Stand Up, Speak Out: My life working for women's rights, peace and equality in Northern Ireland and beyond

By Monica McWilliams

By the age of ten, Monica McWilliams was dispensing payouts in her granny’s post office, book-keeping for her cattle-dealer father and leaving no one in any doubt that she could stand up for herself. She went on to break the mould in so many ways, as a woman, as an activist and as a politician. In this frank and fascinating memoir, she tells her extraordinary story for first time.

Now Emeritus Professor of the Transnational Justice Institute, Monica also chairs the Governing Board of the international NGO Interpeace and has worked with and for women in conflict societies including in South America and the Middle East. She is author of a number of journal articles, essays and reports on family and sexual matters; domestic violence; and human rights in Northern Ireland. This is her first book. 

Anyone interested in Ireland, ending conflicts, making lasting peace, defending human rights, women in politics and feminism will love this book.

Hillary Clinton

As co-founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, Monica McWilliams undoubtedly played one of the most pivotal roles in the Northern Ireland peace process. This is a stunning read ... one of Ireland’s greatest women activists.

Bertie Ahern

An unmissable memoir of a soaring hope for justice and peace, and of shocking misogyny. Women are so often written out of the history they make; women like Monica McWilliams make their voices heard, with humour and grace.

Lyse Doucet, BBC chief international correspondent

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
• Release date: Nov 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781780733234

Book preview

Preface

The title of this memoir comes from a time when I was told to shut up and sit down by an elected representative in a public forum. Now, after lengthy consideration, I have decided to tell the stories of what can happen when you stand up and speak out. The events recorded here are the recollected memories of an eventful and, at times, controversial life. In recounting these, I have tried to be as accurate as possible, relying on diaries and multiple notebooks that I kept over the course of those years.

My story begins in the small market town of Kilrea: in the cattle mart, in the fields, and in the kitchen of my home in New Row. My parents were the source of many important lessons, as were the opportunities to participate in sports, drama and debates at my two convent schools. The campaign for civil rights in Northern Ireland, which began when I was a teenager, was a turning point in my life, and then came the turbulent years of the Troubles.

My years as a student at Queen’s University were eventful – among some of my best but also some of my worst because of the ongoing conflict. In my early twenties, I found myself in Detroit – a city that was as infamous for racism as Belfast was for sectarianism. My feminism and passion for community action began in the mid-seventies and when I returned home, I came together with others to set up the Northern Ireland Poverty Lobby; became involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament; joined the trade union movement against sectarianism; and threw myself heart and soul into the women’s rights movement.

In the turbulent years of the 1980s, I juggled raising a family and working as a lecturer at the University of Ulster. I had the good fortune to see my research on domestic violence lead to changes in legislation and policy. The stories I tell here give an insight into what it was like to live in a country that was awash with weapons, with women more vulnerable as a result. The names in the chapter on domestic violence have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

When the political landscape began to shift in the mid-1990s, I co-founded the Women’s Coalition and was elected to the peace negotiations, aiming to bring a different perspective to the process. Those two years I spent at the negotiating table finally resulted in the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998. That made me a joint signatory to a peace accord – something that very few women in the world manage to be. The weeks leading up to the referendum on the Agreement and the initial years of the Northern Ireland Assembly turned my life into a roller coaster. It was no different during my time as Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, with the ups and downs of the various court cases and investigations, and the drafting of the required advice on a Bill of Rights with my fellow commissioners.

The period covered in this book is cloaked in many tragedies that I witnessed personally. In recounting these I have tried to ensure that this memoir is not unduly overshadowed by sadness and loss; I have had to remind myself that ‘that was then and this is now’. None of us comes through a transition from conflict without being changed both personally and politically. I have lived long enough to see that redemption is possible for all of us. A new space opened up in 1998 and I feel it is important to celebrate the gains as well as to record the mistakes that were made. I am honoured to have stood on the frontline with human rights defenders not just here in Northern Ireland but in conflict regions across the world, and the lessons I learned as well as the inspiration that I found are an important part of my story.

My intention with this book is to leave behind my record of those times and also to correct some of the inaccuracies that I have found in a number of other accounts of the peace process, particularly those of male commentators and historians, who do not think what women did was important enough to document. I hope this book will help people to gain a deeper understanding of the work of peacebuilding: why it matters to have women at the table and how seeing the humanity in each other can lead to transformation.

