By the time I was eight, he was a successful tailor with wealthy Protestants and Free Masons for clientele. He drove a Jaguar, and in the working-class Lower Falls neighbourhood his display of wealth made him a celebrity. He often stood at the door of his shop, shouting greetings to everyone who passed, and if a person stopped to exchange pleasantries, WJ reached into his jacket and proceeded, without encouragement, to read his latest poem about a long-forgotten episode in Irish–British history or a current international event. The reason he attracted a lot of attention was his business slogan, ‘Tailor to the Intelligent Man’, which appeared in local newspaper advertisements. He even had it emblazoned on the gable wall of his house. If you ask me, the slogan should have read ‘Intelligent Tailor to the Ordinary Man’, but his version denoted his natural wit.
Aside from tailoring, WJ loved gardening, cooking and all things French. By chance, an elderly Frenchman living in Belfast was one of his clients, and through him he learned to speak French fluently. I was twelve when he first took me to his rented, whitewashed cottage in the townland of Raholp about forty miles from Belfast. WJ called it ‘St Patrick’s country’ because Patrick settled in nearby Saul on arriving in Ireland. At the rear of the cottage, WJ planted a large garden where he grew vegetables and herbs used mainly in French cuisine. He was the first person I ever saw cook with wine, and he used it liberally. His early influence encouraged me to take a keen interest in French cooking and French wines.
Unfortunately, his role as ‘Tailor to the Intelligent Man’ ended all too soon in the 1970s when the Troubles reached into the Falls area. He was forced to close his business because his Protestant clients, who had contributed significantly to his livelihood for over two decades, were too frightened to enter a Catholic district controlled by the IRA. He opened an ice cream parlour on the borderline of Catholic and Protestant enclaves on the Springfield Road, but mobs soon fought pitched battles near his new business, and he had to close it too. As he got older, his years of weekends spent cooking elaborate meals in his country home came to an end. Nevertheless, until he died in his mid-seventies, he continued to cook French meals and to tend a small vegetable garden in his West Belfast home.
The Clarke clan had a big influence on me in my childhood and early-teen years but so too did the Dillon family, which I believe raised the eccentric stakes even higher. My grandfather, Patrick Dillon, and his seven siblings lived at 26 Lower Clonard Street, not far from the Clarkes. It would be cumbersome for the reader if I referred to my grandfather’s siblings as Great Uncle Gerard, who became a famous Irish artist, or Great Aunt Mollie. I shall simply call them Uncle Gerard and Aunt Molly, as I did in my childhood.
Apart from memories of Patrick Dillon, whose love of fishing I inherited, my most vibrant memories are of his younger siblings, Joe, Molly and especially Gerard, the baby of the family born in 1916. Their mother was, by all accounts, a formidable woman steeped in a strict Catholic tradition, yet she allowed them to be nonconformist in their social behaviour and fashion. She encouraged them to love drama, music and dance and ran a little theatre in their tiny home in the Lower Falls. Neighbours regarded them as ‘odd’ or ‘strange’ children because they were constantly ‘in costume’, delivering Shakespearean monologues, singing Irish ballads or dressing up as Arabs and clowns. Uncle Gerard told me his mother produced some of her ‘little dramas’ outside their house and embarrassed him by insisting he play female roles. He never forgot the first time he walked outdoors dressed as a girl. He became a laughing stock for the boys in the neighbourhood.
My great-grandmother ran the Dillon household, and she dominated her husband as she did her children. Her husband, especially late in life, was a gentle, almost withdrawn figure, who sat in a corner of the living room reading the newspaper from cover to cover, trying to appear invisible. He and his wife did not see eye to eye about most things, and their bitter disputes were political, often at her instigation. She was an Irish Republican, who liked to voice her distaste for all things British, whereas he was proud of his service as a British soldier in the Boer War. He cared nothing for talk of a United Ireland and told her the IRA was full of murderers and criminals. He would say if he had his way he would hang them all. When friends arrived at the house and he was absent, they concluded he had gone to the local pub to avoid a tongue lashing from his strident wife.
