Family Romance Read online

  I must have known, in some way and at some level, that the version she gave of her life didn’t quite add up. I’m not saying that it made no sense at all, or that she seemed shifty – just that, thinking about it now, I could and perhaps should have sensed that she wasn’t an entirely reliable narrator. Not a wholly unreliable one; but not a wholly reliable one. Somewhere in the middle. There were few outright giveaways, but one of them should have been the confusion about her birthday. This was always celebrated on 5 December, even though her passport said that her birthday was 16 February. That was, she said, because of a cock-up with the registration of her birth. My mother was born in December 1929. But her father took months to get around to the chore of registering her. He was supposed to christen her Julia, but when he eventually went to the registrar, months after the birth, both of them were drunk, and the registrar wrote down the date of registration on the birth certificate, instead of the date of birth. So my mother always celebrated her birthday on 5 December, not on 16 February, when her birth had been erroneously registered. Her father got the name wrong, too, since it had been agreed that she would be known as Julia, but he forgot to write that on the form, so the birth certificate gave only her secondary names, Bridget Teresa, and the Julia was only added as her confirmation name when she was eleven. But that didn’t seem as odd as it might have seemed to me, since my father’s given name was George William, though he was only and always known as Bill. There were other oddnesses too, related to the time she had spent in India as a missionary, and a vagueness about the relevant dates. When clues or hints were dropped – my wife Miranda, in the aftermath of a conversation with one of my cousins at a family wedding, speculated that my mother must be older than she said because her younger brother was about to have his seventieth birthday – I reacted with irritation. Her informant must have been drunk. I’d seen my mother’s passport, I had a copy of her birth certificate. I knew how old she was.

  I suppose what all this boils down to is, my mother didn’t want to tell me, and I didn’t want to know. I could tell there were Keep Out signs around areas of her life, and I was happy to keep out. As a child, your parents seem such fixed and immutable beings that it never occurs to you that they are living their lives too. Some of this perhaps is protective: you protect them from your curiosity and you protect yourself also. There seems to be a built-in limit to what you want to know about your parents. Then, later in life, as you become a grown-up yourself, you are increasingly curious about those other grown-ups, who you know better than anyone else but also, in many ways, don’t really know at all. We react to our parents so much as parents that it’s easy to forget that they are also human beings. When I was younger I had absolutely no idea whatsoever about my parents’ lives; it would barely have occurred to me that either of them actually had a life. That was the degree of ignorance, half chosen, half imposed, with which I looked at them.

  *

  One of the things I have noticed about my novels, in the course of writing this book, is that they all concern people who can’t quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives. The narrative they give about themselves is broken or damaged. It’s not so much that they are ‘unreliable narrators’ – a term which I’ve always thought, at this point in history, is wildly naïve, since it implies the existence of an opposite thing, the reliable narrator, in whom no one any longer believes. My narrators aren’t unreliable in that sense, but they all tell stories about themselves which have pieces missing, because they can’t bear to tell the whole story. They are not liars but they can’t tell the whole truth. I’ve come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable life stories comes from my parents, and especially from my mother. I grew up with a sense that there was another, fuller, darker narrative looming behind the various shorter stories she told so well and so funnily.

  * That was my mother’s version. Others in the family agree that Molly Gunnigan, my grandmother, could write a mean letter – a ‘stinker’ was the family term. But they say that the mechanism worked a bit differently. My cousin Siobhán put it like this: ‘The thing is, Mam would get cross about something, and she would sit down and pen a letter, and it would say all these terrible things, and then she would go down to the letter box and put it in and that would be the end of it as far as she was concerned. It would be a kind of explosion, it was her way of letting off steam. And then it was over. Of course the trouble was two days later someone would go downstairs and find this terrible thing waiting for them on the doormat and whereas Mam would regard it by now as something that was in the past, done and dusted, the person getting the letter would be inclined to feel differently.’

  † Thanks to searchable online Bibles, I now know that this was my mother’s riff on Jeremiah 8:22.

  When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in me. Behold the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people because of them that dwell in a far country: Is not the Lord in Zion? Is not her king in her? Why have they provoked me to anger with their graven images, and with strange vanities? The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the hurt of the daughter of my people I am hurt; I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?

  I admire my mother for deploying the prophet Jeremiah to eulogise Tio Pepe sherry.

  LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO

  1

  Julia Immaculata Gunnigan was born on 5 December 1920 at Lurgan, Kilkelly, in the county of Mayo in the West of Ireland. That might sound like fairly straightforward information, but for reasons which will become clear it isn’t, at least not to me. Julia’s true name and birthday were things I found out only after she died. If there was a special typeface for things my mother didn’t tell me, the next hundred-odd pages of this book would be almost entirely in that face.

  Julia was the first child of Patrick Gunnigan, a farmer, and his wife Molly, whose maiden name was Waldron. Julia was baptised on 8 December at the parish church in Aghamore, three and a half miles from home. The day of her baptism was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception – hence her middle name, Immaculata.

