The large, white, five-bedroom bungalow in which I was raised was sometimes called the Forge by my father, and literally no one else. This soubriquet is lovingly rendered on letters my dad sends to relatives, conferring a certain elegance of standing. The Forge could be a fancy B&B, the summer residence of a timber baron, or a stately home that’s been converted into a rehab centre for celebrity drug addicts.
It actually takes its name from its being set on a plot of land once used by a blacksmith, a fact pleasingly confirmed if you dig a hole anywhere around our garage, where you will find all manner of shrapnel, pig iron and horse shoes. The field behind the house once verged on the UK customs checkpoint, but after the demilitarisation of the border that was shut down, and the land, together with the top bit of our field, was sold to build a family home for some new neighbours. My father planted trees to provide a barrier, as he did along two hundred metres stretching from the garage to the slope at the front of the house that has farmland on both sides. This second line of trees was essentially planted to keep the horse in Toland’s field from eating my dad’s flowers but, in the age of Brexit, it has now risen to the exalted position of being fully 0.04 per cent of the United Kingdom’s border with the European Union. Such a promotion might seem slightly above the paygrade of some mottled conifers and a fence you could knock over with a few harsh words. And if you ask that horse if it’s a solid barrier, he’ll tell you no. He may even do so from my dad’s flower beds, in between bites of nasturtium.
So, my family home is not merely on the border, it is a structural part of it, but none of that was of interest during my childhood because it was just my house and, for the most part, the border thing was largely irrelevant.
The land around the house is uncommonly pleasant: rolling hills, fields and open farmland pretty much as far as the eye can see. The hills in the distance are actually across the River Foyle, which itself isn’t visible from my home, although if you were to walk the short road down to Balloughry it’s so quiet you can hear the noise of the traffic as it passes along the far side. There’s wildlife here: wood pigeons, pheasant, large game birds and mid-sized raptors, along with the usual but slightly less commonly sighted owls, foxes and badgers. There are cows in the fields perhaps half the year, and a thin, scraggly electric wire separates their parish from ours where the slope meets the fence and our land terminates. The wire gives a faint electric shock that is barely painful, but enough to alarm cattle into thinking twice about ascending onto our property, and for the most part they seem to take no interest in us at all. Sometimes, however, the cows spontaneously develop some irresistible, albeit temporary, obsession with us, and congregate right at that fence. One or two mornings a year we’d throw back the living-room curtains to find forty-five cows staring with listless attention, like world-weary reporters summoned to a press conference about council tax increases.
Once or twice they’ve ventured further and have, in confused ebullience, stormed the fence and run around our house in a spiral of panic, perhaps in some thirst for the freedom of gravel and pebbledash denied to them in the field. To look out of our kitchen window and see a churning mass of dead-eyed cattle circling the house is thrilling. I’ve never forgotten my sister Caoimhe loudly screaming at me to close the door. This I did, but not before imagining – with delight – dirty-hooved cows storming into our house and running around for no reason. Thankfully/alas, this never happened, and any time they did break through the perimeter we would just ring the farmer and he’d come and apologise and I’d get to watch as he shooed them back down to their field with some uncanny authority that our own screams somehow lacked.
Where I grew up is, in short, the kind of place you might see on Grand Designs before a really annoying couple erect a black cement monstrosity their neighbours will hate, complete with arty windows made specially in Germany that arrive two months late and way over budget. The view from the back of our house is dotted with distant houses and tall windmills that look down over the north-eastern banks of the Foyle. It’s gloriously picturesque, giving the scene from our living-room window the near-perfect charm of a Windows Desktop wallpaper. As a child, of course, all of this was lost on me, since I had about as much interest in scenery as I had in BBC Parliament. When I’m back home these days I can barely keep my eyes off the landscape, stunned into slack-jawed amazement, not just at the view itself, but at the fact I lived within it for most of my childhood and didn’t give it a second thought.
