Whose Life is it Anyway? Read Online Free PDF

voice down in case anyone heard him.
    ‘You should be proud of your heritage,’ he’d say. ‘You come from the land of saints and scholars. Hold your head high and proclaim your Irishness.’
    It was all very well for him, but I was a fourteen-year-old trying to blend in. Besides, I didn’t feel Irish. I was born and bred in London. England was the only home I had ever known and I liked it. What was the use of learning Gaelic? No one else spoke it. I hated everything Irish. It made us stand out and I was desperate to fit in.
    The problem was that my older sister Siobhan loved all things Irish. She also happened to be good at Irish dancing. In fact, she was brilliant. She’d come second in the Great Britain Irish-dancing Championship the year before and my father had almost burst with pride. He’d kept saying it was the best day of his life, until he felt the weight of my mother’s glare, and added that, of course, his wedding day had been the best day, this was the second best.
    I hated Irish dancing with a passion. It was about as cool as train-spotting. You had to wear ridiculous dresses that looked suspiciously like they had been made out of curtains – even Fräulein Maria in The Sound of Music would have had a hard time making dresses as hideous as those.
    Then there was the hair-curling. You had to have ringlets, no matter what. You were forced to sleep with damp hair in curlers with the big pins drilling holes through your skull. No sweet little rags tied in bows like Nellie Olsen in The Little House on the Prairie for us – it was Roller City. When you woke up the next day, in my case with fuzzy clumps of knotted hair from thrashing about in the bed trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in, the torture really began. The rollers had to be extracted from the knots, and my mother was not blessed with the patience of a saint or, say, Caroline Ingalls (neighbour of the Olsen family, wife of Charles and mother of Laura, Mary, Albert and Carrie). The rollers were ripped out of my head, pins and lumps of hair in tow, while she huffed and puffed about unruly hair and bloody ringlets.
    You see, secretly my mother hated doing the ringlets and found Irish-dancing competitions very dull, but she knew how much they meant to my father so she played along. I heard her telling my auntie Nuala one day that her idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon was to curl up on the couch with a good book. Instead of which, she spent all her weekends sitting in cold town halls watching curly dancing curtains jump about the stage with their hands pinned to their sides.
    Anyway, while my sister’s hair bounced out of the rollers in perfectly formed ringlets that Shirley Temple would have coveted, mine always hung in limp clumps. So I’d end up having them tied back in an enormous bow (made of the same bright green curtain material as the dress) and then we’d go to the competition. Siobhan, looking angelic, would leap gracefully about the stage, twisting and clicking her legs like Michael Flatley on speed, while I would try to do the same but end up like someone with a bad case of St Vitus’s Dance. I just couldn’t – no matter how hard I tried – keep my hands still. It wasn’t natural and they always flew up as I danced. I also wasn’t blessed with a huge amount of co-ordination, and dancing in general was clearly not my forte. I wasn’t sure what my forte was – if, indeed, I had one – but I was damn sure it wasn’t Irish dancing, and at fourteen years of age, time was running out and I wanted to explore other possibilities.
    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,