  The Gunnigans and the Waldrons have an unsummarisably complicated family tree. It is intermarriage that makes the chart of relationships so difficult to unpick. For instance, Pat Gunnigan, my mother’s father, was the son of John Gunnigan, who had two sisters, both of whom married men called John Waldron. The resulting family tree resembles those of European royal families or sub-atomic physics, and only one man, my uncle John Gunnigan, is known to understand it. Suffice it to say that at the time of my mother’s birth, this branch of the Gunnigans were, and had been for some years, farmers, with a holding of about a hundred acres at Lurgan. The farm is now run by my cousin Pat, who like me is the great-great grandson of the first Gunnigan known to have lived there. That man, Tim (known as Thaig Mór, ‘Big Tim’), built in 1873 the house which is still the Gunnigan family home. At the time of Julia’s birth the house had no running water and no electricity.

  Mayo is a character in this story. Mayo, maigh eo in Irish, means ‘the plain of the yew trees’, a name that is romantic and evocative and bears no relation to the present-day reality. Basically, Mayo is a bog. In case you’re wondering why Mayo is so boggy, I asked a plant expert, who happens to be a palaeobotany expert and archaeologist and also my cousin Siobhán. Apparently it’s because Mayo used to be completely covered in forest – hence, ‘the plain of the yew trees’. (Though they weren’t all yew trees; yew would have been chosen for the name because it had strong magical and ritual associations. In reality most of the lost forest was oak.) During the Bronze Age the trees were cut down to make fires to clear land for farming. So no more trees. Since forest catches 70 per cent of the rain that falls on it, deforestation leads to the creation of bogs, which are composed of dead plants that don’t rot because they are soaking wet and are trapped under other dead plan
ts. So Mayo is a bog because people made it one. The poor quality of the soil is a dominant fact of life here. Bogs are not good for growing much of anything except peat for the fire.

  There are patches of beautiful scenery along the Mayo coast, and one spectacularly desolate area in the north-west of the county, out past Belmullet, where you drive for what feels like hours of bog to get to a Neolithic settlement called Céide (pronounced Cagey) Fields, one of the bleakest and most remote-feeling places I have ever been to. The Stone Age settlers who lived there five thousand years ago depended on the cattle they raised; something that the Céide Fields Visitor Centre points out to visitors in a note which states that ‘cattle raised on standing grass are still the most important element in the Irish economy’. There can’t be too many places on the planet with that degree of economic continuity. But this continuity also has its post-modern aspects. Near the Gunnigan home is a place called Ballyhaunis, as sleepy and homogeneous a Mayo town as could possibly be imagined – albeit with a pub where they serve the best pint of Guinness I’ve ever had. But Ballyhaunis also has a mosque, built because Knock Airport opened a market for the export of halal meat to the Middle East, and it was far more economical to do the halal slaughtering in situ. So the demand for halal meat created a supply of halal slaughtermen, which led to the opening of a mosque to accommodate their religious needs. Being imam of the Ballyhaunis mosque must be one of the Muslim world’s odder jobs.

  I’ve come to love the landscape of Mayo, and the other kinds of middling Irish landscape I associate with it. This isn’t the Ireland that photographs so beautifully and about which people bang on endlessly: the Burren or the Giant’s Causeway, the Ring of Kerry or the coves of Cork or the Twelve Bens of Connemara or the cliffs of Moher in Clare. It is a landscape that doesn’t look or feel like anything much – it feels like nowhere in particular. And because of the slow-moving traffic and poor, single-lane roads, it takes for ever to cross: as an Irish friend of mine says, you look at the map and things seem close together, but then when you’re driving across the midlands you realise that Ireland is actually the biggest country in the world.

  There is another way, though, in which Ireland is the biggest country in the world. Irish place names are immensely specific and connect directly to a past in which every feature of the landscape, every hillock or field, had a sense of story and memory attached. Brian Friel captures this in his great play Translations, in which the characters describe the incarnate specificity of the Irish landscape. Imagine if every place near you was called The Hill, or The Field, or Big Oak, or Narrow Ford – it gives everywhere in Ireland an extraordinary sense of inhabited density. (Before the Famine, Ireland was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, with a population at its peak of almost ten million; today it’s only 40 per cent of that.) Ireland is dense, crowded, full, written. Everywhere in it is somewhere. And yet so much of it feels and looks like nowhere; and that somewhere/nowhere feeling is, for me, at its strongest in the anonymous bogs and near-bogs of inland Mayo.

  At the time of my mother’s birth and for some generations before, the standard smallholding in this area was twenty-one acres. The land would usually have been rented by a peasant from a landlord, who in this part of Mayo would have been from the Beatty family. In some places twenty-one acres is a good small-size holding on which to raise a family and grow a variety of crops. Here in boggy Mayo, it means marginal subsistence farming. Life here is, and for generations has been, hard. The Gunnigans, with a holding of a hundred acres, regarded themselves as relatively well-off.

