Anne's Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

I felt exactly the same as I did before I went there. My condition hadn't changed one jot but the doctors said I could leave the convalescent home. Heaven knows why. Maybe they thought it would be more beneficial for me to be reunited with my family. If so, no explanation was ever given for my release. I went to stay with Aunt Lily for a couple of days before her husband Alfie, and their daughter Trudie, came with me on the boat to Holyhead. Almost as soon as I arrived in England, I went to the Victoria Hospital in Blackpool for a complete medical check-up – my heart, my blood, everything. Apart from the deep-seated murmur, they could find absolutely nothing wrong with me, an opinion that remains the same to this day.
    I hadn't been out of the four walls of the convalescent home for a year and a half, never mind the unfamiliarity of finding myself in an alien country. The drive from Holyhead seemed to go on for ever through a landscape where everything looked strange and foreign. I tried concentrating on what was going on inside the car in an attempt to anchor myself to something – or someone – familiar. I remember laughing at Trudie while she repeatedly licked her fingers and wet her hair as she put in rollers. I'd never seen anything like it. As we eventually reached Preston, the huge volume of traffic was at a virtual standstill, something I hadn't encountered before. I was so naive that, as we approached Blackpool, I was fully expecting to see an enormous black pool.
    Uncle Fred's house was a redbrick semi and posher than where we'd lived on the Raheny estate in Dublin. It was in an area of Blackpool called Layton, some of which was quite smart and some a bit run-down. Uncle Fred's house was in the nicer bit. There was a small front garden and a little raised path leading to the front door. There were two living rooms downstairs and a long, narrow kitchen leading to a yard beyond. The three bedrooms were upstairs. One of them was Uncle Fred's, another was my parents' and Denise, Maureen, Linda, Bernie and I were all in the third. Tommy and Brian slept in the back lounge downstairs. There was also a bathroom and toilet.
    The culture shock was acute. It was pandemonium.
    On top of it all, it was odd being reunited with my brothers and sisters, very odd. Denise still tells a story about my mother saying to her something to the effect that she wouldn't be needed any more because I was coming home. She would no longer be the eldest daughter. What Mum meant was that Denise would be relieved of some of the duties of helping look after the little ones, but she was terribly hurt by this comment. That helped to explain, I think, why Denise seemed rather resentful of me when I got to Blackpool and was standoffish with me at first.
    Generally speaking, my brothers and sisters seemed rather wild, all yapping and scrapping the whole time, almost like strangers to me for a while. They weren't mean to me, and they tried their hardest to include me, but I'd grown unused to the rough and tumble of family life and I'd missed out on so many shared experiences, especially those of Denise and Maureen, the two sisters closest to me. I was like a little mouse after all those months being shut away. My confidence had been sapped to the point where I almost didn't feel like one of the family. I felt very young for my age.
    I realise now that I was shy in their company, which may be a funny thing to say about your own family but it was true. In time, though, I began to be rehabilitated back into family life. Activities that involved all of us were a real help. My dad was keen on Monopoly, so we'd have evenings when the whole family would play. Or we'd all join in card games: Snap or Rummy or Whist, or something called Uno. He always had time for us all. Sometimes, we'd sit and listen as he read us stories from the Bible.
    It was alreadv the middle of the Christmas term, so everyone was at school, with the exception of Bernie who was still a