Recently my parents attended the funeral of a friend who was the father of ten children. Yes, ten. They were all there, plus grandkids and great-grandkids, filling up the church and paying tribute to the departed patriarch by whistling Ave Maria, a feat for which he was famed.
It seems nowadays that to have that number of children is the provenance of movie stars who cherry-pick needy infants from around the globe. On the other hand, for a regular Joe and Josie such fecundity will itself guarantee you a kind of freak celebrity status; witness America's 'Octomom', who is in the process of having a reality TV show made about her and her brood.
But among my parents' generation of Catholics, having a large family was nothing extraordinary. They themselves had seven (of which I am the last), and we knew many others with five, six, eight or more, though it was generally agreed that with 13 the Massinghams were starting to push the envelope.
For those of us challenged by raising one or two children, this seems the achievement of not merely a previous generation, but of another aeon. A time when Colossuses strode the earth, begetting and begatting; a mythological era, earlier and murkier than even that of Zeus and Hera, more akin to the ancient race of Titans who preceded them.
And as the remnant of an almost-vanished breed I feel I owe a debt to history to record something of the experience. Simply put, it was wonderful. A village within four walls, the sheer numbers meant that amidst the shifting alliances of siblings there was always someone on side and someone available.
When I appeared, my eldest brother and sister were dragooned as godparents, and while the joke was that our parents had run out of friends, it was a great gift to have a spread of older siblings able to offer a different kind of advice and sympathy than parents can. As adults we are all good friends, with the happy recognition that we actually like one another beyond the involuntary ties of biology and history.
But it is not just the children; large families also produce a different kind of parent. While the logistics of caring for a small army demanded certain simplicities and severities, there was also a freedom unimaginable to many children today. Vastly outnumbered, there was no chance