I-'ACTS AND I-'ICTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
147
possible minor destiny; and James says about him that he was the one
of all the world
to
whom absolutely nothing was to have happened.
When I started writing the book, I didn't know how it would
develop. But when it was written, it became clear that it was a book
about my father. If Edmund Gosse hadn't preempted me by writing a
book called
Father and Son,
I probably would have elected
to
call mine
Father and SOil.
My father was the chief personage in my life, impressive even in his
limitations. He was strong, honorable, and central in our lives; but also
rigid. I think of him as having always been in uniform and armed:
revolver, pouch of bullets, truncheon. When I walked with him, he
insisted that I move with shoulders erect and feet in step with his: left,
right, left, right. My father was one of the best policemen in the R.U.C.,
but he knew that as a Catholic in a Protestant police force he would not
be promoted beyond the rank of sergeant. To achieve preferment in
those days, he would have had to change his religion, become an Angli–
can or a Presbyterian, and join the Orange Order. He showed no sign of
resentment, but I resented the injustice on his behalf. Meanwhile my
mother lived as well as she could without drawing attention
to
herself.
She was often ill, suffered we were told from epilepsy and could be
expected to have epileptic seizures, "turns" my father called them.
When she had one of those attacks-my father being often out on
duty-we were to run up the street to "lnnisaimer" and fetch Mrs.
Crawford, who had been a nurse before she married Sean Crawford, a
teacher. She would know what
to
do. Kathleen does not believe, by the
way, that our mother had epilepsy. She thinks her problem was hor–
monal imbalance and could have been controlled by proper medication.
In
Warrenpoint
my mother hardly appears, and when the book was
published, I received a very rare and indignant letter from Kathleen. She
wrote that the book had bleached my mother out of the record entirely.
I so revered my father, she maintained, that he had to be the center of
attention. I allowed my mother to be a shadow, afflicted with illness and
melancholy. Kathleen, I now see, is right. But I can see that it was partly
for structural reasons that my father should govern the scene, taking up
virtually all the space of the book. My mother remained in the margin
as someone who had to be looked after.
Then there was John. I think Gordon Lish is responsible for my giving
the dead infant a more compelling place in my story than he had in my
life.
In
a story as uneventful as mine, the death of a child might be thought
to be momentous and to leave traces of its sadness on every page. I don't
think it did. There was also a photograph of John peering out from his