1

The Early Years

‘Already, at ten, in your element

totting up numbers

taking each problem apart

to solve inequalities –

a mission to make things balance.’

Ruth Carr, from ‘David Manson’s Schoolroom’

By 1959, when the children in our family lined up in the morning for our daily doses of cod liver oil and rose hip syrup, there were five of us waiting in line. First were John (9) and Terence (8), who were born just a year apart, then Mary (6) and me (5), and then Noeleen (3), the ‘wee pigeon’, carried to bed at night on my father’s shoulders. Mary and I were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. Even before Noeleen arrived, having four under the age of four was tough on my mother and not helped by my non-stop crying. The midwife kept telling my mother she was giving me too much to eat, but I was ravenous and needed my nourishment.

My parents had seven children in all, but my youngest two sisters died at birth. Had that not happened, perhaps Noeleen could have had a sister as close to her as I was to Mary. All of us were born in hospital as that was supposed to be best, but it didn’t turn out that way for Dymphna, who died choking with the umbilical cord around her neck, and Deirdre, who was stillborn. My mother had baptised them alone in the hospital because she knew they were going to be taken away immediately. The babies were taken from her and buried in unconsecrated ground, limbo land, which was in the top corner of the graveyard, beside the back wall of Drumagarner chapel in Kilrea. My mother had to stay behind in the hospital; my father never mentioned whether he had attended the burials, but it wouldn’t have been the custom to go. It was painful for her not to know where her babies’ graves were, but we remembered Dymphna and Deirdre each night as we said our prayers in the kitchen. A few years later, my father bought a plot in the graveyard and put the family name on the headstone. When I walked past it each Sunday, I thought it was odd to have a grave with no one inside. I wanted it to stay that way forever.

My mother, Elizabeth McKenna, was born in 1915, the fifth child in a family of nine. The family lived in Tirkane in the parish of Maghera, close to the Sperrin mountains. She was left-handed and had had her knuckles rapped with a ruler by a teacher at school until she learned to write with the right one. She had experienced other kinds of cruelty, like the dentist who pulled all her teeth out in one day. By then she was a hardy young woman who had to ride miles home on her bike without a tooth in her head. That made the dentist a sadist in my eyes, but she didn’t see it that way. I knew she was one of a kind, but I still hoped that some of those hardy genes would get passed on to me.

My mother had been an independent woman when, at thirty-four, she gave up a good job to marry my father. He first set eyes on his future bride at a wake when she was only seventeen, but their paths didn’t cross again till more than a decade later. My mother had gone to Loughry Agricultural College to get her certificate in ‘Dairying, Poultry Keeping and Rural Housewifery’. When she left, her friends gave her an autograph album with the following inscription:

Never trouble, trouble,

Till trouble troubles you;

It only doubles trouble;

And it troubles others too.

That was good advice for Lily in 1933 – Lily was what they called her then, but by the time she was my mother, she was only ever Betty. My father caught up with her when she was working in Ballyrashane Creamery, where she was applying her Certificate of Competency in Butter-Making. She was the only Catholic at the creamery but that didn’t stop her from making great friends there. When they came to visit, they told us how good our mother had been to them and how much they had loved having her as their supervisor.

A marriage bar was in place when my mother got married – it remained until 1975 – which meant she had no choice but to leave her job. The sole breadwinner from then on was my father. My mother often remarked how difficult it was to leave behind the good wages and the craic. She was left with ‘rural housewifery’ from then on. She came to understand the meaning of the Russian proverb, ‘I thought I saw two people but it was only a man and his wife.’ That her role as a homemaker and mother came to define her life was the norm in the patriarchal society of the time, but it was good for us to see that my father deferred to her. He always told us, ‘Ask your mother; she’s the one who knows best.’ That was his way of showing how much she mattered.

My mother did the listening whilst my father did the talking. I was more like him and Mary was more like my mother. When we got together with our multiple cousins, the tears would run down our cheeks as my father told his stories around the fire. My mother was the opposite – she never wanted to attract attention; she was happy just to hear him regaling us with his tales. She also had few expectations about needing things for herself. Each time she returned a gift he’d bought for her, I wished she’d kept it. She would tell us to make sure that when we grew up we had a bit of money to call our own.

