‘If you had to describe yourself in a single word, what would it be?’

We’re sitting around our dinner table under the halogen strip light in the early evening dark. It’s October 1983. I’m eleven. My mother has recently decided the family should be vegetarian, so dinner is Hungarian goulash with mushrooms, sour cream and cheese. The melted cheese has turned stringy and is stuck to my teeth. Flattening his ears back like an owl, our cat mews outside the kitchen window – a pure-black boy cat called Morris. Morris Morrissey. We tend to name or acquire things that sound just like us. At one point we even had a Morris Minor. Whenever we got a lift to school instead of having to walk, my brother and
I ducked our heads while my mother parked, in case anyone saw us.

 ‘Isn’t that a fascinating idea?’ says my father. ‘A single word.’

 ‘Well, it’s possibly a bit reductive’, says my mother, getting up to let the cat in and sitting back down again.

 ‘Yes, okay, perhaps. But this way you get to the essence. You know. Like the relations of production, but in terms of the personality.’

 ‘Can I have some more?’ I hold up my bowl, starving as usual.

 ‘What would you say, Conor?’ asks my father.

 ‘Human’, replies my brother, instantly.

 ‘You see?’ says my father. ‘That’s so interesting.’

 ‘Why is that interesting?’

 ‘Well, it’s the essence, if ever there was one, for a start. Your true gift, Conor, is seeing to the heart of everything. You never get distracted.’

 My father dishes me out a second helping. Paprika swims in the sauce. I take a sip of water. We’ve had a fancy filter installed under the kitchen sink with its own separate spout for drinking water. The filtered water tastes funny. I prefer water from the tap. My mother finishes eating and puts her spoon down.

 ‘Wayfarer’, she says.

 My mother has dark brown eyes and mahogany hair. She tans without trying. Occasionally, she wears hoop earrings and looks convincing in a headscarf. I know the story of her great-grandmother, Hannah Stanniforth, a Roma who ran away to marry a gadjo blacksmith, over the sea in Derbyshire, where my mother comes from. Hannah Stanniforth was cursed by her people and never allowed to go back. She bore seven children in a cottage up Glasshouse Lane but was grief-struck all the same, as though she’d suffered an amputation. When Tom, the father of my grandfather, was small, she took him to a gypsy wedding. They hid behind a hedge. The slicing of hands. The blood. The salt. One Sunday morning, while her family were at church, Hannah hanged herself from the banister.

 When my brother was born, my mother wanted to call him Stanniforth. She wanted to call me Nadine. My father wanted to call me Tamara Aksinia, after And Quiet Flows the Don.

 ‘Wayfarer’, says my father, nodding. ‘Yes, I’d say that’s about right.’

 He reaches over and rubs the back of her neck. They both smile into the middle distance. My mother starts clearing the table for dessert. It’s my turn to do the dishes, but nobody’s turned up unexpectedly, so there aren’t that many. When my parents throw gargantuan dinner parties – six courses for eight people – Conor and I are washing up for hours, like Victorian servants. If someone ends up drinking too much, which they invariably will, I’ll get woken by Dad at two in the morning and asked to swap my bed for the sofa. Besides, we have a dishwasher now, so it’ll be quick.

 ‘What about you Sinéad? What’s your word?’

 I don’t have to think very hard.

‘Poet.’

Two weeks before, over dinner (again), my father had burst into rhyme. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore… What was this? I was transfixed. It was like being electrocuted. It was better than Brecht. A fortnight later, and I already know ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe by heart. I’ve already recited all of it to my parents, who were very kind.

‘Of course!’ says my father, delighted. He makes a grabbing gesture at the air and snaps his fist shut, as though snatching a perfect idea out of the ether.

‘What’s for dessert?’ I ask my mother.

‘Fruit salad.’

Conor groans. We always have fruit salad. Fruit salad or baked apples with dates and walnuts spiked into their hearts.

I turn back to my father.

‘Well, what’s your word?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it all day’, he says. ‘Communist. Communist is my word. It’s the single word that makes sense of who I am.’

*

All Communist families are alike. Each family made up of Communists leaves a unique, indelible mark, exceptional as a snowflake or DNA, on those raised in it.

