My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (15 page)

After two years Robert left Maynooth, and went to college in London to study English, emerging four years later with a passport into the teaching profession. The reluctant prelate was to become the hesitant schoolmaster.

Yet, for all his achievements, the most enduring image I have of him is of his substantial presence blocking our kitchen doorway. He'd lean against the frame, the thumb of his left hand tucked under a lapel, like an Old Bailey barrister about to deliver a crucial summing up, observing mother as she laboured in the kitchen. She rarely sat down to talk to him. She was always busy – baking, cooking or washing – and the Master seemed to have all the time in the world. In
retrospect I think she should have told him to bugger off, but she didn't dare.

He had a perpetual air of unease about him, and I sense this was due to the fact that in 40 years he had not allowed a penny to be spent without regretting it. Unfortunately he carried around the evidence of each of those painful transactions in his long face, his overbearing stance and his eagerness to eschew all those social occasions where he might be required to part with a bob or two: the parish hall jumble sale, the variety concert for political prisoners, mutual congress with a fellow drinker over a pint in the pub.

You could feel the chary diction running through him: ‘Give them an inch and they'll be in on top of me, cleaning me out of house and home and land and all my folding money, and then where would a body be atall, atall?'

So the guard was always on duty about his person; he might as well have hung a ‘keep out' sign round his neck.

Uncle Robert might have been rich by anyone's standards but his fortune was rarely debited, even for necessary items. He drove cars and wore clothes until they literally fell apart. He had a ‘funeral' suit and a suit for everyday wear. Over each he'd put on a grey raincoat, buttoned to the neck even on the hottest day. Though this layer of plastic acted as protection from the elements, I suspect that its primary function was to conceal a rather cavalier attitude towards personal hygiene.

Following the passing of his Aunt Rose, Robert moved from the house he shared with his brothers James and Edward into the cottage he'd inherited from her. Edward joined him there soon after, having discovered that he couldn't live in amity with the fussy James. James, for his part, was more than happy to be rid of both
brothers; now he could lay sole claim to the bleak dwelling that was the parental home.

My uncles were like feral cats in the face of their diminishing kin, coveting all they could from the recent dead to the detriment of a weaker sibling. They all lived and languished and died in the place of their birth, fearing that to stray into the wider world to live constructive, fulfilling lives would mean a smaller share of the spoils in the end. So they chose to stay stuck, frozen in a permanent winter, waiting to move in for the kill, no matter how long it took, willing another to die first and blaming everyone but themselves for the fatuous choices they had made.

I have never understood this. Surely life should be about changing and progressing and righting the wrongs of past generations, rather than repeating their transgressions. However, lessons are not so easily learned when one chooses to remain blind to the needs of others.

After he retired from teaching – and making life thoroughly miserable for the pupils of Altyaskey primary school – Robert continued an existence of structured monotony. Each morning he would drive his blue Ford Anglia at a steady pace to Draperstown, his white hands clutching the steering wheel in a firm ten-to-two grip, the eyes steady on the road ahead. He took his vehicle and his life seriously, not wanting to lose either prematurely. He had too much money to look after, and this responsibility had nurtured a keen sense of self-preservation.

It became an obsession with him. He admitted to mother once that, before using a pedestrian crossing in Belfast, he preferred to wait until a good crowd had gathered; then he'd ‘get well into the middle of them' before crossing. He reckoned that if you happened to be
on the margins you ran the chance of being clipped and tossed by a reckless motorist. And then where would a man be atall, atall?

On rare occasions mother would send me with Robert to Draperstown to buy some item she'd forgotten or was low on, such as tea or sugar. You might wonder why the Master couldn't have run the errand himself. It never seemed to occur to him to offer, and mother was probably too timid to ask.

I hated those tense, silent journeys. He had the annoying habit of halting before corners and sounding the horn several times before moving on. Once, I had the temerity to ask him why, and he took his hands from the wheel.

