Memoir:This book is in two parts. Part One is an engaging account of the author's immediate predecessors, particularly his mother, in the years between the early 20th century and his own birth in the 1930s.
Part Two recreates a childhood in Lisburn, Co Antrim, up until the end of the second World War. An Ulster farm beyond Broughshane, in the Ballymena district, makes a kind of focal point in the story. The owner of this farm is Robert Hugh McMaster - a good Presbyterian name - whose younger sister Lizzie marries a widower with an infant daughter. The daughter, Lily, in due course becomes the mother of Dennis Kennedy and his older brother. Lily's early years are spent first of all in Crayford, Kent (she considers herself English), and then - after the sudden death of her father - in Lurgan with uncongenial relations. Taking matters into her own hands, Lily establishes herself briefly as a seamstress in Belfast, before being reunited with her beloved stepmother and three stepbrothers in Ballymena. Throughout all these changes of fortune, the Antrim farm with its view of Slemish Mountain acts as a refuge and a symbol of stability. Lily's life before the age of 30 is punctuated by deaths - deaths from cancer, heart failure, peritonitis, leukaemia, tuberculosis, all the ills of an era before prompt diagnosis and advances in medical science made recovery a possibility.
As well as being in two parts, Dennis Kennedy's memoir has two main threads: Ulster fundamentalism and its effects, and the miseries of a maladjusted marriage. As she's presented at first, Lily seems far too spirited and resourceful to succumb to proselytising pressures - but succumb she does, taking unreservedly to the state of being "saved". A friend of her girlhood, Jack Kennedy, gets saved at the same time, and Lily agrees to marry him - a course that subsequently inflicts harm on both of them.
But what goes so terribly wrong? Jack's backsliding from an evangelical commitment doesn't help, and nor does his tendency to fling his supper in her face when his temper fails. The last straw comes with a cigarette spotted by Lily in her husband's hands. The sight propels her out of the marital bed and initiates implacable hostility on the home front. Lily, from this point on, is deeply unpleasant and unforgiving towards her husband, and this chimes oddly with her earlier representation as a lively, clever, responsive and good-hearted girl with a talent for friendship. The marriage goes on and on, however dismally, until the warring participants finally achieve eternal separation by being buried at opposite ends of Lisburn Cemetery.
Climbing Slemish is not an embittered memoir. The Kennedy sons appear to have dissociated themselves, to an extent, from their parents' discords, and their juvenile pursuits are recounted with charm and exuberance: the Causeway End gang of local boys, makeshift sports, day trips to Bangor, Lurgan and so on, and holidays at the McMaster farm, always with Slemish itself posing a challenge to climbers and acting as a spur to the imagination - whether or not it's meant to stand as an antidote to the looming imposition of Elim evangelicalism. If religion has a deteriorating effect on Lily's character, it doesn't stop her ensuring that her sons, as far as possible, undergo an encouraging upbringing. As for her life before Elim - family history combined with a particular Ulster ambience is Dennis Kennedy's subject here, and he makes an engrossing story of it.
Patricia Craig is a critic, editor and biographer. Her Ulster Anthology was published by Blackstaff last autumn
Climbing Slemish: An Ulster Memoir By Dennis Kennedy Trafford Publishing, 238pp. €17.50