My mother had got her driving licence at a time when a driving test wasn’t required. In her case, we wished it had been since she didn’t know how to use her wing mirrors. On trips out, Mary and I functioned as the indicators, sticking our arms out the windows, since having to switch them on was one job too many for her. She crawled through the villages, but she still asked if she should slow down. When Aunt Mary was with us, she would reply, ‘Betty, if you go any slower, this car will come to a halt.’ We would clap when we arrived at our destination, even when she reversed into a gatepost trying to park the car. She held her nerve for a year and then packed it in, which meant we didn’t see our cousins as often as we would have liked. To keep us safe in the car, she made us all say prayers, a role that later fell to Mary even though she was a much better driver.

My father’s father had gone to America to work on a sheep farm in Utah and came home in 1899 with enough money to buy a farm outside the town of Swatragh. At the bottom of a long lane, in front of a river, he built the family home at Stranagone. It was an ideal place for children to grow up, but any money my grandfather had made soon disappeared in the pub. The pony and trap knew its way home without him. It wasn’t long before the bailiffs were at the door. His daughter Sadie kept them at bay while his son Patsy acted as the magician, riding the horse, their prime asset, as fast as he could out of their sight. My father Owen was born in Stranagone in 1914 – the fifth in a family of seven children. He would have loved to have stayed at school but had no choice but to leave at the age of fourteen to start milk rounds to bring money into the family. It didn’t take him long to gather up some savings, from which he bought his first cattle. He quickly became successful as he could read the animals very well, was a good negotiator and never stopped working. Pretty soon he had a herd of some of the best cattle in the land and eventually became known the length and breadth of Ireland as one of the best in the business.

My parents married just after the war, in 1949. They paid £34.12.8 for their wedding breakfast at the Montague Arms in Portstewart. Both of them, and all their brothers and sisters, abstained from alcohol so the one bottle of champagne listed on the bill probably remained unopened. The accepted practice on both sides of the family was to take the Pioneer pledge in the belief that the family genes for ‘the drink’ were passed from one generation to the next.

After the reception, all the guests joined them on the first day of their honeymoon in Carrigart, County Donegal. However, my mother’s mother didn’t go to the wedding; she didn’t go to any of her daughters’ weddings. If she had any reservations about my father, they soon disappeared. My grandmother loved that he brought my mother to visit her each week in the homestead at Tirkane. And before long they were bringing a gaggle of grandchildren there as well.

It was the boys who were expected to go with my father when he worked outside the house, but I always wanted to go too. If he went to the fields when the dogs were worrying the ewes, he would bring me along with his gun. We would lie in wait and if the dogs appeared, he would fire a couple of shots. He never set out to hurt a dog but if he wounded one, we would follow the blood trail back to its owner who would be furious at my father for taking a shot at their dog – and also start making excuses. The exchanges were hot and heavy at the start, but it was good to see my father and the owner come to an understanding, with my father insisting that the dogs stayed in during the lambing season. I did other jobs for him, like watching the sow to make sure she didn’t harm her suckling piglets. When my father used the expression, ‘That person would eat their young’, I knew what he meant. He was good at handing out advice, telling me to stay with the flock and not to be running after the stray. That meant that I was not to get distracted; the wanderer would come back by itself.

I loved going to the cattle mart with my father. I stood beside him when he and the other men sealed their deals by spitting on their hands and then slapping them together. I was fond of those cattle dealers and they were fond of me. They often gave me a luck penny, whispering, ‘That’s for yourself because your father was so good to me.’ They would give me a sixpence each time I mentioned my birthday, no matter how many pretend birthdays there were, and would take me to buy bagfuls of sweets and Love Hearts in Scullions. I got a mouthful of fillings in return.