Most but not all of my childhood, that is. I was once an avid agriculturalist. Aged six, a short while after my mother’s death, I became obsessed with the idea of becoming a farmer. I was in it for the machines and was besotted with tractors most of all. I had several myself, all different sizes, as if caught at different stages of their life cycle. I had very small ones that I could plot on little model farmyards of various scales, then I had slightly larger ones with moving trailers and attachments, which I could push by hand. I then had big ones, in which I could sit and pedal myself around, usually still holding a good selection of those other tractors in my lap, just in case at any point while riding round on my tractor I needed a quick reminder of just how much I loved tractors. I wore wellies, quilted gilets and flat caps while driving around pointing at things I wanted to farm. What exactly constituted farming was, to me, somewhat hazy, but I guessed it was basically riding on my tractor while saying ‘ey up’ to dogs and nudging everything I saw with the digger attachment. Long days of this grew tiring for both me and the people and things I was trying to farm out of the way, but the life of a farmer is not for the faint hearted. And so, the dog was farmed, my siblings were farmed, and any random objects that I encountered also farmed. I received tractor calendars for Christmas and would turn the pages excitedly on the first morning of every month, delighted to find whatever new model was there waiting for me. It bothered me that these calendars were invariably sold by the manufacturers themselves, and so would only show makes from said manufacturer. Brand loyalty meant less to me than variety. Craving a mix of tractors each month, I soon had a John Deere calendar and a Massey Ferguson one, hung side by side, so as to give me the broad diet I deserved.
I was in awe of my dad’s friend Robert, who farmed down the road and used to come by our house in his tractor and let me look at it. I was incredibly impressed with my dad for knowing a real live farmer who would come to our house and say hello. To six-year-old me, this was like a greeting from God. I idolised him to such an extent that I’d get too sheepish to talk, and would instead show my appreciation by taking his wellies once he’d removed them and storing them by the door in the back hall, in an act of wordless, admiring servitude. I would probably have been delighted to wash them for him. One day my dad arranged for Robert to take me farming for the day. To date, this is probably still the greatest thrill I’ve ever experienced. He picked me up at 6 a.m., and I was given a glimpse of the heady glamour of driving through fields, feeding hay to cows and getting waves from other farmers as we went past. I tipped my cap and waved back, making it clear that I too was one of their tribe, since they probably couldn’t make out all the tractors in my lap that would have proved it beyond all doubt.
By the time I started school this passion had faded. I grew out of wellies that were never replaced, and the once-endless supply of nested tractor toys gathered dust before being tidied away for ever. When Robert visited, his wellies remained untouched, and I barely looked up when we heard the gravel crunch of his big fat tyres coming in. By the time I was seven or eight, I was not merely indifferent but actively hostile to the environment. The glory and splendour of the countryside existed, as far as I could tell, solely to provide me with knobbly sticks I could hit things with as I walked along low walls. We defaced trees with our initials and, later, blighted them with our own half-baked Grand Designs: our numerous futile attempts to make tree-forts.
My father was a maker of things, a trained architect and an engineer. His father had been a carpenter. I, on the other hand, was never bitten by the woodworking bug, and certainly not one that would have instantaneously granted me the powers of a master craftsman which, in truth, was what I wanted. What I’ve always wanted: to be good at something while committing as little time, effort and attention to it as possible. I wanted to learn things as quickly as it took a spirited montage to finish: was this so much to ask? A childhood spent watching films in which scrappy gangs of misfits manufacture outwardly ramshackle but entirely viable mansions in trees had led me and my siblings to believe we’d just kind of get the hang of building a treehouse as we went. All we had to do, it seemed, was carry wood to the area and occasionally hammer things until, hey presto, by the end of a Huey Lewis song you’d have a fully finished four-bed clubhouse ready to hold meetings in.
It turned out that there were several steps in between ‘wanting to build a treehouse’ and ‘having the finished article installed safely in situ’. Safety wasn’t even the big concern; we were more than happy for the thing to be a death trap so long as it was recognisably a structure and not a sad assemblage of rotting branches, buttressed by planks we’d stolen from our own beds. The end result would be a precarious platform of damp, angular plywood that provided no shelter – we never got to the point where a roof was a likely prospect – and was significantly more uncomfortable to sit in than the tree limbs we’d just built over. Our best attempts looked like fences that had been blown away in a gale and become lodged in a tree, rather than something that was deliberately placed there by human design. Nevertheless, we’d still spend a few hours sitting in this mangled arrangement, as if hoping to convince ourselves that it had been time well spent. ‘Ah,’ we’d say, our knees bent round the accessible part of an out-jutting plank, feeling it crack and groan under our weight. ‘This is the life.’ After each attempt, we’d go back inside disillusioned, vowing never to try again, and it would be a few weeks before Daddy worked out why our mattresses kept collapsing out of our bedframes.
