Considering he spent his adult life giving the staff at the Northern Irish Birth Registry premature arthritis, it’s surprising that my father was himself an only child. His mother’s name was Mary, and his father was a carpenter named Joseph (I know), and they lived in Belleek, County Fermanagh. My paternal grandfather died before I was born, and Granny O’Reilly when I was just two, after spending her final months in our family home. As a schoolmistress, Granny O’Reilly was a pillar of the community in Belleek, and my father tells stories of local men lining up to have their forms, applications or legal documents looked over and signed by her at a time when illiteracy was widespread.
The few photographs I possess of Granny O’Reilly show she was hard to age. It sometimes seems as though all Irish people from the past were born old and then proceeded to age like the pears you get in an all-night garage, accumulating freckles, liver spots and clicking noises at the bendy parts, achieving their final form by around the age of thirty-five. There are photos of my dad when he was seventeen and he already looks like a full-grown man. I’m thirty-five and dress like a toddler. When my father was a teenager, he looked as though he already had a pet name for his favourite stepladder. For older generations, this effect was even more pronounced. The photographic record shows that Granny O’Reilly began her life aged sixty-eight and proceeded to grow smaller and older from there. There are pictures of her with my father as a very small child, which logic dictates must place her in her thirties, and yet her wild hair and deadening glare present the steely mien of a woman many decades her senior. She was stern-faced with a shock of white hair and thick, scowl-prone eyebrows, which made her look like the sort of person who’d keep her arms folded on a trampoline. She was also my dad’s teacher throughout his primary education, a situation I don’t believe thrilled my shy and retiring father, and which added a certain frisson to the much-feared faux pas of calling your teacher Mum. In what seems like a cruel trap, any time he did accidentally make this fairly understandable lapse, he was upbraided for it in front of the whole class. By his actual mum.
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Daddy might have been, by instinct, a more stoical, less effusive father, which makes not just his parenting but the love with which he undertook it all the more impressive. He had a lot on his plate, so maybe it’s OK that he occasionally held up supermarkets with toilet roll purchases.
He is almost comically square, and has more odd ideas about the ways of the world than I can fit in one book. Focusing on, say, that time he had a row with my brother for bumping into him while they were riding dodgem cars – coining the memorable exclamation ‘They’re called dodgems, not crashems!’ – allows us to humanise him for ourselves and others. The fact that my father’s ideal bumper-car experience is one in which dozens of stone-faced children carefully evade each other in total silence can surely only add to the esteem in which he is regarded. Slack-jawed awe is the default reaction I get when I talk about my dad and what he did for us, and rightly so, but my dad hates this kind of sentimentality – and its close cousin, pity – more than he hates traffic wardens, or broccoli. Luckily, he has a ready stock of foibles ripe for us to tease him about. Like all older Irish men, he marries a high-minded rejection of all things modern with a near-chronic addiction to trash culture. My father will roll his eyes when I say ‘cool’, as if lingo that bleedingly hip is an insult to the martyred poets of Ireland, and yet five minutes later will tell me that Nick Knowles has gone country, and the new steel guitar album he debuted on Loose Women sounds a marked improvement on his last.
He knows, vaguely, what a high-five is, but his handle on the concept is so loose he once announced one with a tender, hopeful cry of ‘slap my hand high up in the air’, a declaration that has become something of a family motto. The Christmas before last, he announced, and demonstrated, his total ignorance of rock, paper, scissors, as either a term or concept, and subsequently refused to believe it was a known thing. He has a similar reluctance to accept the existence of the Easter Bunny, which he claims was only invented in the last few years. Stranger still, of course, are those phenomena that do not exist, but which he believes in with every fibre of his being. My father holds horses to be malevolent, because one stood on his foot when he was a boy – this despite living near horses for most of his life, not least the rotating cast of ponies that have been put to pasture in the field directly behind our house. He choked on a fishbone when he was quite small, and the experience so scarred him that we were all told fish was an incredibly dangerous foodstuff and should be eaten only in fillet, finger or nugget form, if at all. To serve someone fish with any or all of its skeleton intact is, to my father, roughly equivalent to feeding someone the contents of a Hoover bag.
Sometimes my father’s eccentricities bend the world around him, conforming to the strangeness of his own mind, as when he became irate at a slow driver on the motorway and kept calling him a clown, only to overtake him and find that the driver was indeed a man in full clown make-up. And then there are his passions. My father’s idea of heaven is to stand in the aisles of a hardware store with a list of impossibly fiddly screws to gather, preferably so disparately spaced he can survey the entire shop’s contents for eternity. Throughout my childhood, any trip out of the house would usually feature an unjustifiable detour to a B&Q or garden centre, from which he would emerge with six hundred glow-in-the-dark cable ties, a box of satirical gnomes and enough random pig iron to keep his available stock of nuts and bolts hovering at an even two hundred thousand.
At my age, my father had five children and lived in a home he had surveyed, designed and built from scratch himself. I pay half my wage to live in a Hackney breadbin and feel like Bear Grylls when I sharpen a pencil with a knife. My dad drafted, constructed and installed septic tanks for his own homes, and for water treatment facilities all over Northern Ireland. If my sink were to get blocked right now, I would call the police. But beside all this, possibly the greatest achievement of my father’s parenting was letting us know that we were loved, and moreover giving us the knowledge that to love – and be loved – was the most important of things. This at a time when most of the men we knew couldn’t have found the will or way to express their feelings if their lives depended on it. Looking back, some of their lives literally did. I’ve always felt that we, his horrible, mocking children, take so much joy from making fun of him, telling tales of miserly standoffs in supermarkets, or overly zealous lectures on toilet roll application, because it punctures the worshipful regard in which we hold him, and brings him down to our level. But we love him to the end of the world and back, and thankfully possess the ease with that love to tell him all the time, in between mercilessly teasing him.