When I was a child, I was acutely aware that no other children I knew were living in a family quite like mine. No other children spent Saturday mornings at Communist Party meetings or marching on protests or helping out at Party bazaars. No other children ate the kind of food we ate or talked the way we talked or understood what we understood (which was everything). When I was a child, I lived a rich, Technicolor existence, within whose frame I grew to feel both intensely treasured and intensely lonely, inside and outside, chosen and outlawed at once.

Other than my brother, I don’t know anyone else who was a Communist Party child. And certainly not an Irish Communist Party child. And certainly not a Northern Irish Communist Party child. But I’ve been drawn all my adult life to people with quirky upbringings, those ‘born at a 90-degree angle to the rest of society’ (as fellow red-nappy baby David Aaronovitch puts it) because
I sense, however deludedly, a thread of connection between their childhoods and mine.

One of the first things a friend told me about herself was that her parents were Reichians – followers of Wilhelm Reich, the controversial psychoanalyst who coined the phrase ‘the sexual revolution’ and believed in orgone energy: an invisible force with life-giving properties suffusing the universe. Instead of an armchair in their living room they had an orgone accumulator. Another woman I know grew up in New Age squats and communes. On the way to her wild, free school on the bus, she’d pass kids from the local comprehensive and feel sorry for them. Another friend was raised an Evangelist. For the purposes of conversion, her family had a house-by-house street map of the area where they lived, marking out the saved neighbours from those doomed to hellfire, as though one’s status in the afterlife were an incontestable fact, like height or eye colour.

Nothing connects my Marxist-Leninist upbringing with the idiosyncrasies of these other alternative lives. I can only snatch glimpses of what they were like by listening to my friends talk about them. Whatever an orgone accumulator might mean can only be effectively communicated by the one who knows everything about it to the one who knows nothing at all. Guesswork cannot help. Guesswork always lands wide. Guesswork tends to dredge up abstract nouns – embarrassment or abandonment or grief, fervour or safety or love – missing the point.

And here I state the obvious.

All families are strange.

Every child growing up in one feels lonely.

I wasn’t wise enough to know this at the time, or self-confident enough to accept my family’s eccentricities with grace.

Between the ages of six and ten, I lived in a little white house on the campus of the Ulster Polytechnic in Jordanstown, where my father was a lecturer and warden and my mother was a student. I attended Whiteabbey Primary School, a high-achieving, Protestant institution built on the eve of the Second World War, with tiny toilets in rows you still flushed with a chain and a GIRLS entrance and a BOYS entrance because people were keener on gender segregation back in 1939, and generally smaller. The purpose of Whiteabbey Primary was to school the offspring of the surrounding middle-classes in God, Good Manners and Passing the Eleven Plus. If the Troubles were raging ten miles away in Belfast city centre, or even on the Monkstown Estate within walking distance at the top of the Jordanstown Road, they certainly weren’t raging here.

Nobody else in my class lived in a student village. They lived in bungalows with front and back gardens on streets with names like Glenariff Park or Rostulla Drive or Dunsona Avenue. Their fathers were businessmen or accountants. Their mothers were housewives or had part-time clerical jobs. When my brother and I walked to school, passing the security barrier at the entrance to the Poly, we swapped universes.

Who were these other children I went to school with? In a sense they could have been anyone. In a sense
I made them up. A Marxist-in-the-making, I hardly ever thought of them as individuals, with complex family backgrounds of their own. Instead, I saw them as manifestations of their wider class. Except society was divided into two classes, not three: the Ordinary and the Extraordinary. We were definitely Extraordinary, which pained me. Not quite understanding what Ordinary was, but desperate to find out, I set about trying to define it, as in some doomed Arthurian quest.

A girl in my class invited me back to her house after school. The house, when we got there, a few hundred yards away from the Poly grounds, might as well have been Mars. Lounge chairs in the back garden. A garage. A conservatory. A mother who greeted us when we walked through the door with a cheery hello and snacks. This girl, I quickly decided, was very ordinary. Was the pinnacle of Ordinariness. Was Apex Ordinariness itself.