We had miles of greenery around us to amble through but settled instead on caking ourselves in dirt and leaves by tumbling down the slope behind the house – the one that bordered on the cows – as an improvised slide. The electric fence that sat at the bottom of this slope should have been a disincentive, but we were no fools – we knew that we were protected from hitting the fence by the thick barrier of stinging nettles that we rolled into instead. We climbed trees and poked at streams. We traipsed through hedges looking for blackberries. We really wanted to find caterpillars that we’d keep as pets. We’d store them in a jar, which we would invariably forget about, only to discover some months later a grisly glass prison of exploded, furry mould. Nowadays, I’m incapable of holding myself back from rambling through the square mile that traces around our house, down towards the river, swinging right to trace the path over the border and towards the nearby village of Carrigans. The entire time I do this, I’m constantly chattering to my wife or anyone else foolish enough to accompany me, loudly lamenting my own inability as a child to see this very real wood for these very real trees, when I would have covered the entire countryside in concrete if it meant a chance of a cinema or a Laser Quest setting up nearby. It’s a conversation I’m sure they relish.
Despite my rural upbringing, I feel as though I developed very little kinship with nature. The only time I did feel like a proper country boy was when friends from the city would come out and not know how to climb over cattle fences or tramp through paths without getting their runners muddy. I’d laugh at their fear of large, stupid cows and lie about the names of trees and birds we’d encounter. I never got caught until one day I couldn’t identify an oak, which is probably the only tree that every person in Derry knows since it’s the official tree of the county. To me, knowing all the names for trees would have been as pointless as a city boy remembering every brand of satellite dish on his road. Of course, I had even less need to memorise a hundred types of dinosaur, or star, or prime number, but I did all that – because I was an indoor kid at heart.
The front door of our house was reserved exclusively for tradespeople, postmen and visiting priests. The back hall was the real anteroom, as well as the area in which phone calls were chiefly made, with the little table common to every home in the Irish countryside, on which stood the phone, the phone book, a torch and a rack of keys (perhaps 4 per cent of which were identifiable). We had a religious icon over the door, a tiny little Blessed Virgin with a font of holy water at her feet, guaranteeing protection for all who passed over our threshold.
For most of my younger days, it was nearly impossible to use the phone when I wanted, since my sisters spent most evenings calling a revolving cast of friends with great urgency, mere hours after they had last been sighted, safe and well, at school. The phone table itself was the most uncomfortable place to sit in our entire house. Possibly to dissuade us from near-constant use of the phone, it was as ill-shaped and wonky as one of our treehouses, almost as if Daddy had intended it as a piece of hostile architecture, the way city planners put those spiked benches in bus stations so homeless people can’t sleep on them. Despite this measure, my father was accustomed to picking up the phone by his armchair to hear one of his daughters angsting to a pal, as if the line was permanently connected to a switchboard for disaffected Northern Irish youths. When the internet was installed, it worked off the same phone line, meaning it was now not just permanently engaged, but also emitted an ear-splitting electronic screech if you haplessly picked up the receiver. In those days the internet was charged like a phone call, meaning that one month early in my use of the service I racked up over £100 of charges. I wish I could even claim it was for some agreeably salacious use, but I was mostly concerned with reading rumours about the new Star Wars prequels and downloading South Park sound clips.
Once a hub within our home, in the aftermath of the landline’s demise the back hall has become little more than a vestibule for various items of outerwear to be quickly grabbed if you need to go outside into the garage. There are roughly a thousand discarded shoes, and a mat for the dog, who is allowed to sleep there when she gets scared by the many things that now appear to terrify her very greatly indeed. There is a coat rack by the far wall which holds – and I have counted – twenty-eight coats, jackets, fleeces and items of hi-viz apparel, all of which at one point or another may have been in daily use by one or several of us, but which were for years kept as a last resort should someone need something to wear when nipping out for a fag. None of us live there any more, nor do we smoke when we return, so this stock of coats has been frozen in time since, I would reckon, about 2009. A recent dig through the archaeological strata uncovered a coat I’d forgotten ever owning, a tatty army surplus thing, its pockets containing a few crumbles of weed and a USB stick of bad techno.
