As children, our family’s internal subdivisions were useful for keeping track of the different age groups. Like all class systems, it was instituted by those at the top, ostensibly as a shorthand for keeping things in order, while also conferring a certain irrefutable status on those who invented it. Being a Big One was just different from being a Middle One, no matter how old you got. Their seniority travelled with them, as if it were a ladder of power pulled up behind them as they climbed, out of reach to those who followed. Sinead, Dara and Shane were aristocrats, custodians of an unearned but unimpeachable moral authority that was rarely challenged or even considered, least of all by me, a Wee One through and through. Each of them had already left home for university by the time I started secondary school, an absence that only added to their cachet. The Big Ones had, after all, lived through that odd period of time when our family was relatively small, and watched first hand as it ballooned. To me this meant they might as well have been present at the birth of the Universe.
The Middle Ones, though only slightly younger in real terms, lacked this perspective, and so we held them in less awe. But they also knew the game was rigged. Unbeknownst to us at the bottom, at some point closer to the dawn of time the Big Ones had told Maeve and Orla that after a certain point – say, finishing primary school, or making your confirmation – a Middle One would progress to being a Big One. In reality, as each milestone came and went it became clearer and clearer that the divides were impermeable, and no such social mobility was possible. By the time this betrayal was realised, the Big-Middle-Wee heuristic had been intractably established. So much so, in fact, that when the Wee Ones reached those same milestones seven years later, it was with no concept that such a promotion was even being denied. Fuelled by resentment toward their social betters, the Middle Ones thus contrived deep distinctions between themselves and those below. In so far as four members of a family arbitrarily grouped together by age can be said to have an ethos, theirs might have been something like ‘we are not Wee Ones’. Maeve and Orla set the rota in which our daily labours were enshrined. Dearbhaile, closest in age to the Wee Ones, and perhaps nervous this would place her position at risk, was particularly vigilant, and took to policing our bedtimes with the iron fist of a prison camp guard. These were delineated in increments, informally attached to the Australian soap operas they followed each weeknight. It was generally agreed that even the dewiest babe-in-arms should be permitted to stay up until the day-glo charms of Neighbours finished at 6 p.m. Staying up to watch the slightly more self-serious Home and Away was a privilege enjoyed only by those over twelve. The true Rubicon for emotional maturity was being allowed to watch Heartbreak High, which owed its place as our natural watershed to the fact that some of its characters had nose rings and disliked school. At each of these shows’ end there would be an audible swivel of heads, as attention was brought to bear on whosoever had not yet decamped to their respective rooms for the evening. Were one of us Wee Ones bold enough to stay up later than was allowed, it was presumed we would be murdered, probably by Dearbhaile. Perhaps only Mairead didn’t seem especially bothered by the ins and outs of who was where or what, maybe because she was technically the Middle Child and free from such insecurities. Although one does wonder if her placing merits the traditional distinction, when middle here means being the sixth of eleven.
For our part, being a Wee One meant being subject to a sort of benign servitude, but also free from the politicking that came from finding oneself so close to and yet so far from real power. We enjoyed a lessening of responsibility born of the fact that we were more likely to be considered, essentially, giant babies than functioning people, and this well into our older years.
We also benefited in another, less immediately obvious way. It’s inarguable that my father relaxed with age, gradually loosening the grip in which he held his children as each managed to survive school trips, hospital visits, exam schedules and nights out without being maimed, murdered or featured in newspaper articles in which neighbours said we ‘always seemed perfectly normal before this’. As younger parents, Mammy and Daddy adhered to a strict code that was largely absent by the time I was growing up. In fact, the televisual rubric I just described would have been unthinkable while my mother was still alive. She was not a lover of television, unlike my father, who loves the medium so much I’m pretty sure he can still see the 5USA logo when he shuts his eyes. It’s likely that Neighbours became the staple of our TV diet since it was originally the only show that Mammy permitted us to watch, and even then only at lunch time during school holidays. It was supplemented by Glenroe, a gently diverting rural melodrama that ran on Sunday nights in Ireland for two decades on a budget roughly equivalent to a tube of Pringles. For me and every other Irish child, it was the last thing we were allowed to watch each weekend. Once we heard the strangled fiddle music that brought each episode to a close, we’d have to face the trudge towards bed, and the school week ahead. Which meant we’d sit through thirty minutes of crag-faced people in wellies having affairs near barns just to keep our weekend alive.
My parents had been stricter in other, more meaningful ways too. The Big Ones describe their adolescent years as if they were parented by the Stasi. Each tells tales of my dad sitting in his car outside teen discos, waiting for the last chime of music to sound. At this, he would blare his horn until they marched into his Volvo, red-faced and sullen, for their 9:30 p.m. ride home. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I was pretty much allowed do what I wanted, and regularly stayed out all night and into the small hours of the next day. So long as I was bright and chipper, and my school results didn’t suffer, nothing was said. No doubt this was partly due to my father becoming less fearful of our independence as successive waves of his children took to their own two feet without disaster. But it’s also likely that the thrill of acting as our private taxi service was beginning to dim.
Some things about having such a large family are stranger than people even think to suggest. I remember standing with my father in the kitchen of Nazareth House convent, waiting on them to deliver the truly gigantic turkey they cooked for us every Christmas. Officially, they were cooking the self-same large turkey we had brought over, since our own oven was too small to cook something big enough to feed the entire clan. But, in practice, they gave us a brand-new, much larger turkey, bearing little resemblance to our own. The turkey we were handed by Sister Angela, which had gone in the size of a ruck-sack, was now the size of a Fiat 500, resplendent in garnish and trimmings. It was the kind of thing you could imagine being taken out of the oven by a forklift, rather than a kindly nun, but that’s underestimating Sister Angela, a lovely, burly woman from the west of Ireland who had a smile that could melt glass and forearms that bent steel. She was effectively Popeye in a habit, and seemed to enjoy nothing on Earth more than preparing us a turkey that, once eaten, we could happily strip to the bones and convert into a back bedroom.
This subterfuge was, of course, never directly acknowledged. The nuns knew my father to be a proud and dignified man, and for us to mention they’d been switching the bird every year might have made things awkward. They were soft on my dad not just because he was a lovely man who had done so much for us, but also because he donated so much of his time and effort to the community. Despite working full time as an engineer, and seeing to the upkeep, recreation and extracurricular activities of his eleven children, he also served on the parish vocations council and as the school’s treasurer, and was always on hand to perform any number of other duties, like recording school events on his camcorder so they could be distributed to parents.