The Irish rock star Bono has revealed his distress at visiting his mother on her deathbed in a Dublin hospital after she had an aneurysm when he was 14 years old.
In an extract published in the New Yorker from his upcoming memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, the U2 frontman recalls that Iris Hewson collapsed at the funeral of her father “Gags” Rankin in 1974 and died just days later, and “she was never spoken of again” in the house he shared with his father Bob and elder brother Norman.
“I fear it was worse than that. That we rarely thought of her again,” he writes. “We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her.”
The 62-year-old singer, born Paul David Hewson, has long attributed the “hole in my heart” left by his mother to his desire to become a rock star. As a rage-filled teenager, he turned to music to cope with the grief, he says. Numerous U2 songs reference his mother’s death or absence, including I Will Follow, Tomorrow, Out of Control, Mofo and Iris (Hold Me Close).
In the extract from his memoir, of which each chapter is named after a U2 song, Bono writes affectionately of the Sunday morning church-going rituals that evolved from having a Catholic father and Protestant mother. (“Theirs was a marriage that had escaped the sectarianism of Ireland at the time,” he says.)
The other difference between his parents’ families, he writes, is that “the Rankin family is susceptible to the brain aneurysm. Of the five Rankin sisters, three died from an aneurysm. Including Iris.”
Bono details the commotion at his grandfather’s funeral after his mother collapsed at the graveside. “I spot my father carrying my mother in his arms through a crowd, like a white snooker ball scattering a triangle of color. He’s rushing to get her to the hospital,” he recalls.
“‘Iris has fainted. Iris has fainted.’ The voices of my aunts and cousins blow around like a breeze through leaves. ‘She’ll be O.K. She’s just fainted.’
“Even though it’s Grandda’s funeral, and even though Iris has fainted, we’re kids, cousins, running around and laughing. Until Ruth, my mother’s younger sister, bursts through the door. ‘Iris is dying. She’s had a stroke.’
“Everybody crowds around. Iris is one of eight from No 8: five girls and three boys. They’re weeping, wailing, struggling to stand. Someone realizes I’m here, too. I’m fourteen and strangely calm. I tell my mother’s sisters and brothers that everything is going to be O.K.
“Three days later Norman and I are brought into the hospital to say goodbye. She’s alive but barely … Ruth is outside the hospital room, wailing, with my father, whose eyes have less life in them than my mother’s. I enter the room at war with the universe, but Iris looks peaceful. It’s hard to figure that a large part of her has already left. We hold her hand. There’s a clicking sound, but we don’t hear it.”
‘She seemed surprised that I could sing’
Bono says although he has “very few memories of my mother”, her raucous laughter soundtracked his childhood, “her humor black as her dark curls”.
While his father had a passion for opera, Bono says as a child his parents didn’t encourage his interest in music. “My mother heard me sing publicly just once. I played the Pharaoh in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.’ It was really the part of an Elvis impersonator, so that’s what I did. Dressed up in one of my mother’s white trouser suits with some silvery sequins glued on, I curled my lip and brought the house down. Iris laughed and laughed. She seemed surprised that I could sing, that I was musical.”
After Iris’s death, Bono writes, “Cedarwood Road becomes its own opera”.
“Three men used to shouting at the television now shouting at one another. We live in rage and melancholy, in mystery and melodrama. The subject of the opera is the absence of a woman called Iris, and the music swells to stay the silence that envelops the house and the three men – one of whom is just a boy.”
The singer also writes about his ill-fated year at St Patrick’s Cathedral grammar school from the age of 11, where he played a prank on his Spanish teacher, Biddy, by lobbing “dog shit at her lunchbox” when she was eating on a park bench.
“Unsurprisingly, by the end of term Biddy wanted this little shit-throwing shit out of her hair, and it was suggested I might be happier elsewhere. In September, 1972, I enrolled at Mount Temple Comprehensive School.”
It was at Mount Temple – “a nondenominational, coeducational experiment” – where Bono met Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr and David Evans (AKA The Edge), whom he formed U2 with in 1976.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in June, Bono revealed he has a half-brother who was born after his father had an affair while his mother was still alive.
Bono said he later challenged his father about the affair. “I asked him, ‘Did he love my mother?’ He said, ‘Yes’. And so I asked him, ‘How could this happen?’ and he said it can and that he was trying to put it right, trying to do the right thing. He wasn’t apologising, he was just stating these are the facts. I am at peace with it.”
Bono’s father died in 2001.
Surrender is out 1 November through Penguin Random House.