The back hall opens onto the kitchen, where the first thing that greets you is the twelve-foot-long table that has served as the locus of family life for thirty-five years. It’s the first sign that you’re entering a house that was designed to accommodate my family’s ludicrous dimensions. It has a marble-effect top, which was probably meant to seem classy but looks more like the backdrop for the cover of a mid-nineties rap album. It was the venue for all the family meals we had together growing up, was the centre point of Christmas dinners, and is now the favoured spot for late-night drinking sessions when we end up at home together. The dogs like to sit underneath it. The steady hum and hiss of their snoring, accompanied by Italian football on Channel 4 and the dishwasher working its way through the dinnerplates we’d just used, was the soundtrack to my every childhood Sunday. That is until I started blaring the Aphex Twin and Autechre CD-Rs that would send Daddy in to rip the speaker plug from the wall.
After Mammy died, a kitchen rota was enforced that split chores up among us, ostensibly to cover the shortfall engendered by her death. This was slightly odd since our housekeeper, Anne, did most of the daily cleaning, but it did help at weekends and after dinner, while also instilling a bit of discipline for its own sake. The rota, famously devised by Maeve and Orla, ruled out the Big Ones since they were busy studying for exams, and instituted a master/apprentice system by which a Middle One and a Wee One were paired to split the cleaning tasks for the day; one washing, one drying, one sweeping, one picking up, etc. This kitchen rota was widely praised by adult observers, but also passed into O’Reilly lore as a wretched tale of forced labour and exploitation. It was common for the older siblings to treat the younger as willing servants, and to capitalise on their inexperience for their own gain. When time came to clean the bedroom they shared, Mairead convinced Dearbhaile, two years her junior, to split the room down the middle. This would have been a fair arrangement had Mairead not decreed that the dividing line would separate the room’s top and bottom halves, meaning Dearbhaile cleaned the entire room, leaving Mairead to make the bed on her own top bunk. Not that I was above such sharp practice myself. On the rare occasions we were gifted money, I kept a pot of 2p coins set aside that I could trade for any £1 coins Conall received, on the basis that the 2p coins were much larger and this must constitute greater value.
The rota was different in that it was systematic and operated in plain sight. The Middle Ones (then aged nine to thirteen) were a bit more savvy than their infant charges (aged two to seven) and wielded their power in a microcosm of capitalist malfeasance. Soon they had tricked us into doing almost all the work while they watched. So it was that a Middle One might put away the dishes after their partner had collected, washed and dried them.
Over on the far wall, beside the dishwasher, there used to be a serving hatch that opened into the dining room, which was by far the coolest thing in our house. Daddy got rid of it in a subsequent renovation, but I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven him, even though there was literally no reason that we would need a portal from the kitchen into the dining room since we ate all our meals in the kitchen, and very few objects were transferred from one room to the other, least of all those that were small enough to get through a hole that size. It was just cool. The disappearance of this little hole, smaller and way less useful than a door, united us in grief. Usually, you’d just open it to see what was going on in the dining room, only to find that it was, as usual, empty, or else occupied by a single, annoyed person, wondering why you’d opened the hatch to stare at them. It remains much missed.
The dining room itself is one of those things, like damp or bats, that are ubiquitous in rural Irish homes; rooms which are lavishly appointed but never used for their designated purpose. Not only did we never dine in there, it would stretch credulity for me to even imagine doing so. Having dinner in the dining room would be like watching TV in the hall or sleeping on the bathroom floor; a category error so flamboyantly unhinged it doesn’t bear thinking about. It housed a table and a grand dresser filled with plates and cups and all manner of other bric-a-brac deemed fancy or irrelevant. The good crockery therein was only used for very special visitors, either to make it clear that they were very special visitors or else give the impression that we were so profoundly fancy that we spent every evening drinking from perfectly unspoiled cups with a tiny gold rim, rather than those we actually used, which were a chipped mass of ceramic scrap bearing the logos of different chocolate bars we got in a few decades’ worth of Easter eggs. The room was used for every other conceivable purpose than eating or looking at the nice plates. It’s where we used the internet over the aforementioned achingly slow dial-up connection. It’s where my little brother and I played computer games or watched un-family-friendly TV programmes. We used it for music practice as it contained a piano and about twenty dozen other instruments accumulated during my dad’s unflagging efforts to make musicians of us all. These stuck around for decades after we either left or stopped playing, meaning that if you stood up too quickly the entire room made a faint twanging, plinking, hooting noise, as if you’d startled a very small chamber orchestra. The dresser that contained the fancy plates was also slowly filled with bottles of whiskey my father was gifted by unimaginative friends and colleagues who didn’t realise he drank only one or two tumblers of whiskey per year, nor that his children would happily drain them for him. Nowadays, it serves as a makeshift spare bedroom for Christmases and other gatherings that exceed the allotted occupancy of the house. We’ve all at one time or another found ourselves on the singularly uncomfortable fold-out bed, drifting off to sleep with a prestigious view of what instruments now remain, as well as some of the finest plates in the parish.
