The Moth

In the U.S., there’s a podcast called the Moth, which features people telling true stories from their own lives. Here in Belfast we have Ten X 9, nine people getting 10 minutes each to tell a true story. Each month has a different theme; tonight’s was Secrets and Lies.

The Irish are famously good storytellers so Ten X 9 starts at an advantage. A fella called Malachy O’Doherty (his name is musical even without a story) told of two winters he spent in a Donegal boarding house with very little money--scavenging for driftwood to burn for warmth. He told of fellow boarder Pipe, who may or may not have been an IRA fugitive and may or may not have blown up the sewage pipe leading to a primary school (“doing his part to secure the freedom of the oppressed in Ireland”). He said that Pipe had an air of self satisfaction that Malachy attributed either to his having done something bad and gotten away with it or the opposite--he may have avoided doing a bad deed that he had been assigned, and perhaps felt great relief for fate intervening to let him off the hook. Pipe’s personality was such that he thought it was the latter. He enjoyed the notoriety of having a shady past--and that it was earned with so little currency.

Another story was of a middle aged woman visiting her elderly aunt after her parents had died. She found a crucifix in the attic and learned that, although she had been raised as a Presbyterian in a Protestant neighbourhood in Enniskillen, her grandfather was a Catholic from Derry’s Bogside slum. He met her grandmother while he served in Enniskillen during WWI. The two fell hopelessly in love. She left her family and moved to Derry with him, living in basically a slum house with his parents and most of his 12 siblings. They had a child and one day, she disappeared with the child (who was the storyteller’s mother), moving back to Enniskillen without telling her husband. The grandmother's family would have nothing to do with Catholics and her brothers would have beaten him up if he claimed his religion. So the grandfather did what his wife had done--he moved to Enniskillen, leaving behind his family and his faith. When our storyteller learned about this, she also learned that she had an extensive family in Derry, which she visited for the first time recently for a reunion. It was a heartbreaking story. The Derry relatives had completely lost touch with her grandfather, who missed his parents’ funeral and other major family events.

Another heartbreaking story--told with great humour--was about a gay man who was very close to his mother, and very closeted. He grew up in Cork and left for London to study, where he met and fell in love with another man. They ended up spending a month in France one summer. He wrote his mother every week and he had to come up with an alibi to explain why the postmark was from France. He concocted a story that he was to be a tour guide for the Camino de Santiago walk, helping the faithful on their journey. When he next visited Ireland, he learned that one of Ireland’s famous presenters had done a TV program on the Camino that everyone in Ireland, apparently, had watched. So he was asked 100s of questions that turned one lie into thousands more. The saddest part is he never told his mother he was gay so, for decades, he told lie upon lie to the person he was closest to in the world.
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