Whose Life is it Anyway? by Sinéad Moriarty Read Free Book Online

they came to Ireland and tried to make everyone speak English and stop speaking Irish and all the people had to go to makeshift schools hidden in the hedges.’
    Brilliant. A stroke of genius. I was delighted with myself.
    My mother, despite herself, began to laugh. ‘You are some chancer, Niamh O’Flaherty. Nice try but you’re still not wearing your jeans. Now, come here to me with that hair.’
    ‘ Noooooo , Mum – please let me do my own hair. You’re too rough with the brush.’
    ‘OK, but I want you downstairs in ten minutes with your dress on and your hair neat.’
    ‘OK,’ I grumbled.
    ‘Oh, and by the way, Niamh,’ she said, turning towards me as she closed the door, ‘I wouldn’t change a fuzzy hair on your head.’
    That was the problem with my mother: she always made you love her, even when you wanted to hate her.
∗
    When I came downstairs half an hour later with a hundred and fifty clips keeping my fuzzy hair in check, Finn was standing in the hall looking grumpy in a shirt and dickie-bow. I felt much better. I might look bad but he looked ridiculous.
    ‘Oh, Danny boy…’ The doorbell tinkled. The relations had arrived.
    I answered the door and my cheeks were then squeezed by my aunties, my head patted by my uncles, and I was told for the zillionth time that I was the spitting image, head cut off, twin separated at birth from Granny O’Flaherty. I had only ever seen one picture of my father’s mother and she was a boot, so I was none too pleased to be constantly reminded that I looked like her.
    After the squeezing and patting, the grown-ups went into the kitchen to gossip and have a few drinks. Us youngsters were expected to entertain ourselves while making sure our younger cousins didn’t choke on their food, drink too much Coke, eat too many sweets, go into the garden unaccompanied, go upstairs unaccompanied, go to the loo unaccompanied, burn themselves, cut themselves, bump their heads or interrupt their parents while they were getting sloshed.
    I had only one cousin I liked. Maura was a year older than me and was also rubbish at Irish dancing. But she had got out of having to do it by feigning weak ankles. Her mother, my auntie Nuala – by far the most progressive of the bunch – had helped her out. She’d lied to my uncle Tadhg and told him that the doctor said poor old Maura’s ankles just wouldn’t hold up to the clicking and jigging.
    Ever since Maura had told me that story I had had the utmost respect for Auntie Nuala. She was a legend in my eyes. I wished my mother could have been a bit more sympathetic to my plight. But she very rarely disagreed with my father. The only time I could remember her shouting at him was a year ago when my father suggested that boarding-school in Ireland would be good for me. They had just come back from a parent-teacher meeting at school at which Sister Patricia told them I had said Ireland was a backward place full of thick people with red hair.
    My father was furious and mortally embarrassed that a child of his would be so ignorant. He said England was corrupting me, and it was time for me to go back to my roots and see Ireland for what it really was: a beautiful country full of wonderful, warm people with deep souls and big hearts. I sat under the stairs listening to their conversation and sobbed. My life was over. But then my mother saved me. For once, she turned on him and said, in a scary voice, that over her dead body would a child of hers be sent away to boarding-school. She said I was a great girl who was just trying to find her way. I didn’t mean to insult anyone, she said, I was only rebelling as all teenagers do.
    ‘It’s hard for the children, Mick. Their whole lives have been spent in England. It’s confusing for them to be living in one country and expected to behave as if they live in another. Kids don’t want to be different, they don’t like standing out. I know you want them to appreciate where they’ve come from, but you