The living room – also known as the sitting room or, more commonly in Derry parlance, the good room – is my favourite room in the house, featuring its greatest asset: the grand, south-facing eight-metre-square window that looks out over a beautiful scene of County Derry and Donegal. We like to say that it faces the Foyle, but it actually more directly faces Reservoir Meats, the meat-processing plant on its northmost bank, where both of my older brothers held summer jobs in their teens, and which luckily is also too distant to be visible. On the hills to the south-east are several gigantic wind turbines that add a futuristic majesty to the view which otherwise would look like something from a cover of Ireland’s Own. The good room was where we gathered to watch TV and work our way through Daddy’s vast, vast collection of video tapes.
Certain governing laws were true of those long sunny days when Raiders of the Lost Ark had just come on, or the second half of the FA Cup was set to kick off. It was an absolute certainty that such a moment would be the cue for the compressed, crackly hiss of an unfamiliar car driving into the front yard, which meant visitors.
When we were small, and so starved of attention and distraction we voluntarily spent time with our siblings, the prospect of visitors, no matter how mundane, was something to be celebrated. Even if it was one of Daddy’s friends from prayer group, or a local eccentric who assembled wicker popes in his spare time, we would receive them as emissaries from the wider universe as gratefully as if we’d been manacled to the furniture and barred from all outside contact. But this glad, happy feeling toward visitors had switched off entirely by the time we reached twelve, at which point we greeted the prospect of guests with unsurpassed dread. By that age, all adults seem so preposterously boring that if Neil Armstrong himself had arrived, fresh from the moon and carrying several species of lunar spider he wanted to show us, we would have cursed the interruption, since it would more than likely have arrived at just the time when we were enjoying doing something else or – bliss itself – nothing at all.
Once we heard that crunch of gravel, we were quickly drummed to action stations. In an ecstasy of nervy fumbling, four of us would scatter to the kitchen with the kind of haste that wraps your heart around your back. Daddy would answer the door and we prepared the hospitality required. The most senior present would cut up some of the ubiquitous fruitcake. Another would be on biscuit assembly, laying an appetising selection of our fanciest biscuits on a plate. Convention dictated that one circular biscuit (a Coconut Ring, Jammie Dodger or Toffee Pop, in ascending order of fanciness) went in the centre, with auxiliary circle and oblong biscuits radiating outward from the middle in a floral burst, a brown and beige mandala that screamed refinement.
Whoever wasn’t immediately necessary for arranging or preparing food would also decamp to the kitchen, not out of any great desire to be helpful but in the hope that this feeble pantomime of bustling activity would legitimise their having left the sitting room, for entertaining visitors could be an awkward affair. Most visits were punctuated by long silences scored by deafening clock ticks and tea slurps off the good china. A deadening series of bulletins was delivered as to the visitor’s well-being, and that of their children and other family members, as if my father was the overseer of a minor fiefdom, one who demanded from his subjects not gold nor grain but news of each child’s academic progress and extravagantly detailed descriptions of the elders’ medical ailments. Barney, it turns out, had done the 11+ now and had actually done quite well in the language section, which was fascinating because he’d gone into the exam thinking it would be the maths that saw him through.
At the time, of course, I had neither the imagination nor the empathy to realise that my father had no more wish to converse with these people than we did. It never occurred to me that Daddy would, or could, be bored in the company of other adults. I simply didn’t think he had the good sense to be. When considered sanely, adult life – with its radio documentaries, coffee breaks and HP sauce – was so incongruously, immorally bleak, so staggeringly lacking in diversion, that it strongly suggested adults were incapable of identifying pleasant experiences and were simply dead to all joy. A bit like how dogs don’t mind living outside, or French people like France. Surely, if they were in possession of the slightest discernment, there’d be much less time dedicated to attending Mass, voluntarily listening to country music or making trips to the dump. How could one justify their frankly insane lack of interest in sitting upside down on sofas?
