In the aftermath of the death of the great Nell McCafferty, many of her attributes were discussed on the airwaves, in newspapers, online and in conversations across the island. But not enough has been said about her writing. McCafferty was a ferociously brilliant writer. Sometimes she didn’t even write about things, but through them, capturing the very mood of a story with incredible deftness, pathos and empathy. McCafferty has been described as tough, unpredictable, challenging, ferocious, kind, passionate and much more, but perhaps the truest version of her is in her writing – a talent, craft and style all of her own, one with a deep and burning emotional core.
The opening lines of her June 1980 piece, Armagh is a Feminist Issue, remain astonishing, “There is menstrual blood on the walls of Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland. The 32 women on dirt strike there have not washed their bodies since February 8th, 1980. They use their cells as toilets and for over 200 days now they have lived amid their own excreta, urine and blood. The windows and spy holes are boarded up. Flies and slugs grow fat as they grow thin. They eat and sleep and sit in this dim, electrically lit filth, without reading materials or radio or television. They are allowed out for one hour per day, hopefully to stand in the rain.” While all of it is extraordinary, it’s the line halfway through that paragraph that really announces the poetry to be found – if the author is talented enough – in such abject desolation: “Flies and slugs grow fat as they grow thin.”
In 2006 McCafferty contributed an essay to the book Hunger Strike – Reflections. In it, her trademark style was evident. This style, I believe, is singular in Irish journalism. Her sentences, when she found the perfect one, possess both weight and lightness. McCafferty’s true skill was landing words as though a feather had a thud. How is that possible? Well, here’s one: “The night Bobby Sands died all you could hear as we walked in the dark was the sound of feet on the road in Derry.” Good God, it’s almost a haiku.
I forgot to plant bulbs in the last autumn of my mother’s life. The garden of my Dublin home in the first months of 2005 was fallow, bare earth
— Nell McCafferty, writing of her mother’s death in December 2004
Occasionally, her writing possessed taut, telegraphic precision. This happened mostly when she was writing from and of memory. Take this column from Hot Press in 1997, about listening to Elvis in a Derry cafe as a teenager, the words hitting the page like morse code, no need to lengthen sentences for the scene to expand in the reader’s mind. “Saturday afternoon. Pocket money. Best white blouse with a fitted string bow tie. Convent grammar-school blazer to show I was not a corner girl. Thirteen years old. Alone. Solitary. Not at all embarrassed to hang over the jukebox by myself.”
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Weather turns up only when it needs to in Nell’s writing, often as a sort of inverted pathetic fallacy. For example, her description of Ian Paisley canvassing in Ahoghill in 1969: “Scrubbed and smiling, solid in the drizzling rain.”
Minimalism is the most complex thing. As George Orwell wrote, “If you simplify your English you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.” Her economy of language often had an immersive scene-setting quality to it. Take, for example, how she described her childhood home: “The kitchen was where we lived. There was an armchair by the fire where my father always sat, a sofa, and a drop-leaf table and chairs, and a sewing machine. The black-leaded, brass-trimmed range, glowing day and night, was a massive, majestic source of power. A clothesline was strung over it. The portrait of the Holy Family, gentle and smiling, and hung above the holy water font, established our priorities. My mother has always been fond of St Joseph. He was a carpenter. Sure, you couldn’t go wrong if a husband had a trade and respect for his wife.”
Describing her endeavour to cover the 1990 World Cup, she managed to fit in her fish-out-of-water task, the social, political and economic context of Ireland, and the unspoken collective action Irish supporters took to elevate themselves in contrast to English fans: “I knew little about football, but I knew how to party, and I was in the company of several thousand Irishmen who were intent on that… There was a war in the North, the economy had tanked in the south, but, hey, look at us – the more the English acted like football hooligans, the more elaborately manned the singing, drinking, peaceful Irish became.”
Of her mother’s death in December 2004, she penned a paragraph about grief that contains within it all the regret and hope, dull pain and resolve, perspective and sadness that such a state holds: “I forgot to plant bulbs in the last autumn of my mother’s life. The garden of my Dublin home in the first months of 2005 was fallow, bare earth. I know there are green things underneath. The weeds may yet be wild flowers. We shall see.”
The final words of her 2004 memoir are ones to live by, “The best is yet to come. While we await that glorious day, the sensible response is to laugh and be a disorderly woman.”