After the mart was over, I would sometimes go with the cattle dealers to Dempsey’s pub in Kilrea. As a lifelong Pioneer, my father never set foot in licensed premises, but I wanted to sit beside the dealers up at the counter and be allowed to bet on the horses. On Grand National day in 1961, I picked out Nicolaus Silver as a winner, placing a pin on his name in the newspaper. I got lucky with that spectacular white horse, and Mrs Dempsey gave me a wink, promising not to tell my mother that her seven-year-old had been gambling. One of the dealers who sometimes worked for my father was known for getting worse for drink on a fair day. On occasions, when he’d start roaring and the police would be called, he’d hide in our backyard. I’d watch as the police took him away with a blanket over his head. If he’d dropped his hat, I would keep it safe and give it back to him the following week. Cattle dealers never went anywhere without their hats. My father’s has pride of place on my bookshelf.

From quite an early age, my father asked me to help him with his accounts, and I loved the idea of being his bookkeeper. Deciphering his writing was always a challenge so matching what was going out with what was coming in was like a jigsaw, and took time to figure out. We had a few rows, but I soon learned from him that for every problem, there had to be a solution. He had stub books that read, ‘No Damaged Stock Taken or Confusion Marks on Ears’. I wonder if that was some kind of subliminal message for later.

He was generous to a fault – known to buy cattle for men who didn’t have the money at the time of the purchase. He didn’t care how long it took for them to repay him. His generosity came easy and I wanted to replicate it. It appeared to me that it was those with most money who had the hardest time parting with it, even when it was for a good reason. Mean people would say they were tight for money when it wasn’t the case, and my father would tell me he could see them coming from a mile off.

Wherever we went, if he heard that someone had fallen on hard times, he would stop at the house to see if he could help. I liked being part of that. When our cattle broke out of a field, his kind-heartedness to our neighbours was reciprocated and people came quickly to lend him a hand. One evening our heifer fell into a swamp and locals turned up with their ropes. They could see the animal’s distress and worked quietly in the field. I felt moved as I watched them in the cold evening light with no one saying a word. When they finally pulled the animal on to dry ground, I put a blanket over her, hoping she wouldn’t die from the shock since I knew the cost of losing a healthy animal. Witnessing that sense of responsibility that the men felt towards my father, their neighbour, left a lasting impression.

My father was often worn out from travelling to cattle auctions in the west of Ireland. He had a habit of going to bed when we were playing in the backyard, and if someone started screaming, ‘Leg Before Wicket’ during a rounders match, he would shout out the window for us to be quiet. Noeleen was usually standing quietly in the corner and would tell us to do what he asked so he wouldn’t have to come down. But if he came home from the marts and we were watching TV, his first question was always, ‘Have you nothing better to do?’ He worked around the clock and didn’t like to see us idle, since, according to him, there was nothing but filth on the screen. He thought Burke’s Law, an American detective series, was much too advanced for us. That meant going to Mrs McIntyre next door to watch it as she didn’t care if the girls were running around in bikinis. One night, when we were fighting over which programme to watch, he reached for the TV to throw it out the back door, but my mother managed to calm things down – as usual – and put it back in its place.

My father was at his most content when he was fishing, and the local fishermen called him ‘the old man of the river’. In the summer evenings I would watch him casting out his line and reeling it in. Our neighbour Sean Donaghy once caught eleven salmon but my father outdid him by catching one more. His long waders weighed him down and he couldn’t swim, but I could see that he was at his happiest up to his waist in the water. He thought it was fun to reverse his car at the edge of the Bann, pretend the gears weren’t working and say to me that the car was sliding in. I woke up at night dreaming of drowning but I think he had no idea how scary it was for me in the back seat, closest to the river. As well as fishing, he loved playing bridge and studied the game for hours in his armchair in front of the fire. I found the Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge for him, as he was a stickler for checking the rules to see who was right. His partner, Patsy McNicholl, was the local road sweeper, and the two of them were hard to beat.

He didn’t have the same kind of patience in the yard or the fields. We called him John Wayne as he steered his green Rover like a horse, banging on the side of the door as he drove through the fields, shouting for us to ‘cap’ the cattle in the right direction. When he moved, we moved too, at speed. I had no fear of those big beasts and weaved my way through them until we got them safely home. We all became long distance runners and champion sprinters because of that experience.

