BLOG POST SPECIAL: PORTRAIT OF A MOTHER

BLOGPOST SPECIAL: PORTRAIT OF A MOTHER

The text delivered by Dave Duggan at the Portrait of A Mother event, organised by WoW Derry Londonderry, at St. Augustine's Church, 10.12.2015.

I’d like you to meet my mother, Margaret Spillane. But she died in 2001, so we’ll have to rely on some memories and a film clip or two. I invite you to visualise. You might want to close your eyes, every now and then. And pardon a smidgin of false memory and a leavening of poetic licence.

There she is, in this first clip. Margaret Spillane, just seventeen, a robust girl, born in 1936, there, on the quayside in Waterford, beside her father, Jack. The steel wall of a ship rises behind them. Funnels belch black smoke. The quay is thronged with families. Cattle slither up a gangway. My father, Eddie Duggan, ten years older than Margaret, stands off. He is afraid of Jack Spillane. Jack's a War of Independence veteran. Margaret and her ten siblings are alive only because her father's death sentence was commuted with the signing of the Treaty. He's the Sergeant of the Guards and a noted pugilist.

Margaret isn't afraid of him. She is not pregnant, despite what he might think. She is set for London. For betterment. When I come along, 2 years later, Margaret and Eddie are married and making their way among immigrants, despite the signs reading

No Blacks, No dogs, No Irish.

Three words outline the portrait of my mother:

working; laughing; singing.

See her skip up the gangplank. She's crying, but she's seventeen and she is Ava Gardner, in the musical Showboat. She waves to her father and climbs aboard her future.

(Sings) Fish gotta swim

Birds gotta fly

I gotta love one man

'til I die

Can't help loving that man a' mine.

My first memory of my mother shows her lifting me to safety. Another film clip. We are in a basement flat. Our neighbours are Cypriots, Hungarians, Windrush Jamaicans and Irish. There is a glass door leading to a patch of scrubby grass. My uncle Donal crashes through the door and deadly diamonds scythe the air. My young mother sweeps me out of harm's way.

I see my mother working. Close your eyes and you can see her in a gingham shop-coat. She has previous retail experience. Here's an earlier photograph of her and another girl, aged fourteen, both auburn-haired, even in black and white. The shining black of the spaniel Margaret is holding. The gleaming white of their dairy-girl coats. Margaret parlays this dairy experience into the shop job in London, where she recites this rhyme for a forgetful shopper:

bread, brown or white;

sugar, brown or white:

tea, butter, milk or marg

rashers of bacon; slices of ham

bread soda, caustic soda

liniment, ointment; unguent

toothpaste, blades, bars of soap;

bars of chocolate

Margaret laughs.

I have more of it forgotten than I have remembered.

Her real party pieces are songs. A common phrase around Margaret is

Go on Margaret, give us an aul' song.

She gives a little half-cough of self-deprecation.

Ah, I don't know. I have a bit of a tickle.

See the rapt faces of the men and women ….

Go on Margaret, girl. The Harbour Lights.

… as Margaret picks the song of her choice.

(Sings) They tried to tell us we're too young.

Too young to really be in love.

She's a life-long romantic. She carries a fierce commitment to the idea of betterment. An experience in a hospital, aged nineteen, when she didn't know the word 'urine' sees her vow

that no child a' mine will never not know the words.

And she has her own words. That's her with her dog, Archie.

Get offa tha' sofa Archie or I'll give you a verk.

Her voice is enough for Archie, who is so much part of her life that some of her grandchildren name her ….. Nanny Archie.

When a film I write, Dance Lexie Dance, goes to Hollywood, Margaret goes to Derry, for the local celebrations. She has a ball, possibly better than we film makers in Tinsel Town.

She's a romantic. A working woman. A singer. And a babe. She puts the razz into razzamatazz. She enjoys a bit of glamour. Showbiz! That's part of her portrait.

