Two Book Reviews by Frank O’Shea
Amanda Brown, NO PEACE UNTIL HE’S DEAD. The story of child abuse at the hands of Davy Tweed and my journey to recovery, Merrion Press 2024. 260pp.
ISBN: 9781785374982
RRP: €15 13
The title gives a good summary of the book. It is the story of the author’s determination to tell the world about her stepfather and his abuse of her and her sisters. Irish readers may find the name of Davy Tweed familiar; he played rugby for Ulster and had four Tests for Ireland. Because his career involved the second row, we get the idea of a big man, almost 200 cm and built to match.
Tweed was a wife-beater as well as a child molester. Here from early in the book, is a scene that will give the idea of the kind of man he was. ‘As we pulled into our driveway, Davy ordered us straight to bed. Then we had to endure the sounds of our mum being dragged up and down the house, the sounds of slaps and her pleas, the sounds of punches sending her flying into the thin walls … then he threw her through our bedroom door with so much force that she fell into the wardrobe.’
The sexual abuse of Amanda seemed to stop at about the age of ten. What she did not know at that time was that her stepfather then went on to sexually abuse his own young children. At one stage, Amanda had her surname changed to Tweed in the belief that she was only being abused in the first place because she was not his daughter. While all this was going on, he was being cheered and feted by rugby followers in Dublin and Belfast. He was a committed member of the Democratic Unionist Party (Ian Paisley’s DUP) and represented them on the local borough council.
The main part of the book describes the author’s slow realisation that she should let the world know about her abuser. The police were initially slow to believe her and it was only when her younger half-sister joined her that she made any progress; in fact, a number of other adults who had been abused by him when they were children, also came forward. The author so dreaded the thought of facing him in court that she determined to take her own life, something that was stopped after her own aunt committed suicide.
The chapters on the trial and the way she was cross-examined in court are frightening. She held out for four days and her younger sister for a further three. Tweed was found guilty and given an eight-year sentence, reduced to four. His sojourn in jail was made easier by the fact that many of his fellow-prisoners and many people in society believed he was innocent and treated him as such. Also it appears that there was some form of prison support from the UVF. Even then, after just under four years, he won an appeal, based on his lawyer’s claim that the jury in the trial had not been properly briefed, and the trial would have to be held all over again. Not surprisingly, his accusers refused.
In the final few chapters, the author tells of her attempt to come to terms with her situation. She received some support in the online world, but so did he. He was aged 62 when he died in a motorbike accident. She has no patience for the common belief that we should not speak ill of the dead –‘nil nisi bonum’ as the classics put it.
This is a wonderful book, made all the better because there is nothing showy or flamboyant in the prose. The front cover shows a young girl of about the age the author would have been when the 200-cm second-row forward was abusing her. Recommended reading, though the topic is painful.
Catherine Nixey, HERESY. Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, Picador/Pan Macmillan, 2024. 365 pp.
ISBN: 9781761560897
RRP: AU$ 17.95
The author of this book is daughter of a former nun and former monk, who grew up in a practising English Catholic family. Now a classicist and historian, this is the most recent of her books on early Christianity, this one moving from the life and death of Jesus to the spread of Christianity.
Initially, she tells us that the spread was eastwards where it merged with similar beliefs and practices. But when Rome found it useful, it spread to the west and, under Constantine, would achieve mandatory acceptance. The author deals with all those early treatments of Christianity, but the book has greatest interest in its early chapters and the unusual treatment of Jesus and his time.
It appears that in the time of Jesus, there was no shortage of healers or saviours or raising from the dead. We read here of people like Minerva, Asclepius and Appollonius among many others. ‘By the first century AD, to be revived from death was such a common phenomenon that it even merited a section in the earliest encyclopaedias,’ she tells us. Walking on water and turning water into wine and curing people of demonic possession were standard tricks for the ‘magicians’ of the day.
In Jewish traditions, Jesus was remembered as many things (not all flattering) but a common accusation was that he was no more than ‘… a potent magician. The fact that he was supposed as a child, to have spent some time in Egypt – noted centre of ancient magic – only added to suspicions about him.’ In early Christian art, Jesus is seen holding a stick (a wand?) when performing his best-known miracles. Most of the writings of the time in which stories like these are carried out by other magicians were put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.
The other element that appears in the stories of other noted human deities was that of virgin birth. In some early art, impregnation is shown happening through the ear. This may have involved fear of giving prominence to a female or more likely may have been a residue of a feeling that the deity was above sex. Even to this day, most Christians accept a belief in the virgin birth without giving much thought to centuries of medical knowledge.
The author is dismissive of the way that the West has treated the many apocryphal gospels or stories in old manuscripts. ‘It is understandable that some Christian historians may have wished to ignore them – but it is intellectually indefensible to do so. Do so and you are not writing history, but theology, with dates.’
The book does not go very much beyond the early 400s AD, but it leaves the reader with some marvel that Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has survived to the present time.
Frank O’Shea
Frank is a prolific book reviewer, and a (much loved) member of the Tinteán editorial collective.
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