Football games brought the worst out in him. When my brothers were playing, we slid down the seats to avoid the embarrassment – he thought he was the referee, telling whoever would listen what the decision should have been. During one match with local rivals at Ballinascreen, he got especially worked up, and I tried to remind him that it was only a game – but he still jumped over the fence to remonstrate with the referee. Before the All-Ireland GAA final at Croke Park in 1958, in which our cousins were playing on opposing teams, we all prayed that he wouldn’t do the same. Sean O’Connell, my mother’s nephew, was on the Derry team and Padraic Haughey, my father’s nephew, was playing for Dublin. Everyone was relieved to see that my father was less invested than when his own sons were playing. Dublin beat Derry, and on the way home we laughed to be told by the Haugheys that Dublin would never be beaten.

My mother was good at working with my father, and he was rarely short with her. I often stood up to him, following the advice he always gave me – ‘Don’t let anyone walk over you’ – but he didn’t mean for me to apply that to him. He once sent me to get chips for the fishermen and then marched into the shop to find out why I was taking so long. The other customers nodded in agreement when he told the owner that he should take down his ‘fast food’ sign and give it to somebody else. They thought it was funny, but I didn’t and when we were back in the car I told him so. I walked for miles to get home after he put me out of the car. The good thing was that neither of us held a grudge and we were back on speaking terms before long.

My father often had a few men working for him, and we came to know some of them well. Jimmy O’Kane rescued me the day I took off on my bike to get out of doing the dishes. I lost control going down the hill after Church Street and as I fell on to the road, my hand got caught in the spokes of the bike. Jimmy found me and carried me home in his arms with a missing bit of my finger in his handkerchief. I spent three weeks in hospital recuperating and getting tetanus injections in my bum. My mother had told me to bless myself with Holy Water before each injection as she believed that was just as important as the medical treatment. The other children saw me diving under the covers and I heard one of them say, ‘She’s gone for her holy dip.’ The nurses stuck me in a cot when there weren’t enough beds in the children’s ward. Visitors compensated with gifts like a toy accordion, but I was affronted to suffer the indignity of a cot at nine years old. When I came home, my mother sent me for piano lessons in the room behind Peden’s sweet shop, hoping they would help straighten out the artificial bit of finger. I passed the preliminary exam in pianoforte, playing in the Presbyterian church hall in Coleraine, where the judges presented a certificate to the girl with the crooked finger. But my enthusiasm didn’t last – I stopped playing and my finger never got straightened out.

Card games were a regular occurrence in our house but gambling for money wasn’t allowed so we played for matchsticks instead. We loved the winter nights when the cattle dealers came to play cards in the kitchen. They hid sixpences for us children to find in the morning and since I was an early riser I was the one who got the most money. Pat McGlinchey, who worked for my father, lived in our house and was the source of much fun for my brothers and cousin Bob. They’d steal his milking stool and take advantage of the times when he’d had too much to drink, which was often. On his way to bed, he would fall over the tripwires they had set across the stairs. But no matter how late Pat came home, he was up at dawn eating porridge at the kitchen table beside me. He told me that the woman he wanted to marry had turned him down but that he still kept the ring in his pocket. When he passed away, my mother gave me his ring, but I didn’t need it to remember Pat – he was one of a kind.

We said our prayers all together each night and mine was the fourth decade of the rosary. I said it like a mantra from a kneeling position on the kitchen floor. My mother fasted on the first Friday of every month. She called them her good Fridays and said good Fridays would be good for me too. During the parish Stations, the priest would come to the house to say Mass and hear the neighbours’ Confessions. I was the one who kept the record of the donations in the book. The amount that each neighbour gave was treated with more discretion than at funerals and at the Mass, when the priest called out how much each person had given, in effect showing the pecking order of the parish. The customs were carefully observed – the housekeeper who worked for the parish priest had to sit in the back seat of his car, reflecting her gender and status. Each Easter Mrs Rafferty made us a new outfit: my favourite was a yellow suit and matching hat. We built Easter huts, pretending they were real houses, where proper manners had to be observed, like expecting my father to wipe his feet on the mat before entering. Cousin Caroline at Stranagone made no exceptions for her dozen siblings or the five of us who climbed in and out of hers.

The names we were given at baptism came from the saints, unlike Protestants, who I thought could choose any name they wanted. The names made it easier for strangers to work out your religion. Felix was on my father’s birth certificate, which would have confused some people, but he used Owen and that made him more of a ‘left footer’. When people asked my name, they found they couldn’t settle the question easily and then had to move on to the next one: ‘What school did you go to?’ I learned early that the foot you kicked with, just like the spade you dug with, meant you were either a Catholic or a Protestant. Whenever I asked why the foot mattered, I would be told: ‘catch yourself on’. It really did matter and came up time and time again throughout my young life.

