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

have to let them breathe. You’re suffocating them with Irishness. I love Ireland, too, and I miss it, but we left for a reason. We left because there were no opportunities and the country was in a deep recession. We came here to England and made a success of things. This country has been very good to us.’
    ‘I know it has, but I came over here out of necessity, not choice. I want my children to grow up in an unspoilt land, raised with the morals I was raised with. I don’t want them running wild. I’m trying to protect them, Annie.’
    ‘Children need to make mistakes, Mick. It’s part of growing up. If you over-protect them, they’ll rebel. Ease up on Niamh. She’s a good girl, just different from Siobhan – she’s more strong-willed and stubborn. And she didn’t lick those traits off a stone. The two of you are very alike. That’s why you clash.’
    ‘I’m not stubborn,’ my father said, sounding genuinely shocked.
    ‘You’re the most stubborn man I ever met,’ my mother laughed, ‘but tonight, you’ve met your match. I’m digging my heels in. There’ll be no more talk of boarding-school.’
    I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was safe. But I’d have to be careful from now on and try to be more positive about my Irishness in front of my father.
    As my birthday party progressed, us elder cousins sat around the TV room playing records and giving out about our parents, taking it in turns to lunge after the sprinting toddlers and trying to stop them crying when we blocked their exit routes. After much experimenting, we discovered that stuffing marshmallows into their mouths was a far more effective way of stifling their tears than putting our hands over their gobs and watching them turn blue.
    After a few hours the parents trooped in, some reeking of booze, and told us we were marvellous kids. They hugged us and planted slobbery kisses on our cheeks while congratulating each other on being great parents.
    Then the sing-song began, as always led by my father, singing ‘Danny Boy’. All the uncles and aunts cheered when he howled out the last line: ‘Oh, Danny boy, I looooooooove you so.’ Then Uncle Tadhg sang ‘The Fields of Athenry’ and everyone tut-tutted about the heartbreak of emigration.
    Siobhan was called upon to dance. She pretended she didn’t want to, and made everyone beg, even though she already had her shoes on. It’d make you sick. Maura rolled her eyes to heaven and we giggled. My uncle Donal took out his fiddle and accompanied Siobhan as she leapt and whirled around the room to the clapping and whooping that accompanied her.
    All the parents then got up, some a little more unsteady on their feet than others, and twirled each other round with great gusto, then dragged us up to join in. Although I pretended to Maura that I found it embarrassing to see my parents dancing together, I actually loved it. They were wonderful. They never missed a beat and my mother looked so young and carefree as my father twirled her this way and that as they relived their courting days in the dance halls of London.
    After an hour or two of dancing, singing and poetry-reciting, the whiskey came out and things began to deteriorate. My uncle Donal said what a saint my grandmother O’Flaherty had been, and my father and his brothers nodded and sniffled into their hankies while my mother and aunts sighed.
    From what I could gather during my years of covert eavesdropping under the stairs while my mother and Auntie Nuala bitched about Granny O’Flaherty in the kitchen, she’d been a right old witch. Not only was she ugly (and me the image of her!) but apparently she was scabby and rude to her daughters-in-law.
    ‘She was an oul bitch, so she was,’ said Auntie Nuala, cutting to the chase. ‘Sure the first time I met her she said to me, “I think you forgot to put on your skirt.” Imagine the cheek of her! Tadhg, of course, then went from thinking I was fabulous to thinking I looked like a cheap