“I have very few memories of my mother,” Bono writes, in a new Personal History. “The simple explanation is that, in our house, after she died she was never spoken of again.”
I have very few memories of my mother, Iris. Neither does my older brother, Norman. The simple explanation is that, in our house, after she died she was never spoken of again.We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her.
Racing to the bottom of the stairs, we found him at the top, holding the power tool, having apparently drilled into his own crotch. The bit had slipped, and he was frozen stiff with fear that he might never be stiff again. “I’ve castrated myself!” he cried. Bob was a Catholic; Iris was a Protestant. Theirs was a marriage that had escaped the sectarianism of Ireland at the time. And because Bob believed that the mother should have the deciding vote in the children’s religious instruction, on Sunday mornings my brother and Iris and I were dropped at the Protestant St. Canice’s Church in Finglas. Whereupon my da would receive Mass up the road in the Catholic church—also, confusingly, called St. Canice’s.
Cricket was not a working-class game in Ireland. Add this to my da’s saving up to buy records of his favorite operas, taking his wife and her sister to the ballet—and then not letting Iris become a “Mrs. Mops,” as he called it, even though her friends were—and you can sense that there might have been just a bit of the snob in Bob. His interests were not the norm on his street, that’s for sure. Actually, the whole family might have been a little different.
My mother heard me sing publicly just once. I played the Pharaoh in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” It was really the part of an Elvis impersonator, so that’s what I did. Dressed up in one of my mother’s white trouser suits with some silvery sequins glued on, I curled my lip and brought the house down. Iris laughed and laughed. She seemed surprised that I could sing, that I was musical.
Mount Temple was liberation. A nondenominational, coeducational experiment—remarkable for its time in conservative Ireland. Instead of an A class, a B class, and a C class, the six first-year classes were D, U, B, L, I, and N. You were encouraged to be yourself, to be creative, to wear your own clothes. And there were girls. Also wearing their own clothes.
“Iris has fainted. Iris has fainted.” The voices of my aunts and cousins blow around like a breeze through leaves. “She’ll be O.K. She’s just fainted.” Before I, or anyone else, can think, my father has Iris in the back of the Hillman Avenger, with my brother Norman at the wheel. Three days later Norman and I are brought into the hospital to say goodbye. She’s alive but barely. The local clergyman Sydney Laing, whose daughter I’m dating, is here. Ruth is outside the hospital room, wailing, with my father, whose eyes have less life in them than my mother’s. I enter the room at war with the universe, but Iris looks peaceful. It’s hard to figure that a large part of her has already left. We hold her hand. There’s a clicking sound, but we don’t hear it.
My brother Norman has always been a fixer, an engineer, a mechanic who could pull things apart and put things back together. The engine of his motorcycle, a clock, a radio, a stereo. He loved technology and he loved music. A large chrome Sony reel-to-reel tape player took pride of place in our “good room,” and Norman was enterprising enough to figure out that the reel-to-reel meant he didn’t have to keep buying music. If he borrowed an album from a friend for an hour, it was his forever.
He had a bad temper, but he was a clever boy who, like his da, should have gone to university. He’d won a scholarship to an institution called simply the High School, a prestigious Protestant secondary school that leaned in the direction of maths and physics but was best known as the alma mater of William Butler Yeats. But Norman never felt very welcome there with his secondhand uniform, his secondhand books, and the secondhand religion of his Catholic father.
Bob loved music, but, in tune with his wife, he never suggested we get a piano. Nor did he ever ask me about how my music was coming on. He talked about opera, just not to his sons. For years after Iris died, he would serenade rooms of relations with Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times.” I still wonder if he was singing it from my mother’s point of view: “I’ll get along, you’ll find another.”
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