I decided I’d have to tell my father so I ran my speech by Siobhan and Finn.
‘Dad, I’m sorry but I don’t want to do any more Irish-dancing lessons. I’m not good at it and I hate it,’ I said, frowning into the mirror.
‘You must be mad,’ said Siobhan, admiring her legs. ‘He’ll do his nut if you stop. You know what he’s like.’
‘Niamh,’ my younger brother, Finn, said, ‘you’re going to have to come up with something better than that. Otherwise he’ll hit the roof. Think of a good reason why you can’t do it any more – like a new hobby. Tell him you want to take tin-whistle lessons to learn the old Irish songs, or concentrate on camogie or something like that.’
My brother Finn had got out of having to do Irish dancing by excelling at hurley. He said Irish dancing was for fags and there was no way he was going to prance around on a stage in a velvet suit. He was sympathetic to my plight.
‘But I don’t want to play a made-up Irish game where you run after a little ball with a stupid stick,’ I wailed. ‘I want to do tap-dancing classes with Sarah. She said it’s brilliant.’
‘You’re a sucker for punishment,’ said Finn, in alarm. ‘Look, bring it up at dinner tonight and I’ll do what I can to help you out. But he’s going to go mad.’
Later that day, I waited until my mother had served everyone their apple crumble, then pounced.
‘Dad,’ I said, my voice shaking, ‘you know the way I’m not very good at Irish dancing and Siobhan is brilliant and wins all the competitions? Well, there’s something I think I could be really good at and Sarah’s started lessons already and says it’s great fun. So I was wondering if maybe I could stop Irish dancing and take up tap instead. If that’s OK with you.’
Silence from my father. My mother shook her head to warn me to stop before I made it worse and Siobhan was running her knife across her throat, mouthing, ‘You’re dead.’ Finn sank back into his chair.
My father turned a deep shade of red, put his spoon down, leant over to me and roared, ‘No daughter of mine will be prancing around in her underwear to that racy black music. You will continue with your Irish dancing and you will take extra lessons so that you can improve like your sister Siobhan who never gives me a day of trouble. I did not move to this country twenty years ago, with nothing but the shirt on my back, to raise children with no respect for their heritage and culture. I have worked myself to the bone…’
That was when he launched into his usual litany: ‘I had no money… I came over to London at sixteen years of age and worked on a building site… I saved my money, I started up my own company and now employ my four brothers and sixty other Irishmen… I didn’t want to leave my beautiful country, but I had no choice.’ Normally at this point tears welled in his eyes. ‘I had to make my way and help out the family… I was lucky enough to meet a lovely Irish girl and settle down. You are Irish through and through and don’t you ever forget it.
‘Niamh,’ he said sternly, ‘I will have no more of this nonsense. I don’t want you seeing that young Sarah Cooke any more. She’s a bad influence on you.’
‘You can’t stop me seeing her – she’s my only real friend. I promise I won’t bring up tap again,’ I squealed, feeling sick at the prospect of not seeing Sarah. I’d die without her. She kept me sane. Although her parents were atheists, they had sent their daughter to an all-girls’ Catholic convent school because it had excellent exam results. They were very cool: she was allowed to watch Top of the Pops and Dallas. I was only allowed watch Top of the Pops when Foster and Allen were on it in their leprechaun suits with my father howling along to ‘A Bunch of Thyme’. And Dallas was considered almost pornographic in our house, although I had caught my mother watching it once or twice when Dad was out.
Sarah went on holidays to Brighton and Cornwall, snogged handsome English boys and had adventures. Her parents let her live the life of a normal teenager. For our summer holidays, we were always shipped over to my aunt Nora’s farm in Ballyban to help milk the cows and fetch the eggs. It was really boring. Her house stank of cow dung and there were flies everywhere. Getting up at six to milk cows was supposed to be a treat for us city slickers, but we hated it. The local kids teased us about our English accents, threw stones at us and told us we had no place in their country. This was not conducive to snogging, so while Sarah racked up experience during her summer months, I got pelted with stones in Ireland. To top it all my auntie Nora was a bitter old witch.
When Finn said he didn’t like black pudding – hardly surprising as it’s made up of boiled pig’s blood and pork fat – she ate the face off him. ‘Well, I’m sorry it’s not good enough for you. What do you get in London, then? Caviar and smoked salmon, is it?’
‘No, just cornflakes,’ mumbled Finn, squirming in his seat.
‘Oh, well, little Lord Fauntleroy, you’ll just have to do without breakfast. Coming over here refusing to eat good food, who do you think you are?’
