My mother stopped working as a waitress and started working as a cleaner in Craigavon hospital, where the pay was better. Her interview had been a doddle.
‘How would you clean this room?’ the panel had asked her.
She’d thought about it for a second.
‘I’d start at the top and work my way down.’
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‘Après vous,’ said a consultant to my mother in a lift once, and then looked at her. ‘But of course you wouldn’t know what that means.’
Having left school at 15 with no qualifications, she took evening classes in Lurgan Tech and passed her National Higher Certificate. She started driving lessons. Two days after passing her test first time, she steered a small, round, black car into the driveway we never used. My brother and I stared down from our lofty vantage point in front of the living-room window.
‘Mummy’s bought a taxi,’ Conor explained.
Our new car, a vintage Morris Minor, was a tight fit. If you lifted the mat at your feet, you could watch the river of tarmac flowing away beneath you through holes in the body work, and it didn’t always start, but we wouldn’t have to catch the bus to Lurgan anymore, whose hot seats stuck to my legs, and could even drive all the way up to Belfast if we wanted to.
Belfast meant Turf Lodge, where Granny and Grandad and Aunt Donnell lived. On the way, we passed murals, the entire sides of houses given over to flags, fancy lettering, an old-fashioned guy in a wig, men in masks with guns. It was like driving through a gallery.
‘Who’s that on the white horse?’ I asked.
‘William of Orange,’ said my father.
‘William of Orange?’ My brother and I fell about laughing on the back seat.
‘From the Royal House of Orange in Holland,’ said my father, making no sense.
‘William of apple…’
‘William of banana…’
The house in Turf Lodge was freezing, but by late afternoon Granny would light the open fire in the living-room, which Grandad would feed with buckets of coal and slack from the coal shed, and which kept me occupied for hours. With no central heating, the fire was the house’s most vital feature. It had a back burner for hot water, and its own array of fireside accessories: curved tongs, a dinky shovel, a black-bristled brush for sweeping the hearth.
As soon as the fire was lit, the sofa would be pulled forwards from under the window and we’d sit directly in front of its glow, our faces burning, a draught at our backs, chewing our way through boxes of Roses or Quality Street. When we threw the wrappers on the fire, they’d hiss and flame brightly for a few seconds, then perish.
Sometimes our parents left us in Turf Lodge for the weekend, gallivanted off to London or Paris to take photographs of each other posing on bridges. Urbane. Beautifully dressed. Approaching their thirties with slightly more cash in their pockets and a warm breeze in their hair.
On Saturdays after breakfast we’d go out with Granny to get her ‘messages’. Messages to whom? Secret messages? Messages in a bottle? Messages in code? ‘Messages’, it turned out, just meant going to the shops and buying the kind of contraband – white sliced bread, ham, cornflakes, crinkle-cut chips – we weren’t allowed at home.
After riots, the pavements would be strewn with bricks Granny picked her way through expertly. It was hard at first to know the shops were shops. They had heavy-duty metal shutters, like prisons or police stations. Unlike Rathmore, Turf Lodge also had soldiers, roaring round corners in armoured trucks or padding about on patrol. Some of them wore netting over their helmets and camouflage paint on their cheeks, which in broad daylight seemed faintly ridiculous and over the top.
Aunt Donnell would call round in the afternoons after her cleaning shift at the City Hospital. (It was years before I realised the cutlery in Granny’s house had CHB stamped on the handle because Donnell had stolen it.) We loved Aunt Donnell. She sang us gruesome songs.
There was a washerwoman and she lived in the woods
Weile Weile Waila
There was a washerwoman and she lived in the woods
Down by the river Saile
She sang with forceful, gleeful spite. Conor and I sat together on the sofa, gripped.
She had a baby three months old
Weile Weile Waila
She had a baby three months old
Down by the river Saile
We knew what was coming next, but it was still a delightful shock. Every time. The venom of it.
She stuck a penknife in the baby’s back
Weile Weila Waila
She stuck a penknife in the baby’s back
Down by the river Saile
And then came all the blood, and the washing that couldn’t wash the blood away, the soaked mops and cloths (she was a washerwoman after all) and the river itself running to blood and the policemen coming to hang her and her turning into a ghost and walking the riverbank forever, not sorry in the slightest but petulant and thwarted and wanting to murder more.
I sucked the ends of my plaits.
‘I knew a girl like you who did that,’ said Aunt Donnell. ‘She died and when they cut her open on the operating table, her stomach was jammed up with hair.’
I sucked my thumb.
‘If you don’t stop sucking your thumb, I’m going to buy you a dummy tit.’
I didn’t know what a dummy tit was. I imagined some metal device, round, with ridged teeth, for slicing your thumb off.
In the evenings we watched television. The Les Dawson Show. The Two Ronnies. Little and Large. The weather forecast was problematic.
‘Look,’ I said once. ‘There’s Northern Ireland.’ And there it was, the six counties all on their own, taking up room. Green but eaten into by water along the right-hand side, the top Lough and the bottom Lough and the landlocked Lough in the middle wanting to join its friends. To the left, the map simply stopped. A man was sticking cut-out clouds all over it.
‘It isn’t Northern Ireland,’ said Granny.
‘Yes it is,’ I said, stating the obvious. ‘It’s where we live.’
‘It’s where we live alright, but it isn’t called Northern Ireland.’
My parents never called where we lived anything, but I knew where we lived was called Northern Ireland because that’s what they called it in school. We lived in Rathmore, Craigavon, Co Armagh, Northern Ireland. They’d been teaching us our address.
‘What’s it called then?’
‘It’s called the North of Ireland. Ireland is one country and we live in the northern part, so we live in the North of Ireland.’
Northern Ireland. The North of Ireland. They were only slightly different but I knew I’d never get my tongue round such a foreign configuration. And Ireland wasn’t one country, but two, and the other part, the southern part, where I’d never been, didn’t really exist. Not a single programme on television came from there.
In June 1977, before school ended for another year, we each received a bronze coin with a woman riding a horse on it, a mug and a handkerchief. I didn’t know why.
Later that August, up in Turf Lodge, our parents elsewhere, Granny and Conor and I sat round watching the news. Before the usual footage rolled of a march and people carrying black banners and chucking bricks at soldiers and soldiers beating one of the marchers and marchers beating one of the soldiers and the soldier getting dragged away to safety, the same woman as the woman on the coin stepped out of a red helicopter and said hello to a group of children my age waving tiny flags. They were small but enthusiastic.
‘Look,’ said my brother, pointing at the screen. ‘It’s our Queen.’
Among Communists: A Memoir by Sinéad Morrissey is published by Carcanet