‘See, if I didn't do that,' he said in all earnest, ‘a young gype could be round that corner like the divil, and could be into us like
that
.' He stressed the last word with a loud clap of the raised hands.

There were many corners between Robert's house and Draperstown so the jaunt was a lengthy one. You could have walked there and back faster.

Sadly that Anglia would never realise its dashing potential under Robert's guidance. On finally reaching the town he'd crawl onto High Street and devote all his energy to the formidable act of parallel parking. This was a complicated business involving much mirror work and signals, the head roving from side to side, gauging distances and checking for those ubiquitous ‘young boys' who were all, he'd convinced himself, out to do him damage. The steering wheel would be twisted and fed through his powerful hands, and all the while the rustling raincoat swished and swore in protest.

Robert's own grocery list reflected the lacklustre menu he and Edward enjoyed every day: bread and butter, bacon and eggs, sausages, potatoes and milk. He marched from greengrocer to butcher to baker,
conducting the transactions over exchanges of gossip concerning the weather, politics, and who had died – or was about to. Being the schoolmaster he was accorded the same respect as the doctor and the priest; this daily intercourse with the town's shopkeepers was the pivot on which his whole day turned.

He'd buy the
Irish News
last and, after he'd stowed the provisions in the boot of the car, would sit and scan the obituaries column for news of God's most recent withdrawals from life's great piggy bank. All the adults around me – my parents included – took a morbid interest in death. This had little to do with the contemplation of their own mortality, because if it had then they would surely have led more productive and happy lives, packing in as much as possible before the final curtain. To paraphrase Dr M Scott Peck: In order to learn how to live, we have to come to terms with our own death, because our death reminds us of the limit of our existence. Only when we become aware of the brevity of our time can we make full use of that time.

When Robert scanned the deaths column, Dr Peck's reasoning did not figure. He was hoping to discover a name he knew. His joy lay in being the first to impart the ‘bad news' to mother or the neighbours and observe their shock. There was satisfaction to be had in relaying the sad tidings just so long as they didn't affect the bearer. Such are the compensations of an empty life.

That newspaper was not only fodder for his morbid curiosity but had an astonishing assortment of other functions. Yellowing copies were employed as seat covers in the car. More pages protected the table at meal times, and he used others to light the fire, and dry the dishes. I don't doubt that it also did duty as toilet roll in the outside privy, although I cannot confirm this, having neither need nor inclination to visit it.

He'd usually stop by our house on his way home from town and take up position in the kitchen doorway, obstructing our passage from house to yard. If we children were indoors when he arrived then we were virtually under house arrest, and if we happened to be in the yard then we'd have to prolong our play until he left. Either way we were too afraid to squeeze past him.

He'd give mother the lowdown on the latest gossip. He carried with him an encyclopaedic knowledge of every family in the parish, seemingly stretching back to St Matthew's book of generation, when Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram. …

Robert was in his element if he had a death to announce. He'd stand there, my captive mother nodding and sighing, while he rattled out a tracery of the deceased's ancestral connections with all the skill of a master genealogist. He'd pick up tributaries of names and details, and join them to the main family flux with facts and dates, while mother listened patiently. She had somehow to simultaneously keep track of the rising scones and those convoluted histories without causing offence.

‘His mother would have been a Martha McAtamney from outside Ballymuck,' Robert would intone, ‘who got married on a son of the Buffer McVeighs – or were they the Butcher McVeighs? Anyway they owned a couple of farms out by the lough shore until one of the Mickey McSquirtys married into them in nineteen and fifty-two and that was the end of it all.'

He would pause for breath and emphasis, and to test mother's attentiveness. If there was one thing Robert disliked it was inattentiveness in his audience. Too many years spent in front of oscitant pupils had made him uncompromising. Mother had learned this lesson too and was ever alert.

‘Is that so?' she'd say. ‘I thought the McSquirty girls were fine lassies.'

‘Not a bit of it! Didn't the Lily wan turn the young boy's head completely, put him to the bad altogether, lost the head and the two farms and the pair of them drunk it out. Aye, a bad pack. It was in the breed of them that wee weakness was there. Then another of them married a Dan McFadden. Dy'mine him? I say he was a Dan McFadden!'