Auntie Nora could be really mean sometimes, but there was no point in telling my father because he wouldn’t have believed us. He thought she was wonderful because she had moved in with Granny O’Flaherty when she was sick and looked after her until she died.
In the meantime, she had inherited Granny’s house and land, all of which my father had bought for his mother when he started doing well in London. And Granny had had the decency to die within three months of becoming ill – come to think of it, she’d probably died of black-puddingitis – so it wasn’t as if she had ruined her daughter’s life by taking ten years to die, thus thwarting her chances of getting married – not that Auntie Nora had had a hope in hell of getting married: all men were terrified of her.
To my father and his brothers, Auntie Nora would always be the saintly one who had stayed behind to care for Granny while they had moved to London to work together, and that was all that mattered. The fact that she was a bitter, jealous old woman, who made our summers hell, was irrelevant. She was a martyr and my father had the utmost respect for martyrs. In fact, the only reason she had us to stay was money. He paid her a princely sum to immerse us in Irishness for three weeks every year.
After the three weeks with Auntie Nora, my parents would come over on the ferry and take us on a two-week tour of the country. My father would bore us to death with the history of Ireland – always remembering to note the four hundred years of oppression by the English – and we would try to look interested and ask relevant questions. Well, Siobhan asked relevant questions. Finn and I played hangman.
On our tour we would visit every dead relation’s grave, followed by every living relation’s house. The pre-arrival routine was always the same: before we got out of the car, my mother would try in vain to glue my hair down with her spit, sometimes aided and abetted by Finn gobbing on to my scalp. He thought it was hilarious. I didn’t. The spit never worked, but she never stopped trying. Eventually she would sigh, rustle in her bag and fish out an elastic band. The big brown ones that are supposed to be used to hold paper together, not human hair. No matter how hard I prayed, she always found one. Those elastic bands actually create knots and cause much suffering the world over when misused as hair ties. But on it would go, despite my squeals of pain – my mother was a determined woman when she wanted to be. Then a hankie would be produced, also spat on and our faces rubbed raw.
Despite the mind-numbingly boring afternoon ahead of us, it was a relief to get out of the car and away from our saliva-frenzied mother. As my father rang the doorbell he would remind us to behave ourselves, accept only one biscuit and never, ever take the chocolate one, always the plain. This was Ireland, where chocolate biscuits didn’t grow on trees.
The door would be flung open and in we’d troop to the kitchen, smiling politely and playing down our English accents. The uncle/aunt/second-cousin-twice-removed would proceed to tell my father how badly they were doing, despite the new extension they had just built, doubling the size of their house. My father would nod and sigh and say it was hard
all right, he remembered the bad times, and could he help at all? ‘No, no, Mick, not at all. Jaysus, you don’t think we’re looking for money off you? Go away out of that, not at all. Sure it’s just lovely to see you and hear you’re doing so well over there,’ they would say
‘Well, I’d like to help. After all, family is family,’ my poor, generous fool of a father would say.
‘Not at all, Mick. Sure it’s a bit of a struggle all right but we’re managing to keep our heads above water. We couldn’t take anything from you. I see things are going well for you, though, with the big new car you’ve outside. Well, sure isn’t it great that one of us is doing so well anyway?’
‘Things are good all right and sure isn’t that why I want to help? How much would tide you over?’ my father would say, opening his wallet, while my mother sat rigid with a fake smile plastered on her face.
Ten minutes later, after many ‘No, no, Mick, not at all’s and ‘Oh, go on, now, let me help,’s the relation would mention a large figure and my father would dutifully fork out the money. Whereupon another ten minutes of ‘Oh, now, aren’t you very good to us, Mick? When we get sorted out we’ll pay you back’ and ‘Not at all don’t mention it again’ would ensue.
Then my mother would nudge me, I’d yawn (as previously arranged) and she’d say we had to go because the children were tired and we’d pile into the car with the relations thumping the roof and sticking their heads in the windows, blessing us, wishing us a safe journey and thanking my father again as they planned how to spend their winnings.
Afterwards in the car my mother would give out yards to my father for being so generous to his sponging relations. ‘They’ll bleed you dry, Mick.’
‘Ah, come on, now. If you can’t help your family when things are going well what type of a person are you?’
‘Are you blind? Did you not see the extension they’ve had done? You’re a fool, Mick, they know you’re a soft touch. We needed that money to put towards getting a new cooker,’ my mother fumed.
‘They’d do the same for me if I was stuck.’
My mother rolled her eyes. ‘They’d do no such thing. You’re too kind.’
‘Better than being mean,’ said my father, smiling at her. ‘Sure isn’t that one of the things you love about me.’
She sighed and smiled.