The artist, George Campbell, who regularly visited 26 Lower Clonard Street when my Uncle Gerard was young, told me my great-grandfather had been a heavy drinker and an abusive husband in the early years of his marriage. As he got older, he mellowed and frequently expressed regret for his past sins. Life had not been easy for my great-grandmother. In the early 1920s, women had no rights, and too many husbands abused their wives. Wives had virtually no recourse to the law, and their priests and ministers turned a blind eye to the issue. Gerard put his thoughts about this on paper years later:
According to my mother, any woman who did her duties and kept her dignity in spite of the hammerings her husband gave her was a saint. ‘That wee woman’s a regular saint,’ she would say about a woman who had just left the house. ‘She’ll get a big crown for it when she dies.’ She was talking as much to herself as to us. ‘Another woman wouldn’t stick it, she’d just up and fly away, but she’ll be rewarded. God is good.’ It was difficult for me to imagine all these ‘wee women’ as saints. I could not see some of them in crowns – some of them were ugly and wore shawls, and didn’t comb their hair and snuffed and wouldn’t suit crowns at all. I thought and thought how could you be sure you would become a saint when you died? The only thing was to grow up a woman, get yourself a bad husband, never neglect Mass, Confession and Holy Communion, and have loads of children. That was according to my mother. But how could I grow up to be a woman?
His sister, Molly, was only eight when Gerard was born, but she quickly saw herself as his protector after she dropped him on his head one day while playfully tossing him in the air. At first, she thought she had killed him. But when she discovered he was alive, she formed a special bond with him. She claimed she cared so much about him that she had an urge to tell the nun in charge of her school she couldn’t love God without first loving her ‘little Gerard’.
She and Gerard were very attached to their sister Teresa, who suffered from tuberculosis. Teresa never left the house and lay in a bed near a window from which she could see her siblings performing their dramatic roles on the pavement and roadway. She was twelve when she died, and her passing forged a unique bond between Gerard and his sisters, Molly and Annie. This closeness to his sisters, rather than to his four brothers, encouraged boys his age to regard him as effeminate. However, his dislike for the rough and tumble of male play may also have helped shape that perception of him. In some respects, he resembled his older brothers, Joe and Vincent, who were both effete and uninterested in sports. In contrast, the two eldest boys, Patrick, my grandfather, and John, were as tough as any their age. They joined the British Army, and John was a professional soldier for most of his working life.
I first met Aunt Molly when I was sixteen. She stayed at our house in Chestnut Gardens. I was struck by her masculinity and her love of tweed suits. Within a week of her arrival, she had changed the names of my seven sisters. It was not an uncommon thing to do in the Dillon clan because Joe had changed his name to Brian when he first moved to London, claiming Brian sounded more Irish than Joe. For Molly, the Catholic names of four of my sisters, Imelda, Attracta, Bernadette and Ursula, were ‘common, much too Catholic and inappropriate’. She renamed them Barbara, Amanda, Samantha and Jane. When my aunt announced she was returning to London a month into her visit, my mother was relieved.
My earliest memory of meeting Uncle Joe dates back to 1958, when I was nine and he was fifty-five. He had been back in Belfast for a decade, having lived in London, and was in his celibate, churchgoing state. He called his Dachshund, Heine, his constant companion, and the small family Dillon house at 26 Lower Clonard Street was his home. I formed a close friendship with my uncle and regularly ran errands for him. He was slim and dapper, and sported a year-round tan that I now believe was as much due to make-up as his love of sunbathing through spring and summer. Indoors, he wore an expensive silk dressing gown with matching pyjamas and slippers, or an embroidered smoking jacket and well-pressed trousers. His rounded, half-rimmed gold spectacles were as well polished as his bald head. My most vivid memories are of entering his house to the sounds of opera