Them aul’ Protestant shoes

For a long time, I believed myself to come from an unbroken lineage of Catholic men and women.

Indeed, through most of our lives, my siblings and I lived under the illusion that both our parental bloodlines were – as far as we knew – Fenian to the bone.

Not what you would call dedicated followers of fascism, we did not give much of a toss about this fact of our family heritage. Disinclined by both constitution and upbringing to notions of religion-based superiority, we found our papal platelets to be neither a source of pride nor shame.

A lock of years ago, however, this delusion was broken. It turns out that we are have Protestant heritage. Who knew? Well, as it would turn out, the whole family apart from us.

This story relates the events that dispossessed us of our delusion of Protestantlessness. It involves my granny, a funeral, and a pair of – what will forever be known as – ‘the Protestant shoes’…

Now, before we get into the meat of the story, I would like to say that I am not entirely sure how this apocryphal notion of pure-bloodedness (forgive the language if it sounds a bit master-racey or Harry-Pottery) managed to gain a foothold in our house.

My granda’s mother was a Protestant. She was Mrs Colhoun, or ‘aul Mrs Colhoun’, if you ask my Da.

Sadly, Mrs Colhoun died before she was able make memories with her grandchildren – the sort that would have preserved her in story and immortalised her in family lore, securing her passage across the bridge that connects one generation and the next.

Some of her children are still alive today, and I am sure they remember their mother fondly.

But, suffice to say, we never heard a pile about her in our house, so we grew up thinking that no Protestant had ever managed to wiggle their way into the heart of a McElhatton.

Then – so we thought – came a mould-breaking auntie. A wild woman with an irrepressibly free-spirit. She went and done it, becoming the first McElhatton to banish that cursed sectarian love hex.

With her mixed matrimony, as is the way, came in-laws.

One of these in-laws – specifically, my auntie’s mother-in-law – had what nowadays might be described as a retail addiction. She could not pass a shoe shop without going home with a new pair of size sixes.

One day, in a moment of shameful realisation, that mother-in-law stood staring upon the landslide of unworn shoes that had amassed in her cupboard. Years of impulsively purchased footwear mocked her wasteful, imprudent spending. She decided that remedial action had to be taken.

The next time she met her daughter-in-law (my auntie), she enquired as to her mother’s (my granny’s) shoe size.

“Perfect match!” exclaimed my auntie.

Soon after, in an act of genuine generosity, a bin-liner full of footwear was dropped off at my granny’s humble abode.

Fond of a bargain and positively in love with a freebie, my granny reckoned she had hit the jackpot. High-heels, flats, boots… you name it.

Then came a fairly close family bereavement.

With so many new shoes to debut, my granny chose a pair fit for a funeral; brown leather boys that sported a small, modest heel.

“That is what ye call a grieving shoe,” she might have said to herself.

She went along to Drumragh chapel with her three daughters.

With everyone well-settled in the pews, the service got in full, mournful swing.

As the priest hummed his solemn hum, my auntie, seated several rows behind my granny, noticed the shoulders of her 70-odd year old mother begin to rise and fall.

“She’s bloody laughing,” whispered one auntie to another.

Minorly embarrassed and majorly intrigued, they set off a chain of silent enquiry through a string of family members seated between.

“Something to do with shoes,” returned the partial response.

Meanwhile, the sacristan, dustpan and brush in hand, furtively crawled along the aisle, sweeping up some dark, crumbly matter.

By this stage, so my auntie says, granny, and the elderly woman sat beside her, were almost urinating with laughter.

“Jesus Christ,” scorned one auntie to the other. “She is going to make a show of us all.”

As the coffin was carried from the chapel, beginning its short trip across the road towards its eternal holding, my granny was jarred by her daughters.

“It was these shoes that your man was brushing up,” she laughed. “There is some aul black stuff coming off them.”

Composing themselves, they walked across the road.

All of a sudden, my granny near hit the deck.

“Jesus Christ, mummy, are ye alright?”

Upon the ground, about a foot behind where she had nearly coped, lay the entire heel of my granny’s ‘new’ shoe.

“These things are falling apart,” wheezed my granny, sending one of her daughters into a loud, uncontrollable, attention-attracting fit of hysterics.

“There, there,” said another auntie in feigned consolation, grabbing and burying her sister’s convulsing head in her chest.

By the time the girls – who, by this stage, appeared to the rest of the mourners to find the death of this relative nothing short of hilarious – had left, my granny was nearly in her bare feet.

“Well,” said the auntie whose mother-in-law had donated the shoes, “that’s what ye get for wearing them aul Protestant shoes in the chapel.”

It was in extension of this story that my brother, sister and I found out about aul’ Mrs Colhoun, her untimely demise, and the Protestant blood that runs in our veins.