I barely made an appearance in the eight-minute final cut. I was in a few group shots, and one heavily staged sequence in which we were filmed walking out of our front door on the way to school. As I’ve said, no one used the front door of our house except visiting priests or doorknockers, so this had a perverse ring of falsity I found incredibly thrilling. Here we were, acting. As ourselves, of course, but acting nonetheless. This brief walk to school in our uniforms – donned on a day when we weren’t even in school – struck a note of duplicity I found so exciting I reckoned I would never get tired of it, no matter how many BAFTAs I won. Unfortunately, my only other appearance of note was the one for which the show became notorious to all who watched it, in our family and out: a lamentable sequence in which Conall and I are shown kicking a ball around the garden. This wouldn’t have been too bad, except a combination of factors made it seem like a home movie shot in Chernobyl. For one thing, it was a particularly dismal December day – like I told the crew, shot choices are everything when you’re chasing the light – so both Conall and I were suffused with a grainy, greyish tinge. On top of that, we were wearing scuffed-up little dress shoes that suggested we probably didn’t have trainers, most likely because none had been dropped into our garden that week by a NATO helicopter. Lastly, there was the fact that it was not a football we were kicking, but a rugby ball, entirely deflated. This we paddled toward each other while attempting not to gurn at the camera, giving us the gormless effect of two rain-soaked peasant children taking a break from our labours by cheerily kicking an oblong leather bag filled with potato peel. It seemed as though a factory horn might at any moment call us back in for eight more hours at the smelting plant.
Friends of my father were quick to point out that we had been captured drinking out of mugs with no handles, and that a poem written by Caoimhe had been inelegantly fixed to the wall with masking tape rather than the more classy Blu Tack. These were, it must be understood, merely those comments they made to our faces. Lord knows what people said among themselves.
Watching it back now, twenty-five years later, I’m surprised we were so embarrassed since it was handled with a great deal more sensitivity than memory allows. The hosts were sympathetic and serious, and my dad conducted himself with incredible dignity and eloquence, not least when he described breaking down upon seeing my mother’s dead body for the first time. He’s remarkably comfortable in front of camera – my Hollywood biographers will likely say that’s where I got it from – and is incredibly moving in conversation, even maintaining his composure as he describes leaving the hospital room where she lay and re-entering it again on the off chance that something, somehow, would be different when he returned. These were memories I can’t remember him sharing, probably because I was too young to understand them. By the time I was old enough, the tape of the show had become an object of fear and horror in our house. Not because of the feelings evoked by his thoughtful words, but because we couldn’t bear to see ourselves portrayed as somehow poor or pitiful.
The eight-minute segment was part of an episode that was mostly taken up with a piece lamenting the price of school-books. Our part done, we watched as the show moved on. A series of statistics were read out about just how massively the price of these books had increased in a few short years. A minister came on afterwards, declaring that the situation was indeed something that gave her grave concern, and said she would look into it.
10
Jeremy
I’m often asked, if my mother had survived, would my parents have gone on to have more children? I’m reluctant to say no, since I’m sure every last one of my parents’ friends lost good money betting any of the first ten would be the end of it. On the other hand, maybe it’s for the best that they stopped when they did, since our minibus only held thirteen, and strapping children to the roof wouldn’t have done for long journeys. Certainly not the longest trip we ever took as a family, one considered so perilous that my father arranged the blessing of the caravan. With God’s good grace on our side, we set off in the big white minibus for Spain to visit Aileen, my mother’s sister, pulling the caravan behind us.
The blessing was probably a good idea, since after a few years of steady service the wheels had actually come off the old caravan. Daddy had been driving it home when the reassuringly steady flump-a-dump behind him morphed into an altogether less reassuring metallic shriek, followed by an angle-grinder’s flurry of sparks, forcing an immediate abandonment of his now decidedly less mobile cargo in a field just outside St Johnston. The ABI Award Superstar we got in its place was much larger, extending our full bus and trailer length to over forty feet, just the thing you want for a 3400-mile round trip taking in all of France, the Pyrenees, a coast-hugging jaunt across Spain’s northern shores, and then back again.
Carting eleven children across Europe by road would be difficult in most circumstances, but doing so in a minibus dragging a huge caravan while coming off the back of a serious bereavement is a frankly insane proposition. We had travelled before, but not much lately, and maybe it was this urge for a change of scenery that drove my father to make the trip – that, and a sense of giving us something to look forward to, to make us feel excited and happy and young.
We were making the trip without Sinead, who was recovering from appendicitis and would follow us on. My eldest brothers, Shane and Dara, sat up front next to my dad. Behind that there was one bank of four seats, another bank of three, and then two banks of two at the very back where the four Wee Ones sat facing each other, in the manner of one of those drop helicopters you see in action movies. I say four, but there were really five of us, since we were joined on this jaunt by a special guest, Conall’s imaginary friend, Jeremy.
Jeremy had appeared a few months earlier, almost always in the context of any child-height mischief for which Conall, the baby of the family at three years old, was being blamed. Jeremy had eaten scones that were left out. Jeremy had stood on the dog’s tail. Jeremy had stolen the contents of a coin dish in my godmother’s house and placed them in Conall’s tiny little trouser pockets so that he jangled when he walked bow-legged out to the car like a penguin who’d shat himself. Jeremy’s presence was so fascinating that we didn’t so much tolerate as support and promote the idea of him wholeheartedly. None of us had any experience of seeing someone interact with an imaginary friend, and it turned out to be enormously entertaining. It also seemed to embolden Conall to do naughty things, which was always fun to watch, and even more so when he got caught and would insist – enraged – that ‘Germany did it’. Conall was one of the few people unlucky enough to have acquired an imaginary friend whose name he couldn’t pronounce.
Our father manned the cassette player, and the soundtrack included Irish Dad classics like Christy Moore, ABBA, Clannad and Planxty, supplemented by odder touchstones like the Carpenters’ back catalogue and, weirdly, the original cast recordings for Chess and Cats. These we would listen to on repeat until he could be talked into ceding control to Dara, who, due to his place in the passenger seat, could occasionally throw on U2, REM or the Housemartins. I can’t think of those long trips in the minibus without hearing the strains of ‘Memory’ sung by Elaine Page, or the Carpenters’ ‘Superstar’, borne on the blue-grey wisps of cigar smoke that emanated from the driver’s seat for the entire journey.
The smoke was a constant of my childhood. Aside from a brief break in the late eighties, my father smoked several packs of Hamlet mid-sized cigars every day, until he finally gave up a few months before his fiftieth birthday in 1997. A rough cough caused him to take some time off work, which was entirely unprecedented. This clearly spooked him – missing work, I think, more than the sickness itself – and without any fanfare he quit his thirty-five-year habit and never had so much as a puff again. Back in 1992, however, the cigar smoke permeated every object in our house, and especially the fabric seats in the minibus. It’s likely they also gave his eleven children a not unpleasant, woody aroma we probably couldn’t smell off ourselves. This smell was only momentarily pleasant, however, since it quickly grew stale and acrid on everything it touched, which was, well, everything. This could also have been a contributor to the frequent, horrible bouts of car sickness which beset several of us, most especially Fionnuala and Dearbhaile, both so inclined to vomiting on road trips that travelling with them was as precarious as cycling through a minefield carrying a large, open vat of parmesan soup in your lap. I think Fionnuala’s record was the time she was violently ill before we’d even reached the end of our drive. Even after wiping, bagging, cleaning and airing for a few minutes, it put a rather unsavoury pall over the next few hours’ travel.