It seemed as though all adults everywhere were engaged in a heartless competition to be more insufferably boring than each other, just so they could be left in peace. These interactions were the perfect example of this evil art. They featured my father’s full vocabulary of impressive, noncommittal tics: rapid intakes of breath, flattening jumper folds, scratching placemats with index fingers, more rapid intakes of breath but this time while saying ‘this is it’ or ‘there we are’ or ‘ah sure anyway’, each of these offered with the absent-minded air you have when the cashier is asking you if you do Nectar points, and you’re boiling to get home for a shite. It is, of course, illegal for an Irish person to say, or even imply, that they’d like a guest to leave their home. If a friend were to arrive on your doorstep, covered in pigshit and carrying an open container of the SARS virus, you would still have to offer him a cup of tea at least twice. Once in your home, a guest must be made to feel welcome for as long as is humanly bearable.
Perhaps this is why my father would so routinely get us to perform for guests, since the idea that several children belting out an off-key Irish ballad was genuine entertainment seems outlandish. These recitals were often not enough, and the performances would be followed by more offers of tea and biscuits and fruitcake. At some point the exchange of mangled fricatives would slow down, and the pace of throat clearings and mumbled half-answers would increase, indicating the universally recognised consensus that a social interaction is drawing to a close. The endpoint would be the slap of the thigh and a fondly intoned ‘Right!’ before standing up and exhaling, in a gesture which is about as close to shooting your guest out of a cannon as is legally permitted.
Our bedrooms were nicely turned out, and after a few chops and changes as the family grew, their order of occupants froze after my mother’s death, so that we all stayed in the same place until we packed off for university and left home for good. Most of them have since been done up, so they no longer bear the bunk beds and decals that I can list from memory: the posters in my sisters’ room declaring Fionnuala’s ardent love for the unlikely pairing of Liverpool player Jason McAteer and Saracen from Gladiators; the glow-in-the-dark Casper the Friendly Ghost stickers that were released as part of a cereal box promotion for the 1995 film and somehow ended up a permanent feature of Dearbhaile’s bed, despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, she had no particularly deep commitment to said film.
Because we all did quite well in school, people tend to assume my dad was a taskmaster. Friends confess they thought he must have been the pushy type; a field marshal who kept us in a perpetual state of readiness ahead of the next impromptu pop quiz. ‘Oh, I’ll pass you the butter,’ he might say at the breakfast table, ‘but only if you first tell me how accurate it would be to describe the decline of the crusader states as being primarily due to the quality of Saladin’s leadership in the years 1169–87.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. He hoped we would do well, of course, but I don’t think he ever knew what subjects I was doing, nor who any of my teachers were. One of the few benefits of being the widowed father of eleven children was that when he refused to perform the mundane and pointless obligations expected of other parents, nobody dared object. It was customary for teachers to send every student home with a daybook describing their behaviour, to be signed by a parent every night. In it would be written comments like ‘Séamas kept whistling the theme music to Pet Rescue’ or ‘Séamas was sarcastic to the school dog’ and your parent was supposed to read these and admonish you, and then sign the thing so your teacher knew that it was sorted. Loads of boys in my class just signed their own, but I think I was the only person who was actively encouraged to do so by my father, who simply lacked the necessary bandwidth to care about such details, let alone to do so for eight or nine children every single night. I did forge his signature for a while, but pretty soon I just stopped signing it altogether. My teacher never minded because, well, who wants to be the one bothering Joe O’Reilly? This suited my dad, who had several thousand other things to worry about, fine, and it most certainly suited me.
What Daddy might have lacked in a minute-by-minute, hands-on approach to my schooling, he made up for with more practical acts of ingenuity. He deliberately raised us in an incredibly uneventful part of the countryside, with nothing to do for miles around.
I was too young to remember the time the IRA blew up the customs hut at the top of our field, and would entertain fantasies, both fond and frequent, of more explosions coming our way to break the tedium. It didn’t seem fair that the city types had all the fun. Even a kidnapping or a chase would have been welcome, for God’s sake. It would be some years before we even accrued the few neighbours we have there now, so at weekends, if we weren’t grumbling as we helped Daddy cut grass or fix gutters, we would loll about in states of performative boredom that elicited from him only new, increasingly arcane tasks for us. Unless you wanted to spend four hours of a Saturday polishing the TV aerial, or re-labelling paint cans, it was better to try to look busy. It was here that one of my dad’s many moments of parenting genius proved mutually beneficial. He never told us to read; he had just built bookshelves in every room and filled them with a dazzling array of – mostly terrible – books, thereby ensuring that there would always be something to retreat to when boredom set in. And boredom – deep, crippling boredom – was pretty much a fixed state for a lot of my upbringing. I spent my childhood so bored, so paralytically intediated by my surroundings, that I found time to run through every bookshelf in our house until I went cross-eyed.