We can watch another film clip. See her, singing in the Theatre Royal in Waterford. Not from the stage. Rewind a bit. There. Margaret, Chrissie and Hannah are in the front row of The Gods, for the inter-factory variety shows competition, The Tops of the Town. Tonight, the Glass Factory faces The Chipboard Factory, where my father works.

He says Dem fellas? Shur they can't work, no mind dance.

Margaret agrees. Ah, God love 'em. They're not really front row material.

Disappointment strikes when the on-stage electrics fail. You can see steel toe-capped boots dashing under the fire-curtain. The packed house grows restive. There's some gentle barracking from The Gods.

A performer calls from the stage

Are ye up there, Margaret? I can't see ye, ye're that high up. Go on, Margaret, give us an aul song.

See her laugh, Chrissie and Hannah pinching her until she stands, grasps the metal rail in front of her and charms her audience with song, as they crane their necks upwards from the dress circle, the stalls and the stage.

(Sings) I was born one morning when the sun didn't shine

I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine

I load sixteen tons of number 9 coal

And the boss man says wella bless my soul

Here's a video of me and Margaret on a road trip. I'm her white-headed boy: a man or boy, who is highly regarded or favoured; a pet; a darling. Ask my sisters. See Margaret in this video still. It's a mid-shot, taken at Gougane Barra, in west Cork. Margaret is half-turned to the tungsten corrugations of the water and the shimmering drapes of the cliffs that ring the coum, cupping the lake.

We drive on to Killarney and hire a jaunting car. The jarvey is a pipsqueak Margaret describes as scrawnier dan your father. She urges him to speed up. He's soon galloping like Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man.

Back in town, Margaret waves at everyone. So do I. Everyone waves back. Margaret often says:

Remember the day the Yanks all waved at us in Killarney. God love their innocence.

I have a photo. It's framed in blue, like her life. We perch on a rock beside the lake. Killarney's hills undulate behind us. There are trees, dense upon a crannóg. A red boat, The Eanna, lifts its prow. It could be Irish, but it is the ancient Sumerian name for the temple of the Goddess Ishtar. Heaven, you could say.

Margaret's earthly concerns find her working in the laundry at Waterford Regional Hospital. If we edit some clips from the film Suffragette, we portray her ankle-deep in water, hauling sopping sheets from cavernous machines.

As a perk, Margaret and her colleagues provide a laundry service for their families, and many others, from their 'one woman, one bag' allowance. Here's another film clip. See that red car. Yeh? But you can't see the women, such is the pile of black bags on top of them.

She lives a tempestuous relationship with my father, Eddie Duggan. He's a well-read, factory-working intellectual and, as they say in Waterford, a martyr to the drink. He's mercurial and melancholic. She's robust and romantic. They have six children, a white-headed boy and five strong women. Listen ... the wheels of a pram clatter up the wooden stairs of the Housing Office, as Margaret pulls her family with her, presenting her demand to be re-housed.

She meets Bill. He's widowed then, like herself. My sisters name him Sailor Bill, a retired steward from the Rosslare-Fishguard ferry. She brings vivacity and gregariousness to his life. He brings a gentlemanly demeanour and a well-kept car to hers. Here's a film clip, as they set off on a weekend to Clonakilty. See my sisters banter with her.

You and Bill are off to Clon? For the weekend? What's the set-up exactly?

See Margaret grinning, girly once more, the perennial seventeen year old.

Dat's for me t' know and ye, ta never find ouh.

She loves Christmas because of what she calls the bit a' plenty.

Margaret and her work colleagues have a Diddly, a small, weekly savings club that pays out at Christmas. So with the bit a' plenty my mother enjoys Christmas, giving generously to all her friends and family.

She loves us all, to this very day. One of her catch phrases, one I use with my own children, is to shout Up our House. She doesn't just mean our house. She means everybody's house. Your house too.

Another song then. They all sing it. Forever. Ella. Lena. Billie. Margaret.

(Sings) Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky

Stormy weather

Since my man and I ain't together

Keeps rainin' all the time.