Sometimes we walked home together along the Shore Road, schoolbags banging off our hips, stopping for lemon bons-bons in the sweet shop along the way. She wanted to talk about sex. I wanted to talk about food. We chewed while we talked.

‘I know what you have to do if you don’t want to have babies.’

‘Do you?’

I’d never considered either having babies or not having babies before. Babies as a concept had not yet impinged on my consciousness.

‘You keep your pants on at night-time. If you keep your pants on at night-time, you can’t get pregnant. It’s a rule.’

‘Oh.’

‘My mum says giving birth is like trying to pass a melon. Whole. Through a hole this size.’

She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger. It looked really small.

I had more urgent matters to discuss.

 ‘What are you having for dinner tonight?’

 ‘Dunno’.

 ‘Do you have a weekly menu?’

 ‘What, like, in a restaurant?’

 ‘I mean, do you have the same things on the same days of each week?’

 ‘No.’

 The wind off the sea blew into our faces and whipped up our skirts. Our legs were freezing. We arrived at the traffic lights and pressed the button for the green man.

 ‘Do you ever have curry?’

 We had curry every Sunday, curry and rice and banana dahl my father baked in a tray in the oven with glasses of buttermilk.

 ‘I hate curry.’

 ‘Do you ever have Eggs Florentine?’

 My mother made Eggs Florentine when she got back shattered from her lectures. The spinach came frozen in a block and we had a special little poaching pan.

 ‘Eggs what?’

 I was constantly seeking permission for my at-odds, sticky-out life.

If a classmate did something, like eat quiche for tea, or stay up past eleven on a Saturday night, this was normal. Which made me doing the same thing normal too. Except my family and my classmates’ families rarely aligned. Food was an unhealthy focus. Lunchtimes excruciating. Mortified by my homemade, wholemeal, doorstopper sandwiches, glued together with some unmentionable paste, I’d clock the contents of everyone else’s lunchboxes and yearn hopelessly (I was a realist) for egg-and-onion white-bread sandwiches sliced into triangles with their crusts cut off.

Whiteabbey Primary School Girls wore their fine long hair in ponytails, knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart and played genteel musical instruments – the oboe or the violin – they carried into school in specially designed black cases. I had crooked teeth, throughother hair and wore my jumpers inside out. I was interested in the lessons themselves to a degree that was not just uncool but uncouth, precociously advanced in certain subjects and a poor dissembler.

Even when I tried to fit in my efforts went angular.
I asked my parents if I could take up piano lessons, assuming this might help. We’d no room for a piano. There was barely room for ourselves. But living where we lived meant there were lots of pianos I could practice on. Across our back field, Dalriada Hall, home to the School of Music, had a piano in every room and a polished black baby grand you could see your own reflection in. The front door was always unlocked. On rainy days, I’d drift from room to room, making noise.

‘I’ve found you a piano teacher’, said my mother a week later.

That was quick. Though she’d get round to it eventually, it usually took my mother longer to action school requests. A square metre of gingham for needlework or – horror of horrors! – a fancy-dress costume.

‘Who is it?’

I pictured an old lady in a parlour with a sleeping cat and a metronome.

‘I asked around. He’s called Frank. He’s a student. He wants some extra cash. You’re all set for next Thursday afternoon. He’ll call here and take you over to Dalriada Hall.’

When Frank arrived to collect me, my parents weren’t in. Frank was twenty, willowy, long-haired, in Army Surplus khaki trousers and Doc Martin boots, smoking a roll-up. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. His chest blazed. I didn’t know where to look. He held out his hand like an old-fashioned suitor and seemed even shyer than I was.

‘Hello Sinéad. I’m Frank.’

I was crushed.

*

Rapture. The Rapture. The State of Becoming Enraptured: Enrapturement.

Meeting erstwhile children of Reichians or New Age hippies brings me joy, for they, too, I assume, grew up in a lightbox. The lightbox of a discrete family unit whose culture is at odds with the dominant culture outside. The box derives its light from a totalising world view, and is a box in the first place by virtue of this world view’s peripheral status, so that the kinds of light that shine inside and outside the box are different, and the line between them clearly marked.

