Tinteán

by Méabh O’Leary

My brother telephoned to tell me the news of Uncle Jack’s death, in the early hours of the morning in Melbourne. ’He died way too young’, he said wistfully, as if worried the same fate might befall him. Other family members agreed he was ‘taken’ too early. Nowadays, some might voice it was his lifestyle that killed him.

The news had taken me by surprise. Uncle Jack was in his early 60s. He didn’t have a wife or children to mourn him, nor his parents, who had both pre-deceased him. He had a loyal band of friends, work colleagues, seven siblings and eighteen nieces and nephews, scattered around the world who grieved him. I didn’t know what to say to comfort my brother, only that I thought Uncle Jack had lived his life on his terms. My brother didn’t agree or disagree, only to later inform me that it had been a packed-out funeral.

There was a space for him to be laid to rest, with his parents in the family plot at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. I knew exactly the location of this grave, as I would visit this grave where my paternal grandparents lay. My maternal grandparents were buried at the other side of the graveyard, near the round tower and the ivy-clad stone wall, that separated the cemetery from the Botanic Gardens. The Republican side, my father so often scoffed. I thought about Uncle Jack, now deceased, in the cold damp grave, his wooden coffin placed above both his parents, the first of his siblings to die.

Through those formative years, I counted Uncle Jack as a cherished member of my family. As a young child I only saw him on Christmas Day each year and I looked forward to his arrival.  My grandmother and father would sometimes make derogatory references about Uncle Jack’s conduct and deportment on certain occasions, whether he was alone or not, at what hour he arrived, or was the last to leave, or even if he showed up at all, information that was meticulously dissected. My mother never entertained criticisms and had only good things to say about Uncle Jack. She would answer my childlike questions about him in a very matter-of -fact way.

I heard him referred within the family as ‘the black sheep’, ‘a philanderer’ and ‘a heathen’.  I never knew what was behind these accusations other than one story that was often brought up about the fateful night he had come home from the pub long after closing time and had fallen asleep while enjoying a cigarette in bed.

There had been very high expectations placed on Uncle Jack from both his parents I knew. I formed the impression that Uncle Jack continued to be a big disappointment to his parents and never redeemed himself before both their deaths. That he was ‘highly intelligent’ was evident, though he didn’t attend university after school, which was one of the reasons that might have caused ‘disappointment’. In her rare kinder moments, my grandmother might say ‘He got in with the wrong crowd’.  When years later, as a mature student he enrolled at night at University College Dublin and secured a Bachelor of Business Studies, she complained ‘that he had done nothing with it’ and that he was wasting his life. That he had never married, joined the priesthood, or even emigrated, as some of siblings had done also made him stand apart. He had maintained a very responsible steady permanent pensionable job in the Government. This fact was never lauded in the same way as his siblings’ accomplishments.

I knew Uncle Jack as a beloved Uncle mostly on that one day – Christmas Day, when he arrived after Mass, often jarred up, much to my grandmother’s chagrin and my father’s amusement.  My father enjoyed drinking malt whiskey and smoking a pipe to abandon, and talking politics, business, and sport with him. He would carefully take down the crystal decanter and glasses from the sideboard where it was on display for the remainder of the year. I would watch as the whisky was measured out, and eventually emptied over the course of a couple of hours. It was one of the few times when I heard my father discuss such adult matters animatedly, as normally at all family meal times he would have the radio on high and we would all eat in silence. To my lifelong gratitude, Uncle Jack never showed in any way that he was more impressed with my cousins’, or my grandmothers’ neighbours’ children, vast lists of accomplishments and achievements. These would be paraded and applauded at the Christmas table. My siblings’ equal abilities never made the cut.  Once or twice he would wink at me over the Christmas table when she started her tallying and score-keeping. He always took an interest in what we children were doing throughout the year, and who our friends were and even remembered their names. None of us was favoured, apart from my mother, as hostess. He usually brought a present beautifully wrapped for her – 4711 perfume or Tweed, and a box of Black Magic Chocolates which thrilled her.

Sometimes at Christmas I found him in the small kitchen chatting with my mother as she sat at the table and sipped a glass of sherry, he had poured her, in a way that I knew charmed her and made her smile, when she had so much to attend to. She always packaged up some almond iced Christmas fruitcake and homemade mince pies and set aside slices of cold ham and turkey for him to bring home. She didn’t mind that year after year, he only stayed the minimum respectable amount of time after he had wolfed down the Christmas fare she had meticulously prepared, some of it months in advance. When he made his departure, I always ran to get his long grey, satin lined gaberdine coat and hat from the cloakroom under the stairs, and watched in anticipation as he put it on.  He would place his big hands into the front deep pockets of the coat and then the inside pocket, to check for his key, he would say. There was always a sweet or a coin or a beer coaster to give to us. I remember watching his long strides as he turned up the collar of his coat and legged it down our long driveway, probably to the nearest pub. My father, depending on whether his brother was in or out of favour with him, often gave him a small bottle of Paddy whiskey, that would fit inside his long pockets to go. His mother would purse her lips and say disapprovingly ‘don’t encourage him, Vinnie’. This was the cue for my father to offer his mother a measure of whisky and she would accept bashfully for medicinal purposes. I would help myself to a selection of minerals, a Christmas treat, and pour them into one of the beautiful delicate hand-painted crystal glasses, if I thought I could get away with it. My father’s cheeks would redden and he became more jovial and approachable, and it was a relaxing time after the big event and before the big clear-up with anticipation of a black and white Norman Wisdom or Red Buttons film on the television.

