A Big Connection

  Somewhere in Belfast there’s a hospital consultant whose great-grandmother taught herself to read by going to matinees and watching silent movies – mouthing the words along with the actors while looking at the subtitles.  In London there’s a girl called Lucia – who once was Lucy – who helped set up a theatre company.  “She went to a place called RADA.  Have you heard of it?”  A woman in Dundalk  whose mother could remember in 1916, people waiting on the station platform to shout up at passengers on the Dublin Belfast train for news of relations imprisoned in Kilmainham.  In Australia there’s a nun called Faith and a man called Jim who worked for Qantas. 

All of these people are related to me but most of them I’ve never met.  I can’t keep straight the links between them and don’t know which generation these Peters, Jims and Marthas belong to.  Some of the names are so dated they must be Edwardians or under twos, the Mamies, Salinas and Almas.  Lots of them are scattered; England, Australia, Scotland, America, New Zealand.  Many of them are dead.  The teenage boy who disappeared in the Blitz, whose father, demented, wandered round Belfast for weeks afterwards asking people if they had seen him even though he had died of his injuries in hospital.  A journalist in South Africa murdered for his car keys.  People who had died in old age in their own beds surrounded by their families.

These people were all real to my mother even if she had met them only once or twice.  Some she did know really well and some she hadn’t seen since they were children.  The journalist in South Africa was “a lovely wee boy”. The London actor’s father kept in touch with her, ringing every few months for news of his country relatives.  She wrote to Faith in Australia and her cousin in Dundalk and fretted when they were slow to reply.

 My mother was proud of her family and how well-doing they were.  These grandchildren and great-children of a big, working class North Belfast family, many of them successful, beyond the wildest dreams of the members of that original family, were a source of great pleasure to her.

A “big connection of them” is how my mother described large extended families.

I only half-listened to her stories and now that big connection, that existed only for her, is broken .

 

Comments

[Nelly]

You have broken my heart with that post.

[London sister]

this is very good - I am touched

[Nelly]

Would you consider linking that to Danny's site on Facebook?

[curious]

That's a great piece of writing. I shed a little tear.

[Louise]

You've brought a tear to my eye too.....and sent me off in a reverie of family memories myself.
I wish I had your way with words to write them down.

[ganching]

Thanks all.

I don't think I would want this to go on Facebook as my blog is a FB free zone.

[Nelly]

I see your point.

[fifi]

You are the connection now. Just a slightly smaller rhizome.

[ganching]

A good way of looking at it Fifi.