conforming to the strangeness of his own mind, as when he became irate at a slow driver on the motorway and kept calling him a clown, only to overtake him and find that the driver was indeed a man in full clown make-up. And then there are his passions. My father’s idea of heaven is to stand in the aisles of a hardware store with a list of impossibly fiddly screws to gather, preferably so disparately spaced he can survey the entire shop’s contents for eternity. Throughout my childhood, any trip out of the house would usually feature an unjustifiable detour to a B&Q or garden centre, from which he would emerge with six hundred glow-in-the-dark cable ties, a box of satirical gnomes and enough random pig iron to keep his available stock of nuts and bolts hovering at an even two hundred thousand.
At my age, my father had five children and lived in a home he had surveyed, designed and built from scratch himself. I pay half my wage to live in a Hackney breadbin and feel like Bear Grylls when I sharpen a pencil with a knife. My dad drafted, constructed and installed septic tanks for his own homes, and for water treatment facilities all over Northern Ireland. If my sink were to get blocked right now, I would call the police. But besides all this, possibly the greatest achievement of my father’s parenting was letting us know that we were loved, and moreover giving us the knowledge that to love – and be loved – was the most important of things. This at a time when most of the men we knew couldn’t have found the will or way to express their feelings if their lives depended on it. Looking back, some of their lives literally did. I’ve always felt that we, his horrible, mocking children, take so much joy from making fun of him, telling tales of miserly standoffs in supermarkets, or overly zealous lectures on toilet roll application, because it punctures the worshipful regard in which we hold him, and brings him down to our level. But we love him to the end of the world and back, and thankfully possess the ease with that love to tell him all the time, in between mercilessly teasing him.
Now, we mostly live away, and Father’s Day is spent sending him WhatsApp videos from the grandkids and calling him to see if he liked the jumper/socks/Irish country CD we’ve sent him. But when we were children, he awoke each Father’s Day to the sound of soft padding at the carpet outside his room, and the doorknob stiffly turning as we filed in, conveying good wishes for the holiday. Or, more likely, he would have woken one hour earlier, to small, quick feet scurrying through the hall and to the kitchen, where his special breakfast was prepared. In that thick way of children, we had mastered the art of whispering louder than we spoke, and a cacophony of hushed screams, frantic scribbling and clanging saucepans would resound through the house, masked only by the steady clatter of moderately serious trips and falls, themselves so common as to have become white noise.
I imagine my father sat up in bed with a book set aside for the purpose, studiously ignoring the fights breaking out among the grubby little servers now traipsing down the hall, pushing a battered tea trolley towards his door. This contraption was three turns of a screw away from being shrapnel, and sported thick brass wheels which, even on the plush brown carpet of our hall, made a noise like the Eiffel Tower being folded into a quarry. It would groan under the weight of a cooked breakfast, some inane trinkets, a flower, an errant sock and the multi-coloured foliage of our many crumpled handmade cards. Once we’d made our way down the hall with all the stately grace of an exploding foal, my father’s bedroom door was thrown open. Feigning alarm and surprise, he pretended he’d only just now been roused by the eleven children unloading onto his carpet, pyjama-striped and laughing, like the freckled contents of a rural Irish clown car.
Standing in that bedroom, we’d laugh as he delighted over his plate of burned rashers, runny eggs and beans that looked like they’d been pre-digested. Luckily for him, we’d interrupt this feast to thrust our cards in his face. We would sing songs and read poems and hand him gifts; one year I gave him a frankly terrifying sculpture of him that I’d constructed from pasta shells. Back then I knew how to sum up what he meant to me. Thirty years later I’m content to reach for that, even if he’d probably prefer I wrote an entire chapter about dogs and priests.