Don’t Tell Mummy Read Online Free PDF Page A

green. I spotted clusters of sheep huddled together for warmth in fields separated by low flint walls. We passed tiny hamlets where one small house, turned into a general shop, serviced the local community. Pigs with scrawnychickens pecking round their feet snuffled contently in the muddy yards of single-storey smallholdings. Children waved at our passing car and, waving back, I held Judy up to the window to see them.
    Deciding I liked the look of Ireland, my thoughts turned to my Irish family. Although I loved the maternal grandmother we’d left behind in England, I was looking forward to meeting new relatives. My mother had tried to describe my family to me but I couldn’t visualize them. They, I knew, had seen me as a baby, but I had no recollection of them.
    The fields were replaced by wide roads with large houses standing in landscaped grounds, which gave way to roads of compact bow-windowed semi-detached homes with their oblong gardens boxed in by neatly clipped hedges. Following them came rows of terraced houses with their flowerless shrubs protected by low walls.
    My father told us that we would soon be at his mother’s house where lunch would be waiting for us, which reminded me I was hungry. The breakfast of weak tea and toast had been hours before.
    A few minutes later all greenery vanished as the streets grew narrower and the houses darker, until we turned into a road of tiny red-brick houses, their front doors opening straight onto the pavements. This, my father told me, was the area where he’d grown up, and where members of my Irish family, including my grandparents, lived. I craned my neck and saw a street completely unlike anything I’d seen before.
    Women with headscarves tied over their curlers lent over the tops of their stable front doors, calling across to their neighbours while they watched snotty-nosed toddlersplaying in the gutters. Others, bare-legged, feet pushed into carpet slippers, leant against walls inhaling cigarettes through pale lips. Children in ragged clothes played cricket against wickets drawn on walls. Dogs of questionable parentage barked furiously, leaping in the air as they tried to catch balls. Men with braces over their collarless shirts walked aimlessly with their hands in their pockets and caps on their heads, while a few of them standing in a group were having what looked like an intense conversation.
    More dogs ran around the car as we parked and climbed wearily out. Not knowing if they were friendly or not I clutched Judy protectively in my arms. She repaid my concern by wagging her tail and wriggling to get down. Waiting to greet us was a short, plump white-haired woman who stood with her hands on her hips and a wide smile on her face.
    She seized my father in a fierce hug and then pushed open the door. We stepped past the steep uncarpeted staircase, straight from the pavement into the minute sitting-room of my grandparents’ house.
    The room was hot with a coal fire blazing brightly and crowded with the immediate members of my father’s family. My grandfather looked like a smaller, older version of him. He was a short, stocky man who, like my father, had thick wavy hair swept back from his face. But where my father’s waves glinted with dark red lights, Grandfather’s had faded into a pale yellowy grey. Like my father he had thickly fringed hazel-grey eyes but when he smiled it was to reveal yellow stained teeth, not the brilliant white gleam of my father’s mouth.
    My grandmother, an animated little ball of a woman dressed all in black, had white hair done up in a bun andapple-red cheeks beneath twinkling blue eyes. She fussed happily around us and I instantly liked her.
    ‘Antoinette,’ she exclaimed, ‘I haven’t seen you since you were a wee baby, and look at you now, a grown-up girl.’
    She pulled forward a young woman, whom she told me was my Aunt Nellie. Petite, with dark hair and brown eyes, she was my father’s only sister.
    Two more men, whom my