Our bedrooms were nicely turned out, and after a few chops and changes as the family grew, their order of occupants froze after my mother’s death, so that we all stayed in the same place until we packed off for university and left home for good. Most of them have since been done up, so they no longer bear the bunk beds and decals that I can list from memory: the posters in my sisters’ room declaring Fionnuala’s ardent love for the unlikely pairing of Liverpool player Jason McAteer and Saracen from Gladiators; the glow-in-the-dark Casper the Friendly Ghost stickers that were released as part of a cereal box promotion for the 1995 film and somehow ended up a permanent feature of Dearbhaile’s bed, despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, she had no particularly deep commitment to said film.
Because we all did quite well in school, people tend to assume my dad was a taskmaster. Friends confess they thought he must have been the pushy type; a field marshal who kept us in a perpetual state of readiness ahead of the next impromptu pop quiz. ‘Oh, I’ll pass you the butter,’ he might say at the breakfast table, ‘but only if you first tell me how accurate it would be to describe the decline of the crusader states as being primarily due to the quality of Saladin’s leadership in the years 1169–87.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. He hoped we would do well, of course, but I don’t think he ever knew what subjects I was doing, nor who any of my teachers were. One of the few benefits of being the widowed father of eleven children was that when he refused to perform the mundane and pointless obligations expected of other parents, nobody dared object. It was customary for teachers to send every student home with a daybook describing their behaviour, to be signed by a parent every night. In it would be written comments like ‘Séamas kept whistling the theme music to Pet Rescue’ or ‘Séamas was sarcastic to the school dog’ and your parent was supposed to read these and admonish you, and then sign the thing so your teacher knew that it was sorted. Loads of boys in my class just signed their own, but I think I was the only person who was actively encouraged to do so by my father, who simply lacked the necessary bandwidth to care about such details, let alone to do so for eight or nine children every single night. I did forge his signature for a while, but pretty soon I just stopped signing it altogether. My teacher never minded because, well, who wants to be the one bothering Joe O’Reilly? This suited my dad, who had several thousand other things to worry about, fine, and it most certainly suited me.
What Daddy might have lacked in a minute-by-minute, hands-on approach to my schooling, he made up for with more practical acts of ingenuity. He deliberately raised us in an incredibly uneventful part of the countryside, with nothing to do for miles around.
I was too young to remember the time the IRA blew up the customs hut at the top of our field, and would entertain fantasies, both fond and frequent, of more explosions coming our way to break the tedium. It didn’t seem fair that the city types had all the fun. Even a kidnapping or a chase would have been welcome, for God’s sake. It would be some years before we even accrued the few neighbours we have there now, so at weekends, if we weren’t grumbling as we helped Daddy cut grass or fix gutters, we would loll about in states of performative boredom that elicited from him only new, increasingly arcane tasks for us. Unless you wanted to spend four hours of a Saturday polishing the TV aerial, or re-labelling paint cans, it was better to try to look busy. It was here that one of my dad’s many moments of parenting genius proved mutually beneficial. He never told us to read; he had just built bookshelves in every room and filled them with a dazzling array of – mostly terrible – books, thereby ensuring that there would always be something to retreat to when boredom set in. And boredom – deep, crippling boredom – was pretty much a fixed state for a lot of my upbringing. I spent my childhood so bored, so paralytically intediated by my surroundings, that I found time to run through every bookshelf in our house until I went cross-eyed.
I read my brothers’ archive of slim paperbacks featuring ladies in corsets holding pistols or ladies in metal bras wielding swords; sports capers with names like GOAL! or NET! or HEADER!, the plots of which invariably involved an oft-unused sub from a broken home coming on to score the decisive strike in a big final. There were also bizarrely highbrow works by Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Thomas Pynchon, and Stanis?aw Lem, but with no literary background I’m not sure that I was even aware that there was such a thing as a bad book. There were simply books I had read and those I hadn’t. Early on I remember someone telling me that even if you read a book a week for your entire life, and lived for eighty years and change, your lifetime haul would still only be about four thousand. I set out to beat that number
My first loves were the Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton collections peppered through every room, and the Reader’s Digest versions of popular classics. Later there came the bullet-stopping King and Barker novels that formed an early taste for horror and the macabre. After these, I began working my way through my older sisters’ shelves full of Judy Blume, Francine Pascal and, latterly, Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper. Polo would be my first introduction to the world of sex. At the tender age of eleven I was highly intrigued by Cooper’s descriptions of posh people bonking while wearing tight white trousers and receiving very fancy fax-machine messages. But many of the books in the girls’ rooms were propaganda they had been made to bring home from school. I have very strong memories of one book about a ballerina with an eating disorder, and another that was ostensibly a manual for teenage mothers but was actually written to scare young women into not being teenage mothers while also explicitly asserting that any form of contraception was evil. Catholic education required that girls fear the prospect of pregnancy above all things, while creating the perfect condition of ignorance which would result in just that. Having said that, none of my sisters ever became a teenage mother.
In Caoimhe and Fionnuala’s rooms I found slightly more varied material for the younger lady. I was particularly taken with girls’ comics from this time: Jackie, Bunty, Mandy & Judy, and the majestically uneventful Twinkle. Arriving in from Mass and eating Sunday dinner, I’d find myself filled (figuratively) with the Holy Spirit and (literally) beef gravy, and get a few pages in before full-bellied sleep would grab me for an hour or so in its downy claws. I’d wake up groggy and bloated, halfway through a particularly riveting edition of ‘Nurse Nancy’.
Finally, I’d end up in my dad’s room, stumbling through his airport potboilers. My dad was an avid reader, particularly of news and politics, but when it came to fiction he was a stolid supporter of the page-turner, and was rarely seen without a thriller of varying quality. He loves John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell and Robert Ludlum, and I have hazy memories of him reading template special-forces action thrillers that always had titles that seemed as though they were formed from random pairings of cool-sounding words, like The Decagon Opprobrium Crisis, Diagnosis: Parabellum or Midnight at the Prolepsis Confabulation.
Since my father loved thrillers, and is a proud Catholic, I wondered if he’d take to Dan Brown’s preposterous blasphemy puzzle book, The Da Vinci Code. We were all delighted to discover he loved it and was able to park his tribal affinity in favour of the Catholic hierarchy long enough to become absorbed in the book’s mixture of Vatican intrigue and what amounted to a series of remedial word scrambles. He was especially enamoured of the book’s trip through the machinations of Opus Dei, singled out by Dan Brown as the shadowy puppet-masters of the papacy, a diabolical cadre of spies, archivists and killer monks enlisted to keep the church’s secrets through deception, intrigue and as few words as possible containing two or more syllables.
‘It does make you think, you know,’ he announced, incorrectly, to the sitting room one sleepy Sunday, licking a finger and turning a page with relish. Such was my father’s fondness for this ripping yarn that his suspicions regarding Opus Dei remained undiminished even when we reminded him that it was the self-same organisation he’d been a member of since 1983. ‘That’s a different thing,’ he said absent-mindedly, before returning to the bad anagrams and short sentences that had held the book-reading world in thrall. One should never, I presume, let facts get in the way of a good clergy.
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