The voice would have risen to a whine because mother had turned, perhaps to rescue a scone in the nick of time. But in a second she'd be back, feigning interest yet again with a placatory comment.

‘You don't say, Robert. Is that so?'

‘Aye, them McFadden crowd weren't up to much either.'

The litany would continue. Each sentence marching out to the beat of an invisible drum.

‘He was a son of a cousin of an uncle of Stuttering Paddy's. Y'mine him, a low set, stout boy with a squint, dragged the leg a bit, nivver out of the pub either. Used to see him spraghalling up Mary Pat's back, stotious.' (By which he meant that he'd often observed the character in question staggering into Mary Pat's public house by the rear entrance.) ‘Couldn't get enough of that drigging. His mother would have been a half-sister of Jamie the Snout's. She would have been a Thompson to her maiden name.'

‘Thompson, that sounds like a Protestant name, doesn't it?' mother would say with sudden attentiveness.

‘Aye, it is, but the oul' boy was a turncoat, back in nineteen and forty-seven. He had an illegitimate wain to a daughter of Johnny the Slap's, a wee fat lady, wasn't too right in the head. A kind of a clatt of a blade from up the country or y'know deed begod it could have been down
the country, can't mine right, put him astray altogether. The priest had to be called and didn't they fine him dead in a sheugh outside Ballygosidewards at half five in the morning on the fifteenth of June nineteen and thirty-six, stiff with drink more than anything else.'

‘Is that so Robert? God, that drink's a terrible curse.'

‘Aye. Sure they say when a man gets a feed of that poison he doesn't know whether he's living or dead. Tarra stuff. … A bad crowd, aye. And that was the end of that.'

There would follow an uneasy silence while mother ingested all this information and Robert raised his cap, to scratch his crown with the middle finger. He'd replace it an inch or two more towards the back of his head with an air of satisfaction, pleased to have had his say so heatedly and eloquently.

‘Aye, that's the way the oul' thing goes,' he'd remark while studying a patch of ceiling.

My mother, eager for closure and fearful he might start up again, would offer something like: ‘God, I can't believe that Wee Jamie's gone. He was a harmless cretur.'

‘Aye, that's the way it goes,' Robert would add after a long pause. ‘Comes to us all, boys a dear. S'pose a body would need tae go tae a wake and funeral – on account of Big Frenkie. And that means a mass card havin' to be bought. Pity a body couldn't buy a wheen of them in bulk; you'd save a quare bit, so you would.'

There was the phantom Frenkie again; his name seemed always to emerge when someone had expired. Either he was a very gregarious man or had spread his seed far in the course of an ill-spent youth.

On one occasion, however, Robert got things confused. He announced to mother that a mutual acquaintance of theirs – one Lizzy McCrudden or ‘Lizzy the Dizzier' – had died. In a state of shock she sped
posthaste to Draperstown to buy the obligatory mass card. Imagine her astonishment when on the return journey she met Lizzy pedalling her bike into town. There had obviously been two Lizzy McCruddens in the locality – either that or Robert, disgusted at the slow death-rate in the parish and having no shocking news to report, had made it up by way of compensation.

Yet fate was to get its own back on Robert. He himself made the pages of the
Irish News
, though not the obituaries column. One bright August morning, while he trundled along 'twixt Draperstown and his homestead, rations in the boot and eyes steady on the road, Robert's car was hijacked.

As the Anglia mounted the first hill out of town, a man toting a gun jumped from behind a hedge and ordered Robert to stop. He'd been hijacked by a member of the Provisional IRA. The Provo took possession of the car and sped off, leaving the Master dazed and stranded in the middle of the road, his arms raised in an attitude of surrender.

Mother was out at the clothes-line at the time, awaiting Robert's regular visit. She was astonished to see the Anglia flying past the gate, doing, she estimated, a very respectable, rip-roaring 90mph.