My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (14 page)

This was the beginning of the end of our sorrow. There was a palpable feeling in the air that morning; a kind of realisation that these men of God would cleanse the house and release us all at last.

At their request the room had been stripped of its remaining furniture: the wardrobe and the bed. On a small table mother had assembled a crucifix, two candles and a bowl of holy water. The exorcist carried a small black suitcase; the assistant helped him into a surplice and draped a violet satin stole about his shoulders before
they entered the room. They shut the door quietly and firmly behind them, at once shutting themselves in and ourselves out. Mother sighed and crossed herself as she turned away from the closed door. For now, it seemed she would not be needed. I could feel the strain of all those tortured weeks begin to ease as she willed those capable and ministering men to deliver us from the danger that threatened.

We children were banished to Helen's home for the remainder of the day, and were at once curious and glad to be absent. The exorcist and his assistant stayed in the locked room for many hours, not emerging until they'd completed their mission.

At the end of it all they drank tea, then went with us to the now-purified room. There we all prayed together; the clergymen assured us that Great-aunt Rose had been finally laid to rest and would never bother us again. With that they were gone. They left as quietly and unobtrusively as they had come.

The blind faith we had in those men was matched by the fearless actions of my mother following their departure. The linoleum was laid down again, the room's furniture was reinstalled and the bed returned to its proper place by the window. We all assembled and said the rosary as we'd done so many times before – except that this time our prayers were of thanksgiving, and were uninterrupted.

Afterwards we remained kneeling in the glorious silence. Mother, in one final act of faith, lifted John in her arms and placed him on the bed. He didn't wail or remonstrate but lay there and waited. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that throughout the weeks of haunting John never showed any degree of fear or panic, nor did he cry or question why this was happening to him.) Prior to this, just sitting on the bed for a few
seconds was enough to bring on the knocking. This time there was nothing, just complete and total peace. There was no doubt that the entity had gone, that the spirit of our great-aunt had finally been laid to rest.

That night we all went to bed with relief coupled with a lingering nervousness, not quite believing that we were free of the haunting at long last.

There was, however, a cruel epilogue to the tale. In the early hours we were awakened by our dog Carlo howling in the yard. The doleful cries lasted for about five minutes, fading into a whimpering lament before ceasing. The following morning, to our great dismay, we found Carlo dead. His poor little twisted body lay where he sometimes slept: under the wheelbarrow. We were in no doubt that the departure of our ‘visitor' and Carlo's death were linked.

From that day forward, and after six hellish weeks, we were never bothered again. A miracle had been worked and a blessed calm descended, unlacing every knot of fear in our hearts and in every room of the house. All alarm and panic were sucked clean away with the entity's parting, but not surprisingly it left a residue of trauma that was harder to expel. None of us could sleep, eat or study normally for a long time after.

Our mother never told us what kind of ritual had been performed and we never dared to ask; she took that secret knowledge to the grave. As I contemplate it, more than 30 years later, this event still has the power to amaze and unnerve me. Something awesome happened then, a subtle adjusting of perceptions that set me on another path, another journey, a spiritual questing for knowledge and answers that has never abated.

At the young age of eleven, a veil had been drawn back to reveal to me an altogether alien reality. I came to know that the dead did indeed live in a dimension I could not
see. This realisation reinforced my belief in God because it was His power that had finally laid old Rose finally to rest. Those two exorcists truly carried divine power into our home that day, in their healing hands and trusting hearts. They asked nothing in return, but every prayer I have said since contains an acknowledgement of the selfless love their act demonstrated to me.

What had visited us all those years ago? It's common knowledge that the word poltergeist derives from the German
poltern
, to knock, and
Geist
, ghost. Our visitor answered most of the criteria attributed to such phenomena: the activity started and stopped suddenly, it lasted for a number of weeks, it always occurred when a particular individual or agent – my brother John – was present, and it was most active during the hours of darkness.