The best part of the holiday was going to visit Granny and Granddad Byrne in Dublin. My mother’s parents were great. They were the type of grandparents you wished for, like Charlie’s sweet old granddad in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They didn’t have much but what they had they were happy to share.
My mother was an only child – unheard of in Ireland in the 1950s when a pill was something you took to cure a disease, not prevent childbirth – and was doted on by her parents. They also thought their grandchildren were wonderful. We could do no wrong. But the best thing was that they seemed to like me best!
It’s not that I ever thought my parents didn’t love me, it’s just that I was third in line when the love was being dished out. Siobhan, as the eldest and most perfect child – Irish-dancing champion, fluent in Gaelic (or so they thought), going out with a boy from an Irish family (both sets of grandparents had emigrated to London, no half-measures there) – was my father’s pet. My brother Finn, being the youngest and a boy, had my mother’s love pretty much sewn up. That left me with slim pickings.
I knew I was a disappointment to my father because I was a terrible Irish dancer, spoke no Gaelic and, truth be told, I wasn’t the most attractive child you ever saw. I had wiry brown hair while Siobhan had sleek auburn locks (except when they weren’t sleek because they were soft bouncy ringlets in honour of some championship event). She also had cat green eyes and I had big round brown ones, like a cow’s. Finn, in fairness to him, was no looker. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes and big brown freckles all over his body. But he had a cheeky grin and lots of confidence because he was good at hurley, so somehow he got away with it.
I think my grandparents felt sorry for me. Granny was always telling me I had great potential. She never specified in what area, but it still made me feel better. I didn’t feel like a complete loser when I was with them. They lived in a small house on the outskirts of Dublin and when we arrived we were made feel like the most important guests in the world. They always had our favourite food waiting for us. Siobhan liked potato cakes (she would, wouldn’t she?), Finn liked roast chicken and I liked bacon butties with HP brown sauce, much to my father’s disgust.
Granny Byrne always had HP brown sauce especially for me and I loved her for it. She was also the first person I confided in about my hatred of Irish dancing.
So it was Granny Byrne I called after my row with my father.
‘I know it’s hard, Niamh, darling, I never liked it much myself. Maybe you could say you were going to Irish dancing on Saturdays and do tap instead. Didn’t you say they were in the same building?’
‘You mean lie to Dad?’ I said, shocked. Grannies didn’t encourage their grandchildren to lie to their parents.
‘No, not lie to him,’ Granny Byrne said, back-pedalling furiously. ‘But maybe you could do a tap class after the Irish-dancing class. You wouldn’t have to tell your dad you were doing it. Just keep it to yourself.’
Granny Byrne was a genius.
6
For the next three months, using money I was given on my confirmation, I tapped my way enthusiastically through Saturday mornings. Fred Astaire wasn’t exactly shaking in his boots, but I was a lot better at tap than at reels and jigs. I told my parents I was staying late to practise my Irish dancing and everyone was happy… except Father Hogan who said lying to my parents was a sin when I confessed my porky-pies. But I knew he was bound by the sacred gagging order of the confessional so my secret was safe.
For my fifteenth birthday my parents decided to throw me a party at home. I know it may sound ungrateful, but I was dreading it. I knew the format. I’d seen it enough times at my cousins’ parties.
My three uncles, Donal, Neil, Tadhg, plus their wives and children, all came over. I actually had another uncle – ‘poor Pat’ – but he was on holidays again. Uncle Pat was a roaring alcoholic who went to dry out at least once a year. The brothers chipped in for his treatments, although they were getting fed up because this was his fifth time. The adults tried to protect us from Uncle Pat’s condition by telling us he was on holidays, but we all knew he was in rehab.
There were sixteen cousins altogether and we ranged in age from seventeen (my sister Siobhan being the eldest) to two. They descended upon the house bearing gifts. Some brought the type of presents a fifteen-year-old girl would want, like luminous pink leg-warmers, Duran Duran’s latest album and some fingerless lace gloves. The rest gave crossword-puzzle books and Irish-dancing socks.
My mother forced me to wear a dress. I wanted to wear my jeans with the rip in the knee. I was fifteen, for God’s sake. But no amount of pleading and sulking worked.
‘Niamh,’ my mother said, grabbing my arm and frogmarching me back up the stairs, ‘only tinkers wear trousers with rips in them. Now, put on your blue dress and stop whingeing. Why can’t you be more like your sister?’
Bloody Siobhan and her bloody perfectness! I was sick of her.
‘I’m not Siobhan,’ I roared, losing my temper. ‘Stop telling me to be like her. I’m a different person. Sister Patricia says you should accept people the way they are and not try to change them like the English did when 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.
Whose Life is it Anyway? Page 4
