short story

Foxes Furs, Men on the Moon and Peter Pan

My Dad was different. Right from the start he lived intensely. What I mean is that there was no halfway existence. When he was happy he made all of us sing with his exuberance and when depressed, the whole house became permeated with his mood. As children we noticed that while other relations bought houses, our Dad liked to buy boats, tents, caravans, things worth buying in our young eyes. Other families were rooted in one place, Uncle John in Kilkeel, Co. Down, Aunt Isobel in Coleraine, whereas we all emigrated, first to Canada and then subsequently to Australia. We always came back, but at least we went in the first place.

In those days if you emigrated they paid your fare and if you wanted to return you had to wait at least two years. Daddy mentally booked his return voyage the day we arrived in Sydney and two years later to that very day, we returned to N. Ireland. I remember a huge calendar was always pinned up in the kitchen and every day Daddy would score off another day of his sentence done.

Irish homesickness is a dreadful illness. I have an uncle in New Zealand who married a New Zealander and has four lovely children and a ranch, but he admits to regular weekly weeping sessions when he thinks of N. Ireland and all he’s left behind. It’s a strange thing that Daddy always claimed that he never suffered from it. ‘No”, he would say in a sombre tone “If you are miserable where you are, you will be miserable wherever you go. You take it with you inside. I had to go away to find that out. Don’t you forget it!”

He never seemed that miserable to me. He could be dramatic though. One Christmas we were visiting an aunt of my Dad’s up in Killylea, Co. Armagh. She was strict Brethren and didn’t believe in having a TV. Neither did she believe what her neighbours told her the TV had reported.

I remember sitting fascinated one year, as she stated her disbelief that men had actually ever landed on the moon. No, she insisted it had all been filmed on a set somewhere and made to look real. It was a plot, like the theory of evolution, designed to lead people away from God.

I remember when such topics came up, she would get very excited and her chin would go up and down like a boxer dodging blows, a peculiar gesture on a tiny thin grey-haired grandmotherly looking woman. Daddy always brought the subject around to religion. It was always so much more interesting when those dangerous waters were entered. We all sat listening as Daddy skilfully manoeuvred the conversation deeper and closer to the bone. Usually he would annoy and get her heated up on some theological argument, only to calm her down again by quick back peddling. Tales of how we children were faring at school usually worked a treat. Daddy would note the high colour and unusual tone in her voice and would announce some of our successes. Like the year I won the Ulster Schoolgirl’s Chess Championship; that was thrown in during a particularly fraught discussion on the Trinity. It worked a treat and I remember Aunt Winnie writing down the details of the competition etc., so that it could be told with relish to neighbours later. Oh, he was clever, Daddy, but one Christmas he misjudged it.

We had our usual yearly visit and were having our ham supper in the kitchen in front of the range. The conversation had been mostly fact finding until then. Who had died, who had married, who had done well, who hadn’t, the usual small village talk that is as detailed as any interrogation. Then Dad brought it round to religion. With other relations he used politics as bait, but with Aunt Winnie it had to be religion.

We children watched with interest as Daddy suggested that perhaps other religions apart from Christianity might also lead one to God. As he brought up the Hindu, Islamic and Buddhist religions, Aunt Winnie’s face became a higher colour. In the middle of Dad’s intellectual exposition of other world religions, my great aunt asked in a rather cold voice “Are you saved, Son?”

My Dad began to highlight the origins of the word ‘save’ and pointed out in the original Hebrew there were four different words all translated to mean save, which one did she refer to? My aunt got up from her seat and stood in front of my Dad, chin beginning to bob ominously. The tone and the colour meant it was time for some back peddling. Time for an anecdote about the children. Perhaps some quaint amusing tale of how I, a child at Sunday school, had misinterpreted scripture.

But he didn’t, he answered honestly, “I don’t know, Aunt Winnie”. He told her of how he’d felt as a small boy being taken to the Methodist service in the morning by one aunt and the Church of Ireland service in the evening by another, every single Sunday of his childhood.

Of listening to a heated preacher scream of damnation and hell and devils, while watched by the beady eyes of the fox fur lying across one aunt’s ample bosom. And of how when in response to the clergyman’s vehemence her bosom rose and fell in growing agitation, Daddy had looked in terror at this now breathing fox, which glared at him with fixed intent. The terror of that moment had stayed with him for sometime.

Now he had begun to question what religion meant to him and what it meant to others. Fear wasn’t going to hold him spellbound and silent anymore. My aunt would not be deflected, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” My father looked up thoughtfully, “I don’t know what I believe”. Aunt Winnie’s voice was as firm and rigid as her line of questioning, “Then you are with the Devil, out of my house”.

It seemed very odd, all of us filing out of the front door, we children with the boxes of maltezeers Aunt Winnie had just given us still clutched in our arms. When we were all in the car and heading home, my mother asked in a weary voice “Why do you do it, you know what she’s like when you bring up religion”. My Dad answered seriously, “I wanted her to know that religion is not about being afraid, not even of fox furs”. Then he had laughed and made us all laugh. I sat in the back seat and hugged myself in glee and suddenly wanted to crow like Peter Pan.