My christening took place on Saint Monica’s feast day and that was how I got my name – Monica was the long-suffering mother of Saint Augustine, a reformed reprobate. According to my mother, I was no saint, and struggled to be like my namesake. She called me Tom Thumb – the nickname made me want to behave more like my sister Mary, but I didn’t always manage it. I should have been doing what my mother needed me to do, but instead I did what I wanted. I would take the Hoover and lie under the bed reading my book, a picture of George Best – my favourite footballer – by my side, when I should have been cleaning upstairs. Mary could have told on me, but she didn’t, and that’s one of the many reasons I loved having her as my sister.

A few years before he was married, my father bought a house in Kilrea. He had managed to save a decent amount over the years and, because he was a successful cattle dealer, he was considered to be good for a loan from the bank. It was a large house with lots of barns and sheds out the back – a perfect place for a family home. At the start of World War II, American soldiers requisitioned the house as they needed accommodation during their stay at Aghadowey aerodrome. The officers rearranged the rooms to suit their requirements and built a hatch between the kitchen and what became their breakfast room – we kept its name but we never ate there, opting instead for the kitchen table.

When my father first bought the house, there was a railway line at the bottom of the street, and the address was Railway Place. In 1950, the railway closed and our address became New Row. My father had used the railway to transport his cattle but when that all stopped, he turned to cattle lorries instead. On quieter days, the old station house, with its booking office and waiting room, was where we played at being conductors and guards.

The kitchen was the heart of our home. Most days, the kettle swung from one side of the Aga to the other as my mother made tea for the men. The men were my father, the workers, the lorry-men, cattle dealers and anyone else who crossed our door on a fair day in their big yellow boots. It was a lot of hospitality and a lot of work so when we were all small a housekeeper came to stay to help my mother.

At dinnertime on fair days, I would go to the pantry to feed my dolls while waiting for the kitchen to get back to normal. Before long, I’d had enough of the dolls and decided to ask Santa for a typewriter. I searched the house for weeks until I found where the toys were hidden and made a scratch on my present. The discovery that Santa wasn’t real taught me to be careful about what I wished for and an early lesson that you’d always be disappointed if you put your faith in a fantasy.

My mother knew to keep me busy: encouraging me to wind skeins of wool and to sew and knit while I was reading. That’s what we girls did – multitasking even if we didn’t know it. We stored the wool in a cubbyhole, and the bats loved the darkness of it as well as the sleeves of my coat. The pulley for airing the clothes on the ceiling worried me as much as the bats. For years, I lived in fear of it falling on top of one of us until it did just that, landing on my mother. She knew she was fine, and wasn’t the type to get into a panic – there were five of us already doing that. I begged her to get rid of that pulley, feeling sure it would kill her someday. It stayed where it was for years, but it’s gone now and is much missed, like my mother.

My mother had a great conviction that being outdoors was good for you. When she was growing up, not everyone in the family got a place on the pony and trap, the only form of transport, so she frequently had to walk miles to get anywhere. She was a firm believer that we ought to be out in the fresh air as much as possible, not least because it helped her to get on with her work in the house, and frequently told us to get out from under her feet. The day we took her at her word, we were gone for hours. We were found later, miles from home, eating honeysuckle and sucking blackberries on the road to Swatragh. We had a knife to protect us and used it to cut branches for sticks, along with a rope, in case we were attacked. I was seven years old and at the rear, while John, the oldest, led from the front. After that escapade, my mother made sure to ask us where we were going. If she left home without us, I would ask where she was headed and always got the same answer: ‘Timbuktu or Kalamazoo.’ When I eventually got to those places myself, they were much further away than I had been led to believe.

Generally in our house, I got the easy jobs and Mary got the hard ones. Shaping yellow butter into tiny balls was one of mine, as was getting the buttermilk out of the churn. The smell of it turned my stomach but the pancakes my mother made with it made me forget that – they disappeared from the griddle on top of the Aga as quickly as she could turn them over. The chickens in the backyard were also disappearing, but for a different reason. If my mother showed up with a brush in her hand, those chickens knew what was coming. They scattered as she picked one out, twisting its neck as it screeched. Mary plucked and gutted the carcass; I did the singeing with methylated spirits to get rid of the stray feathers that wouldn’t come out.