The nature of the lightbox, religious or political (and these cross and mesh inextricably), isn’t what interests me. What interests me is that when such people were children, a lot of what they heard in school (if they were allowed to go to school) and a lot of what they watched on television (if they were allowed to watch television) directly contradicted what they had already learned at home.

Even if I don’t know what an orgone accumulator was made of, what its dimensions were or how hot it got inside one on summer afternoons, I believe I do understand how it made my friend feel. Dramatically, all-at-once and in the form of the most apposite objective correlative imaginable – a trap for magical energy – the orgone accumulator in her sitting room marked the precise boundary of the lightbox into which she’d been born, the exact borderline where the fundamental assumptions of her family rubbed up against, contravened, realigned or even upended the fundamental assumptions of everyone else, setting her howlingly apart.

Marooned inside Whiteabbey Primary School, I stared at my face in the mirrors over the sinks in the toilets and longed to be transformed into a blander, more camouflaged version of myself, like Cinderella in reverse. But at home I felt completely at home.

We never had anything as talismanically ‘other’ as an orgone accumulator in the four different houses I lived in as a child. There was only one poster of Marx in my father’s study and no statues of Lenin. Our homes were always clean and in a reasonable state of repair, though my brother and I helped to keep them that way to a slightly unusual extent, as though we existed in a microcosmic version of a Russian Pioneer camp.

Our parents did not treat their two offspring as children, but rather as comrades-in-arms. If this meant we lived uncomfortably close to the maelstrom of their private lives (and their private lives were a maelstrom: they were ardent revolutionaries at a time when the personal was political), it also bestowed independence at an early age and a dense sense of insider privilege. Living in my family was a shut-off experience all its own. Brilliant. Hyper-charged. Lit from within. A trap for magical energy. There was abundant love in it. Its twin engines were laughter and fascinating ideas. It provided an unusual view. The things I heard in school (I was allowed to go to school) and the things I watched on television (I was allowed to watch television) directly contradicted what I had already learned at home. And even though that view was flawed – and it was criminally, monstrously flawed, there is no shirking it – by positioning me at a ninety-degree angle to everything else, it was the richest gift of all.

Lightbox children hold kernel-truths in their hearts which, even if they don’t speak them out loud, they nevertheless believe. Or believe sometimes. That Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead in two years, three months and twenty-two days. That rain can be made. That a Soviet-style Socialist Revolution will erupt in Northern Ireland. If lobbed at the correct second and pitch, like a hand grenade, these truths hold the power to set the ordinary world on fire, and can be especially useful if said ordinary world happens to be haranguing you by taking issue with your socks or the contents of your pencil case.

*

‘Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?’

‘I’m neither.’

‘But you can’t be neither.’

My mother was English and my father was Irish and my mother had been baptised Anglican but had given it up and my father had been baptised Catholic but had given it up and I’d been baptised by my Irish granny in her kitchen sink as a pseudo-Catholic but had given it up before the holy water dried on my forehead and my Irish grandfather had been interned during the Second World War for being in the IRA but after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had given up fighting for Ireland and now fought for the Workers of the World instead and I’d tottered off to one state school after another where I’d learned the Lord’s Prayer and not the Our Father and where teachers called me Siobhán because they could only hold one weirdly spelled Irish girl’s name beginning with ‘s’ in their heads at a time.

Unravel that.

*

‘Daddy,’ I’d ask, back in our little white house on the Poly campus, ‘is the Revolution going to be soon?’

 ‘Very soon.’

 I doubted it. There didn’t seem to be enough of us.

 ‘How do you know?’

 ‘Because we’re planning it. And because your grandfather’s involved. He’s at all the planning meetings. And he’s great at Revolutions.’ My father twinkled at me. ‘He’s very good at guns, your grandfather. You know, from his IRA days.’

 ‘I don’t think the parents of any of the kids at my school want a Revolution.’

 ‘Of course they don’t. But they’re the bourgeoisie. They don’t count. It’s the proletariat who count.’

 ‘Are the proletariat the working class?’

 He nodded.

 ‘And are the bourgeoisie the middle class?’

 ‘Yes.’

 ‘But aren’t we middle class?’

