It took me decades to learn he was wrong. He had no knowledge of Mayo in the 1920s and 1930s when my mother spent summers with her father’s family. In fact, my father only went to Mayo in the late 1960s, and by then, there was little evidence of the mansion or the racehorses. Only while writing this book did the truth emerge about the Mayo Clarkes. Painstaking research by my cousin, Eddie Clarke, revealed Ed’s family members were big landowners from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1930s. They lived on a large spread called ‘Brickfield’, named after a brick-producing factory they owned. The soil on the western end of their property was the best in the region for not only making bricks but also delph and china. They were known as the ‘Lord Clarkes’ because only English Lords had their kind of wealth and a large stable of racehorses.
She often used colourful language to enhance her stories about the Clarkes. By the time I was old enough to enjoy her stories, her father was dead, and she had lionised him to erase every unsavoury aspect of his personality. She ignored the heavy drinking and gambling that led him into debt and almost bankrupted him. As a consequence, the small family home in No 4 Ross Place had to accommodate his tailoring business, his wife Margaret, their eight children, and Margaret’s older sisters, Sarah and Bridget Carson. He even conducted the tailoring from a downstairs backroom during the day, depriving the family of privacy in their daily lives. My mother overlooked the hard times he heaped on her and her siblings because she believed he redeemed himself by giving up alcohol and gambling before he died. She saw salvation in his ability to conquer his demons, and it allowed her to highlight his reformation when I was old enough to ask questions about his darker side.
My mother’s storytelling ability was just one aspect of her vivacious personality, which endeared her to the young men of her generation. She later admitted she wasn’t the most beautiful girl in St Peter’s parish but she was the liveliest, with a great sense of fun. Photos of her when she was eighteen show a girl with a full figure, a radiant smile and a shock of auburn hair. ‘My hair was my crowning glory,’ she would say as she got older, adding, ‘and my pins weren’t too bad either’.
My father first set eyes on her in 1939 when he was fourteen and she was sixteen. He was a regular visitor to 4 Ross Place because her brother, Gerard, was his best friend. The two-year age gap allowed her to dismiss him as ‘the kid’. It upset him because he had a secret crush on her and was too embarrassed to admit it. Instead, he publicly chided her for trying to look pretty, and that caught the attention of her older brother Willie Joe, whose moniker was WJ. He was an astute young man, who would later set up his own tailoring business on the Falls Road. For some time, he had observed young Gerry Dillon’s fascination with his sister and realised he was besotted with her.
‘He who slights the meadow buys the corn,’ WJ told him one day, using a proverb that went to the heart of the issue.
A short time later, my father plucked up the courage to ask my mother for a date. She turned him down, saying, ‘You’re just a kid. I wouldn’t be seen dead going out with you till you’re eighteen.’
While she genuinely thought Gerry Dillon was too young, her rejection of him was punishment for the times he loudly made fun of her appearance. He took the put down in his stride and continued to arrive at her home every evening on the pretext of looking for her brother. She never wavered in her refusal to go on a date with him until the evening of his eighteenth birthday. They went to a local ice cream parlour and briefly to a dance studio. Decades later, my mother joked with me that there was ‘no hanky-panky’ during their first date, and he behaved like a ‘scared kid’.
In 1943, my mum had just celebrated her twentieth birthday when cancer struck her father. To help her mother financially she worked in a factory, making items for the war effort. Her father died when she turned twenty-one, and she married my father four years later in 1948. They spent the first six months of their marriage living with my grandmother Clarke and her sisters, Bridget and Sarah. They then rented No 7 Ross Place, across the street from No 4. They were in their new home three months when my twin, Damien, and I were born. It was 2 June 1949, and my father was 24 years old. In his brother Vincent’s eyes, his days as ‘the fancy-free kid’ were over though he didn’t quite know it. According to Vincent, my father did not realise how living opposite his mother-in-law and her sisters made him the focus of their scrutiny.
He began training as a watchmaker and lived a quiet life until he joined colleagues one evening after work, returning home drunk. My mother was emotionally devastated. Perhaps suppressed memories of her late father’s drunkenness and abusive ways were suddenly unlocked. She ran across the street into No 4 and began crying uncontrollably. Her mother decided this was a marital problem that had to be nipped in the bud and walked straight to my grandmother Dillon’s, a mere five minutes away in Lesson Street. Granny Dillon was a tall, dark-haired woman in her early forties who gave birth to my father when she was twenty. Her name was Frances, and her children called her Francie as though she were their sister or friend. Sadly, she would die of cancer on her forty-ninth birthday, five years after I came into the world. She possessed a gentle personality and was highly respected as a caring mother. When she learned her newly married son was drunk she was horrified.
The two grandmothers made their way to 4 Ross Place where they drank tea and discussed strategy. According to my uncle Vincent, they let my father ‘stew in his own juices for several hours until he was sober enough to take his medicine’. The medicine took the form of a long lecture about life and his responsibilities as a husband and father of twin boys. My father later admitted, ‘Awaiting the arrival of my mother and mother-in-law was punishment enough.’ He said he felt like Kafka, facing the wrath of two determined women. In Kafka’s case it was his lovers, Stella and Vanessa. In my father’s, it was two traditional Catholic grandmothers who knew my mother was pregnant with her third child.
They must have scared the daylights out of him because he joined the Pioneers, a Catholic lay organisation of men who pledged not to drink alcohol so they could be closer to God. He also became a member of the Society of St Vincent De Paul, dedicated to doing charitable works and helping the poor and sick. My father was recognisable as a Pioneer by a heart-shaped pin displayed on his jacket lapel, signifying dedication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For a young man who had never been troublesome or fond of alcohol, being a Pioneer was a mammoth step towards a more conservative lifestyle – a step he later considered served him well, as he fathered eight more children. With such a large family there was no room for alcohol or for ‘good times with the boys’, he would later say. His decision to ‘take the pledge’ provided my mother with reassurance he would behave himself. Twenty years later, however, he put the Pioneer pin in a drawer and began a love affair with French wine, a passion he shared with my mother until her death.
My childhood memories of my mother can best be summed up with the words, ‘dedication’ and ‘love’. She was dedicated to her growing family and to her Church, and she loved her husband, children and God with much the same intensity. She had an ability to describe situations and people with exactitude and wit, allied to a peculiar idiomatic use of language and imagery, a talent I may have learned from her. Her ability to find humour in the midst of hardship never ceased to amuse and intrigue me. With ten of us children sharing one bedroom, she would joke with friends, saying she, ‘stacked us in beds and cots like a deck of cards’. Her command of language, coming from a young woman with little formal education, was impressive. When a friend suggested she must surely be proud of the success of her ten children, she replied, ‘Yes I’m proud of all of them. But some have the spark of genius, and the rest have ignition trouble.’
In my formative years, I was very close to her even though my father watched over my school homework and took me for long walks over Belfast’s Cave Hill and in the Divis and Black Mountains. I saw in her a gentleness and an inner strength I rarely witnessed in other women later in life. She managed to maintain a youthful