But what reinforces for me the notion that it was indeed the ghost of our great-aunt is the fact that in many cases the spirits of the dead will knock and scratch and move heavy objects. Mischievous and malevolent energies, on the other hand, are characterised by breakages, the throwing of light objects, or physical assault on, or the possession of, the agent.

I cannot accept the theory proposed in the 1930s that poltergeist activity is caused by sexual conflicts generated during the onset of puberty: projections of repressed emotions, such as anger and hostility. The writer Stephen King further enlarged this idea in his novel
Carrie
and in the film of the same name. In King's fiction the teenage Carrie, victim of a repressed upbringing and bullying classmates, finally unleashes all her anger by the power of telekinesis.

Yes, my siblings and I were all either approaching or experiencing puberty; and yes, we were an unhappy bunch of fearful, confused children. Yet it's difficult to
believe that a nine-year-old boy could either deliberately or unconsciously cause such upheaval. The theory of ‘repression' mooted by psychologists has since been rejected by some eminent researchers in the field, who have gathered enough convincing evidence to drive a coach and horses through the hypothesis.

Dr Martin Israel, a clergyman and senior lecturer in pathology at the University of London, believes that spirits are rarely evil, but are entities confused and trapped within the aura of a living person. (The aura is a subtle emanation that surrounds all living things and provides a host for occult phenomena.) Dr Israel asserts that such entities are family members or friends of the victim, trying to complete their business on the earthly plane.

Given what I know about Great-aunt Rose and the nature of her life, it does not surprise me that she had unfinished business to attend to.

The timing of this visitation is significant also. The spirit showed up on 31 October. For the ancient Celts this day – Hallowe'en, or Samhain – was the most sacred of all their festivals, a solar feast dedicated to the Lord of the Dead. They believed that on the eve of Samhain (
Oíche Shamhna
) the dead arose and roamed abroad, creating mischief by blighting crops and causing chaos in homes up and down the land. The Celts also held that the veil between this world and the next was at its frailest at Samhain, making it easier for dead and living to communicate with one another.

But what I find most interesting about the Celtic mythology is that, during the darkest hours of the night – in our case around 3am – the Lord of the Dead was believed to summon all lost souls in order that their sentences in the hereafter might be reviewed. Often this meant that condemned souls were destined to spend 12 months on the earthly plane in
animal form
.

I have stressed ‘animal form' because it's intriguing and very curious how the animal motif figures in all this. There was the goat that drove us to our great-aunt's door; the invisible dog or goat that my mother felt moving on the bed; finding our dog Carlo dead the morning following the exorcism. Bizarre coincidences or evidence of an ancient truth? God alone knows.

Why John? It has been well documented that spirits will attach themselves to the spirit of an innocent child in order to cleanse and purify themselves; in much the same way we attach ourselves to saints, or a favoured relative who has ‘passed over', to help us and guide us here on the physical plane. Do we know what we set in train when we pray thus, and what turbulence we create in the ethereal regions with our petitions and requests?

Perhaps Great-aunt Rose knew that by beseeching the youngest and purest mind she would get the response she craved and get it quickly. We prayed as much for John's deliverance as we did for hers. She released him when she'd finally found release herself. It took an enormous amount of effort and prayer to bring this about. Is it too much to assume that refusing to be loving in this life guarantees unrest in the next? And if this is the case then why do so many of us find it so difficult to make the qualities of love and goodness the mainstay of our lives here?

T
HE
M
ASTER AND
T
HE
P
ROVO

T
wo months after the exorcism I sat the eleven-plus examination. I did not make the grade; my concentration had suffered as a result of the ‘visitor'. The homework, during the period of haunting, rarely got completed and Master Bradley administered the beatings as usual. The burden of not being able to explain to him the real reason for my negligence was yet another injustice to be borne.

At any rate the Master had not encouraged success in the classroom. Lisnamuck primary school inspired neither confidence nor excellence in its pupils. Since we were mostly the progeny of farmers and labourers it was assumed that the collective aspirations of parents and pupils were not very high. This unspoken ethos excused abysmal teaching methods and crushed the hopes of an untold number of bright pupils.