We enjoyed those dinners, and the times when we had rabbits and hares, snipe and pheasants – shot by my father. We knew where the food came from. If we turned our noses up at whatever was on offer, my mother would say, ‘No force, no flatter; if you don’t like it, it’s no matter.’ It was different when we went to stay at my father’s homeplace in Stranagone. There was no fuss allowed as my uncle and aunt who lived there had thirteen children. Most of them had been born at home and after each of the births Aunt Martha was on her feet the next day, in the field with her toddlers running alongside the pram. We didn’t dare turn up our noses at the Stranagone table and when we went to bed, we slept like spoons, all squeezed in together without complaint. All in, I had eighty-six first cousins – some of them in families with over a dozen children. Five would go on to become priests, and my cousin Anne became a nun.

In our own house back in Kilrea, my brothers tried to boss us because they were older and they thought that was what boys did to girls. They expected me to do their fetching; I would tell them they were useless soand-sos and that they could get whatever they wanted themselves as they had legs of their own. The gender divisions were clear but I always had lots to say for myself and I was determined they weren’t going to walk over me.

Although I was outspoken and much less biddable than Mary, my mother only put me across her knee once. Someone had been stealing from the milkman, and a neighbour had seen me buying sweets by the dozen in a few local shops. I wasn’t the thief; it was the girl down the street who asked me to share her takings, and I accepted without asking any questions. My mother said she was sorry for not believing me. It was another of life’s lessons: if something seems too good to be true, then it usually is.

My outspokenness meant that I was the one who started the rows. My mother was always begging us to ‘keep the peace’. When she was planning a treat for my sisters, she often arranged for me to stay with Mrs McIntyre or the McKays out the road. That meant she and my sisters could have a few peaceful days on the beach at Portstewart. What was going on became clear when the breadman called at the house where I was staying and spilled the beans that my sisters had gone off on a holiday and must have forgotten about me. They were in Kelly’s boarding house where high tea was on the menu. High tea sounded really special, so I complained to my father, arguing that they were getting more than me. He had a soft spot for me and brought me to Portstewart, where my sisters were wandering up the prom, licking cones of Morelli’s ice cream. In order to be allowed to stay, I had to promise not to start any rows. If I did, I would be sent back to Kilrea, but if I stuck to the rules the reward was high tea at Kelly’s for two whole days. My Cinderella days were over, but the experience was a formative lesson on how to use the carrot and the stick.

I was sent to be company for my grandmother during the summer holidays from the age of ten. Her home in Tirkane at the snout of the Carn wasn’t far from Maghera – it felt to me like it was in the middle of nowhere but it was only ten miles from home. My grandmother was confined to bed because of an amputated leg and lived with her son, my Uncle Patrick, who wasn’t married. My job was cooking: I made the Complan, a fortified energy drink, as well as fried eggs, bacon and spuds, and a custard dessert, and, since we ate the same things every day, I became an expert. My uncles David and Patrick ran the farm, and they drafted in more help during the summer. When they did, I knew to cook more of everything. Every so often I rang home from the red phone box at Tirkane; our house at Kilrea was one of only four with a telephone, so it was easy to remember the number – Kilrea 204.

There was no electricity at my grandmother’s and only an outside latrine. I had a chamber pot in my room as I didn’t want to go out in the middle of the night with only a Tilley lamp to light the way. I thought ‘chamber pot’ was a very grand name given what it was used for.

On the days my cousins came to visit, we headed to the river. Stepping stones and a deep pond provided the fun for our clan from the Bann. We thought we’d learned to swim by splashing around in the trout hatchery at Portna, near home – but we hadn’t, so it was a miracle that none of us drowned. If the eels in the Bann at Portna looked like snakes, whatever was in that pond looked just as scary.

When the cousins departed, I only had the antiquarian books up the stairs to distract me. At home I had twelve volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which I buried myself in, but the books in Tirkane were hard going for a ten-year-old. The magazines that came from the missionary orders took my mind to faraway places – I wasn’t