On the way home, Don came up with a piece of logic that made perfect sense at the time. Women with bigger ‘diddies’, he insisted, had bigger cracks between them and therefore gave birth to bigger babies. He had been truly sold on my theory, and I was thrilled. For all my prurient interest in Aunt Vera’s bosom, she was one of my favourite aunts because she was kind and colourful.
TWO
Ancestral Eccentricities
My mother’s older brother, John, fascinated me most. He was tall and bald, with peculiar, deep indentations on each side of his forehead. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles and resembled the renowned Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. He chain-smoked unfiltered Park Drive cigarettes, chewed gum, made long speeches no one seemed to listen to and drank tea from a large mug. When adding sugar to his tea, he loudly announced each teaspoon of sugar, only stopping when he reached ten. He claimed to like tea when it was strong enough for him to stand on it. He would lift me high in his arms and give me two gentle pecks on my cheeks, exclaiming, ‘Jelly and custard!’ My twin and I got the jelly-and-custard treatment each time he saw us.
He was thirty-six but looked older than his years and seemed somewhat detached from the world around him. He frequently used combinations of complex words and quoted extensively from the writings of Marx, Lenin and Engels. While those names sounded exotic and foreign to me, he also talked a lot about a certain James Connolly and, because Connolly was an Irish name, I assumed he was referring to a friend or neighbour. Years would pass before I understood the Connolly in question was the Irish revolutionary socialist executed by the British for his role in the 1916 Rising in Dublin.
On our eighth birthday, Uncle John took Damien and me on our first Sunday morning stroll along the Falls Road to Milltown Cemetery, Belfast’s main Catholic burial ground. The trip soon became a weekly routine, beginning before midday Mass and ending two hours later. Every time we walked through Milltown’s heavy wooden gates and arched stone entrance, Uncle John would point out the oldest headstones. Many were granite or marble, from 50 to 100 years old, commemorating prominent Belfast Catholics, whose wealth came from bookmaking and alcohol. In contrast, the Protestant City Cemetery, a short distance away, had more ornate headstones, honouring people who had amassed wealth from linen mills, shipbuilding, land ownership and politics. Catholics were essentially second-class citizens and their opportunities to generate wealth and move up the social ladder were restricted to a few business models and trades.
After inspecting several small tombs near the entrance, we visited some family graves, beginning with the Carsons. He never prayed but insisted we say an Our Father followed by three Hail Marys at each family member’s grave. He always showed us the Republican Plot and begin a familiar rant about the failings of Irish Republicanism, which he claimed was now dominated by ‘cowards’ and ‘dog-collared bastards’; the latter term he used for priests. For him, James Connolly was the only true Irishman, who would have transformed Ireland into a Socialist Workers Republic if the British hadn’t ‘murdered’ him. Instead, his death led to the emergence of a narrow-minded, Catholic Nationalist Ireland.
On the journey home, our uncle’s speeches became more intense and rambling. We never interrupted his tirades, believing they were part of his personality. Minutes from home, his ranting always tapered off, and he became jovial and funny. It seemed like an alarm went off in his head, telling him it was time to revert to his other persona. He would take a rounded bubblegum, known as a ‘Bubbly’, from his pocket, tear it into two equal pieces and give one to each of us. It was his idea of a bribe, and it worked because we never told our parents or our grandmother about his odd behaviour.
In those early years, I never heard my parents criticise my uncle or make fun of him. I was too young to realise just how different he was from the other adults in my life, but I trusted and loved him. He had idiosyncrasies and obsessions but wasn’t sectarian in a society ridden with religious prejudice. He insisted his political views were based on socialist principles that appealed to Catholics, Protestants and dissenters alike. Much of what he said did not make sense in my childhood.
I was unaware he had once been a prominent IRA activist. Like many Belfast Catholics of his generation, he was a teenager when the IRA secretly recruited him. He fell under the influence of older men with a history of political violence, and it took years for his parents to learn of his IRA affiliation. By then, he was too deeply attached to the organisation to heed the pleas of his family to leave it. His mentors, to whom he pledged total commitment, were IRA veterans from both sides of the Irish border. They treated him to political lectures and trained him in guerrilla warfare. Irish Republicanism so dominated his life, he ignored the effects of police scrutiny on his parents and siblings. It mattered little to him when the police launched regular midnight raids on his home. He was holed up in a safe house somewhere in Belfast. Sometimes, he watched the raids from the bedroom of an elderly female’s home across the street.
In January 1939, while Britain faced the prospect of a war in Europe, the IRA planned to strike at its old enemy – England. It was a reckless and unjustified endeavour driven by bitterness and a crazy belief the British could be forced to abandon Northern Ireland. The IRA leadership decided the most successful strategy was to bomb Britain into submission. When the British received an ultimatum to leave Ireland or face the consequences, they dismissed it as farcical. But the danger was real. To the British government’s shock and horror, bombs exploded in eight major English cities, including London and Liverpool, on 17 January at 6 a.m. Units from the IRA’s Belfast Brigade took responsibility for some of the explosions and for many more that followed.
The bombing campaign was ultimately a failure. It antagonised many Irish in Britain, who soon found themselves under suspicion and ostracised by their English friends and neighbours. Good police work led to the rounding up of IRA operatives throughout Britain, and my uncle John was among them. Due to lack of evidence, he was deported to Dublin after he claimed Irish citizenship. The IRA promptly sent him north to re-join its Belfast Brigade. He was quickly re-arrested in a massive round-up of IRA activists, sympathisers and left-wing trade unionists, all of whom were imprisoned without trial on an old naval vessel, the Al Rawdah, anchored in Belfast Lough.
Two years later, he was transferred to Crumlin Road Prison. While there, he protested his confinement without trial, refusing to vacate his cell for the preferred safety of the open yard during German air raids. He tried to encourage other IRA prisoners to join him, but they refused. Prison warders, the majority of whom were Protestant and anti-IRA, vented their anger at his rule breaking by assaulting him in his cell. Their brutality left a lasting impression on my mother, who accompanied my grandmother during prison visits. They were not permitted to see him after beatings. Instead they were handed his bloody clothing and told to take it home and wash it.
By the time Uncle John left prison in the spring of 1944, nothing remained of the young ideologue of the pre-war era. He returned to No 4 Ross Place deeply depressed and rarely went outdoors. Before long, he began denouncing the IRA, its Belfast leadership, the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Vatican. His anti-Catholic rhetoric puzzled his family, but they weren’t unduly concerned by his antipathy towards the IRA. Belfast’s IRA leaders knew all about John’s terrible prison treatment, yet none of them visited him after his release.
As the months passed, his bitterness increased. He would look out from the living room window into the street, hurling abuse at the priests of the parish and the IRA. Somehow, all the knowledge he had acquired from reading socialist literature and attending political lectures in prison transformed him from a Catholic Nationalist into an atheistic socialist. His disintegrating personality also made him a disgruntled and angry individual. Ironically, his striking political transformation was a reflection of a similar metamorphosis, which infected the IRA less than a decade later. In the 1950s, the organisation transitioned into two factions: one advocated traditional Irish Republicanism, while the other promoted a Connolly brand of socialism with some Marxist-Leninism included for good measure. That metamorphosis within Republicanism was particularly manifest in prison debates in the mid-1950s when Republican veterans expressed disillusionment with the IRA’s attachment to Irish Catholic Nationalism. I believe, however, the genesis of that political divergence can be linked to an earlier period when