The priest, the doctor and teacher had absolute power in those days. No one challenged their despotic status within the rural community. My parents accepted without question the brutality of the Master. Those frequent episodic sicknesses, sore heads and sore stomachs that excused us from school were viewed as a malingering tactic rather than with the concern they deserved. It never seemed to occur to my elders that such obvious ‘unhappiness' must have had far deeper psychological roots. My father had been beaten by his own teacher and he reasoned that what was good enough
for him was good enough for his offspring. We stopped looking for his sympathy when we discovered, to our great dismay, that his general response was to give us a further clout for having ‘upset the Master' in the first place.

Mother, being a woman, was more disposed to discussion than attack. Never once, however, did she bring the Master to task. He was left to continue his sadistic practices while his innocent pupils bent and buckled under the tyranny.

The torture did finally end – in June 1971 – when I left that awful school and the ire of Master Bradley for good. The scourge had been expunged from my life, but the damage to my psyche would take longer to heal.

However Master Bradley was not the only teacher employed in the ritual abuse of pupils at that time; my Uncle Robert, also a headmaster, was dishing out the same brutality to the innocents of Altyaskey, another parish school in the vicinity of Draperstown.

Robert, my father's older brother, had been the chaperon on my parents' honeymoon and their ‘spirited' tour guide to the sites of Dublin. He had also been confidant to Great-aunt Rose and, as such, bursar to the family fortune. Much of his income derived from two establishments of alcoholic refreshment in Draperstown. Both pubs were bequeathed to him by his Uncle Mark – Rose's brother – on his demise. Apart from all this, he owned three farms, even though he would have had difficulty distinguishing a turnip from a sprout.

He had a real talent for attracting money into his bank account, did Robert. He was always in the right place at the right time, somehow contriving to be near a ‘profitable' deathbed and guiding a trembling hand in
its final scrawl. As the occupant croaked himself into the hereafter Robert would emerge into the light of day, a triumphant smile softening his stern face.

My uncles rarely smiled. It was as if to do so showed weakness. Worse still, it might have indicated a willingness to forget themselves completely and part with some of their precious cash. Money was for hoarding, not for spending or – God forbid – giving away. So they lived their lives:

Keeping the soul unjostled,

The pocket unpicked,

The fancies lurid,

And the treasure buried.

Robert, though, in his defence, proved to have a wealthy store of knowledge as well as money. He was an avid absorber of literature, had astonishing retentive powers for precise figures and facts and – what impressed me most – he carried around a repository of grammatical knowledge that would have put the most learned linguist to shame. I had reason to mine this seam when during a university course I sought his sagacity in differentiating the properties of the transitive and ditransitive verb. He solved the mystery with a studied casualness that impressed me no end. Oliver Goldsmith would have recognised his sort:

The village all declar'd how much he knew;

'Twas certain he could write, and cipher too:

Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,

And e'en the story ran that he could gauge.

It was clear to me that he possessed a prodigious intellect; yet he chose to live, for purely monetary
reasons, an irrational life. Intelligence and common sense did not sit comfortably in his head. As for spirituality, well how could it even get a look in? Oh yes, he went to mass and attended to his duties, so to speak; the actor on that votary stage ‘receiving' every Sunday. Sure what would the neighbours say if a man missed mass? A body could not be seen to be lying in his bed on a Sunday of all days, boys a dear.

Indeed earlier in life Robert had actually contemplated the religious life. At 18 he had aspirations for the priesthood and was sent to Maynooth College to realise them. I do not believe this to have been a genuine vocation. Personally I never saw him display those attributes – love, kindness and compassion for one's fellow man – which surely must be uppermost in one who wishes to answer such a calling. However, in those less enlightened days, a family's reputation was greatly enhanced if a son or daughter submitted to the dog-collar or wimple. I am sure lots of bullying was carried out – vocation or not – by those parents eager to acquire that pious sheen of respectability.