Séamas OReilly - Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: A Memoir

O ne thing they dont tell you about mammies is that when they die you get new trousers. On my first full day as a half-orphan, I remember fiddling with unfamiliar cords as Margaret held my cheek and told me Mammy was a flower.

She and her husband Phillie were close friends of my parents, and their presence is one of the few memories that survive from that period, most specifically the conversation Margaret had with me there and then. Sometimes, croaked Margaret in a voice bent ragged from two days crying, when God sees a particularly pretty flower, Hell take it up from Earth, and put it in his own garden. Margaret held me in the sort of tight, worried grip usually reserved for heaving lambs up a ladder. As she clenched my hand and told me God had specially marked my mother for death, a tear-damp thumb traced small circles on my temple. She stroked my hair.

It was nice to think that Mammy was so well-liked by God, since she was a massive fan. She went to all his gigs Mass, prayer groups, marriage guidance meetings; and had all the action figures small Infant of Prague statuettes, much larger Infant of Prague statuettes, little blue plastic flasks of holy water in the shape of Gods own Mammy herself. So, in one sense, Margarets version of events was kind of comforting. It placed my mothers death in that category of stories where people met their heroes, like Maureen Bouvaird getting a hug from Daniel ODonnell in the Mount Errigal Hotel. Only Mammys death was even better, since Mrs Bouvaird didnt get to live outside Daniels house forever thereafter, however much she would have liked to. As it happens, witnesses said Maureen cried so much she hyperventilated, leaving a shining snails trail of snot arching from Daniels jumper to the floor. Thereafter, the sexy eunuch of Irish country music waved her to the medical tent, where she spent the remainder of the evening clutching an icepack to blue curls in glazed, mumbling bliss.

As Margaret reassured me that God was an avaricious gardener intent on murdering my loved ones any time he pleased, I concentrated once more on my new corduroy slacks, summoned from the aether as if issued by whichever government department administers to the needs of all the brave little boys with dead, flowery mams an infant grief action pack stuffed with trousers, sensible underpants, cod liver oil tablets and a solar-powered calculator.

The cords were new and clean and inordinately delightful to fiddle with, most especially when I flicked my finger up and down their pleasing grooves, stopping only each time a superheated nail forced a change of hands. I think its fair to say I had no idea what was going on, save that this was all very sad and, worse, making Margaret sad. In that way of five-year-olds, I feared sadness in adults above all things, so I leaned my head upon Margarets shoulder to reassure her that her words had scrubbed things clean. In truth, I found the flower story unsettling. I couldnt help picturing Mammy lovely, tired and blue-tinged in her flowy white hospital gown awakening to a frenzy of mechanical beeping as the roof caved in and tubes burst from machines.

God takes the most beautiful ones for himself, she repeated in a tired rasp, as I envisaged the room pelted from above by ceiling plaster, maybe an oncologist or two getting knocked out by falling smoke alarms, Gods two great probing fingers smashing through the roof to relocate Mammy to that odd garden he kept in heaven, presumably so hed have something to do on Sundays.

In fact, my mother died from the breast cancer that had spun a cruel, mocking thread through her life for four years. The hospital rang my father at 3 a.m. on Thursday 17 October 1991. Their exact words went unrecorded, but the general gist was that hed want to get there quick. I cant imagine the horror of that morning, my father racing dawn, chain-smoking as he managed the ninety-minute drive from Derry to Belfast in less than an hour. When he arrived, she had already passed. Sheila OReilly was dead, and my father drove back to Derry as the sole parent of eleven children.

From certain angles, the circumstances of my upbringing are disarmingly baroque. I agree, for example, that the whole eleven kids thing is a bit much. My parents remarkable fecundity had long been something of a cause clbre to friends or, indeed, any random person who could count past ten, or had passed our scraggly-haired forms in the big white minibus in which we drove around. Nicknamed, with some inevitability, the OReillymobile, this vehicle cemented our place as an oddity wherever we went, and while Im not saying everyone we knew mocked us as a gaggle of freaks, Id find it hard to understand if they didnt.

Passing us on the road during the school run, you would have seen a mildly frazzled man at the wheel, muttering at traffic through a woolly fog of cigar smoke. This man, resplendent in a two-tone suit and with beautifully combed blond hair, is my father, Joe, or Daddy, as Northern Irish speech has it. Daddy was, for reasons that will become obvious, the bright, shining star of my childhood, and, quite possibly, human life on Earth during this period. His hypothetical tension behind the wheel on this entirely notional morning might have been the result of one of us forgetting to put on shoes, neglecting to go to the toilet, or ingeniously weaponising a nosebleed against their nearest sibling.

He might have been stressed by that mornings checkpoint run, the dystopian rigmarole undertaken by everyone who lived on Northern Irelands border with the Republic of Ireland, during which army patrolmen would have commanded him to present ID as they manoeuvred their long, mirrored stick under the vehicle on the off-chance hed paused ahead of the school run to place explosive materiel underneath his eleven infants feet. Of course, you could also just have happened to catch him during the nerve-obliterating period between 1999 and 2001, when no fewer than six of his daughters were simultaneously teenagers. I cant imagine what that was like, and I was there. To be honest, the wonder isnt so much that my father was frazzled, but that he managed to avoid going flamboyantly insane.