  The great issue was, and always had been, the land. Memories here were long, and many of them concerned grievances to do with the land and with the aftermath of the Famine, which had begun in 1848 – not all that long ago, in Irish terms. I have a photograph of one of my mother’s younger sisters standing with a neighbour who was born during the Famine. The years that followed were bitterly hard, and the accumulated grievances found a particular focus on the matter of evictions. These reached a peak in 1850, during which twenty thousand families (a total of 104,000 people) were evicted from their farms for non-payment of rent. Emigration raged during these and subsequent decades. Mayo was a birthplace of the Land League, the body formed to fight for what came to be called ‘Tenant Right’ – mordantly, and not inaccurately, summarised by the dark-hearted Lord Palmerston as ‘Landlord Wrong’. The League lobbied for the Three Fs – ‘free sale, fair rent, fixity of tenure’ – and it did so through a mixture of legal, semi-legal, and illegal tactics, one of which has passed into the language as Boycott, after the estate supervisor whose job was to collect rents around Lough Mask, about thirty miles from Lurgan. This was the period known as the Land War. Julia grew up hearing about the importance of the struggle for land reform, and about the heroic involvement of various family members. One of them, her grandmother Nora Drudy, had as a girl spent a month in jail for scattering sheep that the sheriff and police were trying to seize from a neighbour’s land during a rent strike in 1887. Nora hid a sheepdog under her skirts and then let it go to disperse the livestock. On her return from prison in Dublin she was greeted with bonfires; she is a family heroine to this day. The political was in this sense local and specific: it was about the right to own the land you farmed, and had farmed for generations – the objection to colonial rule flowed from, and grew out of, specific local injustices.

  Julia was born in 1920, during the Anglo-Irish War. In that year the Black and Tans, irregular paramilitaries attached to the British army, were deployed, and their indiscriminate sectarian violence was starting to turn the tide of the conflict in favour of the rebels. The reality was that the British could not lose a military conflict, but they could lose a political one. They could lose both the consent of the governed and the will to govern. This, broadly speaking, is what happened. On 21 November, two weeks before Julia was born, Michael Collins’s team of gunmen assassinated fourteen undercover British agents in Dublin, and the same day the Black and Tans fired into a crowd at Croke Park, the main Gaelic football stadium in Dublin. The resulting introduction of martial law was the beginning of the end for British rule. By 1921 the war of independence was over, to be succeeded by the civil war between the followers of Eamon De Valera, who rejected the terms of the treaty with the British (especially the oath of loyalty to the crown), and those of Michael Collins, who accepted the treaty on the basis that it was the best – not to mention the only – available deal. The consequences were played out over the subsequent decades of Irish history, but in the meantime, for Irish small farmers, there was a much more important and more local outcome of these great events: the Land Commission, founded in 1923, began the process of giving 450,000 acres of land to the people who lived on it and worked it.

  In 1919 Patrick Gunnigan met a young woman called Molly Waldron. She was the oldest daughter of a relatively well-off local family, brought up in a house called Mount View in the village of Aghamore, three and a half miles from Lurgan. Her father was headmaster of the local primary school, and as such a figure of both means and respect: even when money was tight, the Waldrons had two servants. Molly’s father was the illegitimately descended grandson of the local landlords’ misbehaving scion, Dominic Beatty, who did not survive the experience of being sent to the Crimean war ‘to cool off’ (as my uncle puts it). By the standards of the time and place, the Beattys behaved well by Dominic’s illegitimately born daughter, letting her use the family surname and giving her some money; there may also have been continuing financial support. It should be said that Molly vigorously denied this. But even if there was, it would have alleviated the hardness of life rather than annulling it. Molly’s father was one of twelve surviving children, born to a woman (the illegitimate Beatty daughter) who was married at sixteen and dead, exhausted by childbirth, at forty-six.

  However the family was able to afford it, Molly went to Dublin to train and then work as a teacher. Unfortunately she failed an exam – her eyes were so bad she
couldn’t read the questions, according to family lore – and she was able to get only a so-so job in Dublin. When she came home for a holiday she was introduced to Patrick Gunnigan, her near neighbour and distant relative; they married on 5 November 1919.

  It would be a little too stark to say that Mary’s marriage to Pat constituted coming down in the world. A farmer of his scale was a figure of substance in rural Mayo. Besides, there was a streak of poetry in the Gunnigans, and a streak of high-mindedness too. On his mother’s side, Pat was a Greally, and no fewer than five of his Greally uncles were priests. One of them, Canon John Greally, was the parish priest at Knock, the important Catholic shrine not far from Lurgan.* Canon John had helped buy the land where the Knock Basilica and Pilgrimage Centre now stand, and the money with which he had done it had been made thanks to a brilliant investment in Courtaulds – hence, in nylon stockings. This was a family secret/family joke.

  Tim, Pat’s brother, had followed in the family tradition and become a priest too. He was the curate at Westport, on the Mayo coast. Father Tim was an intelligent man, fastidious and scholarly, with a clerically dry sense of humour. He was to rise to become a Papal Monsignor, a figure of some local importance, and one who never lost a tart edge. He may have shared the family’s political sympathies; after the Easter Rising in 1916, at which point he was a junior priest at Dunshaughlin, he cycled twenty miles to Dublin to provide spiritual comfort for the men facing execution. This was something he did not talk about.†