I read my brothers’ archive of slim paperbacks featuring ladies in corsets holding pistols or ladies in metal bras wielding swords; sports capers with names like GOAL! or NET! or HEADER!, the plots of which invariably involved an oft-unused sub from a broken home coming on to score the decisive strike in a big final. There were also bizarrely highbrow works by Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Thomas Pynchon, and Stanisław Lem, but with no literary background I’m not sure that I was even aware that there was such a thing as a bad book. There were simply books I had read and those I hadn’t. Early on I remember someone telling me that even if you read a book a week for your entire life, and lived for eighty years and change, your lifetime haul would still only be about four thousand. I set out to beat that number
My first loves were the Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton collections peppered through every room, and the Reader’s Digest versions of popular classics. Later there came the bullet-stopping King and Barker novels that formed an early taste for horror and the macabre. After these, I began working my way through my older sisters’ shelves full of Judy Blume, Francine Pascal and, latterly, Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper. Polo would be my first introduction to the world of sex. At the tender age of eleven I was highly intrigued by Cooper’s descriptions of posh people bonking while wearing tight white trousers and receiving very fancy fax-machine messages. But many of the books in the girls’ rooms were propaganda they had been made to bring home from school. I have very strong memories of one book about a ballerina with an eating disorder, and another that was ostensibly a manual for teenage mothers but was actually written to scare young women into not being teenage mothers while also explicitly asserting that any form of contraception was evil. Catholic education required that girls fear the prospect of pregnancy above all things, while creating the perfect condition of ignorance which would result in just that. Having said that, none of my sisters ever became a teenage mother.
In Caoimhe and Fionnuala’s rooms I found slightly more varied material for the younger lady. I was particularly taken with girls’ comics from this time: Jackie, Bunty, Mandy & Judy, and the majestically uneventful Twinkle. Arriving in from Mass and eating Sunday dinner, I’d find myself filled (figuratively) with the Holy Spirit and (literally) beef gravy, and get a few pages in before full-bellied sleep would grab me for an hour or so in its downy claws. I’d wake up groggy and bloated, halfway through a particularly riveting edition of ‘Nurse Nancy’.
Finally, I’d end up in my dad’s room, stumbling through his airport potboilers. My dad was an avid reader, particularly of news and politics, but when it came to fiction he was a stolid supporter of the page-turner, and was rarely seen without a thriller of varying quality. He loves John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell and Robert Ludlum, and I have hazy memories of him reading template special-forces action thrillers that always had titles that seemed as though they were formed from random pairings of cool-sounding words, like The Decagon Opprobrium Crisis, Diagnosis: Parabellum or Midnight at the Prolepsis Confabulation.
Since my father loved thrillers, and is a proud Catholic, I wondered if he’d take to Dan Brown’s preposterous blasphemy puzzle book, The Da Vinci Code. We were all delighted to discover he loved it and was able to park his tribal affinity in favour of the Catholic hierarchy long enough to become absorbed in the book’s mixture of Vatican intrigue and what amounted to a series of remedial word scrambles. He was especially enamoured of the book’s trip through the machinations of Opus Dei, singled out by Dan Brown as the shadowy puppet-masters of the papacy, a diabolical cadre of spies, archivists and killer monks enlisted to keep the church’s secrets through deception, intrigue and as few words as possible containing two or more syllables.
‘It does make you think, you know,’ he announced, incorrectly, to the sitting room one sleepy Sunday, licking a finger and turning a page with relish. Such was my father’s fondness for this ripping yarn that his suspicions regarding Opus Dei remained undiminished even when we reminded him that it was the self-same organisation he’d been a member of since 1983. ‘That’s a different thing,’ he said absent-mindedly, before returning to the bad anagrams and short sentences that had held the book-reading world in thrall. One should never, I presume, let facts get in the way of a good clergy.