At the Christmas table there was no talk from Uncle Jack of having attending church, or carols or whom he got for confession, as were typical Christmas table topics. Nor did he join in the small talk about the quality of the sermon and the priest’s delivery of it, the singing, members of the congregations’ attire, only to compliment my mother on the Christmas turkey. This seemed to irritate my father as he stood at the head of the table sharpening the carving knife’s blade, before digging in and hacking into the now unfortunate lifeless bird.

There were enough of us around the long dining room table to seat Uncle Jack well away from his mother. I noticed how his long elegant fingers were stained yellow from smoking cigarettes and a pipe. He had a gruff voice and when he laughed, he chortled. Once he spoke up in my defence after I had done badly in an Irish exam. Another time I felt my grandmother was trying to humiliate me as she insisted that I play a piano piece I had not yet mastered for an upcoming exam. He told her in no uncertain terms that I was not yet ready for such a public performance and he asked me to tell a joke instead which I always had as my ‘party piece’. After such an exchange she would remain uncharacteristically tight-lipped and tense in his presence. There was a lingering heaviness and disapproval in the air, when her least favourite son was mentioned. The few times he did answer back it appeared to silence her.

One memorable Christmas, my mother was encouraged to invite a female friend to Christmas lunch. She was recently widowed and back from England. Seated directly opposite Uncle Jack she tried to draw him out on matters that interested her. I could sense his restlessness. He seemed to be out the door a lot quicker that Christmas Day.

 
Uncle Jack rarely stayed for the festivities afterwards – usually a slide show as we indulged in the big box of Quality Street sweets. He would often sneak out without saying goodbye whilst my grandmother was asleep, in the good chair in the lounge room in front of a crackling fire.  The only indication we got he was leaving was when he left my eager brothers the bitter dregs from the bottom of his Smithwicks’ glass, causing them to break the pledge of total abstinence to drink alcohol, that we were all encouraged to take at our Confirmation. He would be gone before any family photographs that my father insisted on taking of us all, lined up awkwardly in front of the pine-needled Christmas tree that by this stage had already begun to shed its needles on the red carpet. His exit marked the moment for me when the Christmas celebration was over until the next year and I would not have cause to wear my best clothes again until my birthday in April.

Before he left, he always gave my brothers, sisters, and me cash, and if he had missed a Communion or a Confirmation that year, he made up for it with an extra fiver or tenner on top of our normal Christmas ‘box’. And then there was our Birthday money. There were never wrapped-up presents as such, just cold hard cash which thrilled us, from a wad he pulled out from inside his top left breast suit pocket. We already had so many selection boxes, tubes of Smarties, fruit gums and annuals between us. He had not even been allocated the role of godfather to any of us, we marvelled, so this seemed like the height of generosity to us.

I didn’t attend Uncle Jack’s funeral because of the practicalities of having young children to care for at the other side of the world. I vowed to pay my proper respects to Uncle Jack at his graveside and in his favourite pub on my next trip to Dublin.

On that trip, I discovered that earlier in his life Uncle Jack had had money problems, to the extent that debt collectors were to become involved. My informant swore me to secrecy. What he had to tell me was not yet ‘out’ in the wider family. He then told me I had another first cousin. That there were 19 cousins and not 18 cousins, the number each of us took as finite up to now. He, or she, would be a couple of years older than me.

Uncle Jack had not lived a carefree life without grave consequences as I had imagined and admired.

What became of my unknown first cousin and his or her mother? Perhaps Uncle Jack didn’t love her or she didn’t love him. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Jack doing anything he didn’t want to do no matter what convention dictated. Still, the little that I really knew of Uncle Jack has left an indelible mark on my own life and a fondness I carry to this day together with a deeper understanding and a sense of loss over who was absent at our Christmas table.

Méabh is Dublin born and bred. After graduating from the College of Marketing and Design in 1982 Méabh worked in London, Boston and Seville before arriving in Australia on a working holiday visa.  She returned to Australia to take up permanent residency and met her Australian husband with whom she now resides in Melbourne along with their three daughters.   Méabh presented  ‘Migratory Grief – The Silent Grief of Voluntary Migration’  at the Inaugural 1st Global Irish Diaspora Conference in Dublin in August 2018 as an Independent Scholar. See https://tintean.org.au/2018/03/06/migratory-grief-the-silent-grief-of-voluntary-migration/ Tinteán published her poem ‘Cluas Mara’ in May of this year. See https://tintean.org.au/2024/05/10/cluas-mhara-sea-ears/ ‘

‘Uncle Jack’ is a shortened version of one of ten short stories-in-process.