My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress by Christina McKenna Read Free Book Online

didn’t seem to think that proficiency in Irish dancing was such an impressive asset, so the potential in my little legs was never realised. It might have meant an important confidence booster but it was not to be. Culture of any description did not figure large in Lisnamuck.
    Those rare and delightful intrusions – Miss Heron’s slide show, Varnie’s magic, Mr O’Leary’s dancing – exemplified a world I seldom glimpsed. They each afforded me flashes of experience I should have had in greater measure: joy, merriment, freedom and lightness. Are they not the very things a child needs in order to grow in spirit?
    There seemed to be so much anger in the air in my childhood. I felt the same degree of hostility both at home and at school. The only conclusion I could draw at that early age was that I was causing it. I internalised this and grew to believe that I was wicked and unworthy, and therefore helpless in the face of it; I was left not knowing how to make things right and all those angry adults happy.
    School was not all doom and gloom; there was at least one hour of the week when I was happy, 60 preciousminutes when Master Bradley did not hold sway. For the last hour on a Friday afternoon we got to do needlework with Miss McKeague.
    Nothing could compare with the relief I felt at being excused from the Master’s presence with the words, ‘Would the girls now slip quietly into their sewing.’ The word ‘quietly’ was superfluous here: each of us was a model of subordination. Yet the Master always felt the need to remind us just the same.
    In Miss’s sewing class I was forever knitting a red scarf. This joyous labour seemed to stretch over four years, with a multitude of dropped stitches and tangled knots along the way.
    We would sit in a semicircle round the stove, our shins mottling in the heat, our pink faces lowered and tongue-tips appearing through lips tightened with effort. And, as the crackling fire and clacking needles carried on a noisy dispute with each other, it didn’t matter if the sun shone or the rain fell; for that hour of the fearsome school week I was happy.
    I was happy because I was in safe territory, away from the ill-tempered jolts and stabbing gaze of the Master. In Miss’s room I could drop a stitch without the risk of being beaten. Her customary reaction was to gently free the wool from my hands and repair the damage as best she could.
    With Miss I knew I could make mistakes and be forgiven, that I could ask permission to go to the toilet and not be refused. My limbs felt looser, my head lighter, and my words flowed more freely.
    As I sat there I sometimes thought about the boys and girls who had, like me, sat at that stove – or one very much like it – trying to make sense of that little part of Ulster we inhabited. This was the school my parents and relatives had endured all those years before. Had theirteachers been any different? Perhaps. I wondered if they, as children, had sat there like me, tightened in by unknowing, with all their dreams before them ‘spread out like a spring-woken tree’.

U NHAPPY H OME
    O ur house stood in the shadow of the Glenshane mountain range, three miles east of predominantly Catholic Draperstown, two miles north of Protestant Tobermore, and five or so miles from Maghera, which nurtured a risky mix of both. Such clearly delineated boundaries along lines of religion seemed just as important back then as they are now. The people of the locality liked to know where they – and their neighbours – stood.
    This South Derry region is mainly farming country, studded with freeholds that have witnessed generation-long internecine conflict. Land and religion are of equal importance to the Ulster Catholics. This obsession with the soil is rooted in the dark past, when their forebears, being dispossessed during the Plantations, had to buy back their plots from the Protestant British. The sons of