 Our class status flummoxed me. I hadn’t been able to fathom it.

 ‘Well, it depends’, he answered, warming to his theme. ‘We are and we’re not.’

My father had long narrow fingers. He’d rope them into any argument, slicing the air into compartments as he talked. Sometimes it looked as though he was chopping people’s heads off.

‘We don’t own any property.’

‘Yes we do. We own a car.’

‘Okay. We own a car. But it isn’t a very grand car. And we don’t own a house. And we don’t own the means of production.’

‘What’s that? A factory?’

Who owned a factory? Who owned Harland and Wolff? One person. How ridiculous.

‘Yes. But we don’t own any small-scale enterprise either. A shop or a company.’

‘So does that mean we’re working class?’

We didn’t seem very working class. Nobody in my family did any work. My father was a lecturer, so he talked for a living. My mother was a student, so she read books. True, my mother used to work in a factory. The Summit Works on Whittington Moor. She used to make circular saws. But that was before she joined the Communist Party and came over to Belfast on a Communist Party holiday and met my father at a Communist Party meeting and had my brother and then me, two scrunched-up bundles in a row, quick as a blink. Now, at thirty, she was a mature student studying History and Politics in the same department my father taught in and living off a government grant.

‘You see, Sinéad,’ said my father, sighing, as though the solution had just come clear in his head. ‘We’re what you might call the engaged intelligentsia. A sort of middle-class-without-means.’

‘So what’s the Revolution got to do with us?’

‘Well, everything. After all, Lenin always said the proletariat needed a vanguard. A spearhead. An advance task force. That’s us. That’s our task. We’re the vanguard of the vanguard. We light and lead the way.’

In the late summer of 1981, my mother arrived home from the German Democratic Republic after a three-week course on Marxism-Leninism for foreign Communists. She stopped wearing make-up and started wearing dungarees. She pinned her hair straight back from her forehead, as though fringes were a Capitalist frippery. She wore GDR Worker Boots every day for weeks and discussed the Northern Irish Socialist State in urgent, practical terms, ferrying us around in our rusty Morris Minor (my father couldn’t drive). She attended a Communist Party protest one sunny Saturday in Belfast city centre dressed like this. ‘Reagan!’, declared her banner, in her elegant, pointy handwriting, ‘You Can’t Have Your Banana Republic and Eat It!’

Communism shimmered in front of me, phantasmagorically close. The prospect filled me with queasy alarm. One afternoon my father arrived home in sparkling form. I was eight.

‘The Revolution nearly happened today, Sinéad, but JP forgot to being the guns.’

I liked JP. JP was quietly spoken and wryly amused. All Communist Party men were amused. Being amused was a prerequisite for entry. But JP was less raucously amused than other Communist Party men, whose belly laughs intimidated me. I could imagine JP forgetting to bring the guns because I couldn’t imagine him shooting anyone. I couldn’t imagine my father shooting anyone either, though he had rougher edges and a criminal lineage. So this detail, at least, rang true. But if there were guns, then people were armed and ready. And if people were armed and ready, then the Revolution was genuinely poised to unfold. And if the Revolution was genuinely poised to unfold, any doubts I had entertained so far were a category error, a failure of faith.

‘But what about the police, Daddy?’

‘The police?’

My father laughed. I was clearly being ridiculous.

‘Sure the police are on our side.’

*

Sometimes I wondered if my parents understood how heretical my school life was. Sometimes I imagined giving them tours.

Here’s my classroom. We’ve been learning about Moses. The Plagues (in order) and the Parting of the Red Sea.

Here’s our Assembly Hall. We sing hymns every morning. We Plough the Fields and Scatter. All Things Bright and Beautiful. And though I’d never dream of singing them at home, I do know all the words.

This girl’s father plays golf. This girl’s mother volunteers at a mother-and-toddler group and holds coffee mornings for cancer charities.

They all go to church. They all vote Ulster Unionist.

Even I could see how much these people stood to lose, should the workers rise up at last, power get handed to the Whiteabbey Soviet (i.e. us) and absolute equality be made the rule of law. And here the lightbox would dim and grow strange and my parents inexplicable.

But at other times I believed.