Anne's blog

   We have holes in our socks and shoes. We wear short trousers until we’re fourteen. We wear short trousers until we’re fourteen. We wear the same shirt day and night. It’s the shirt for school, for football, for climbing walls, for Mass. When I sit down in church, people smell the air and move away. If Mam gets a ticket for a new shirt at the St Vincent de Paul, the old shirt becomes a towel. It hangs wet over the chair by the tap for months.

  We go to school through the lanes and back streets so we don’t meet the boys from the rich school. They wear wool jackets, school scarves, shirts, ties and shiny new boots. We know that they will go to university, take over the family business, run the government, run the word. We’ll be the boys on bicycles bringing their letters and bread. We’ll be driving lorries and bringing their coal. Our sisters will look after their children and clean their floors.

  Grandma’s neighbour, Mrs Purcell, has the only radio in her lane. I love the radio. On Sunday nights I sit outside her house and listen. You can hear plays by Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare’s the best of all, even if he is English. He’s as good as potatoes with butter. There are strange plays about Greeks too, who pull out their eyes because they marry their mothers by mistake. I want a radio. 

  We haven’t paid for our house in Roden Lane for the past four weeks.

  ‘I don’t have money for one week. Where will I get money for four weeks?’says Mam. She sits by the dead fire up in Italy. There’s no wood to heat water for tea until Michael pulls a loose bit of wood from the wall. ‘One more bit and no more,’She says the next morning. She says that for two weeks until there’s no more wall.

  When the rent man comes for the four weeks’ money, he says, ‘God in Heaven, where’s the other room?

You had two rooms up there. Where’s the wall?’

  ‘I don’t remember a wall,’ says Grandma, who’s come to visit.

  ‘I’ve been in this job for forty years,’he says,’and I’ve never seen anything like this. Where’s the other room?’

  Mam truns to us.’Do any of you remember a wall?’

  ‘Is that the one we burned on the fire?’ says Michael.

  ‘That’s it,’ says the man. ‘You’re out. One week and you’re out of this house.’

  Grandma says she has no room for us, but our cousin Laman Griffin could give us a room. He’s lived on his own since his mother died.

  Grandma takes us to his house. It’s two miles and it pours with rain all the way. Lamen Griffin is in bed and there’s a whisky smell. She wakes him up and tells him why we’re there.

  ‘All right, all right,’ he says.

  He moves to the floor above and we have the beds in the kitchen. There are no stairs in the house so we move the table to the wall. In the morning, Laman Griffin climbs down onto the table. He gets his bicycle and goes to work.

  We explore the house. There are boxes everywhere, newspapers, magazines, bits of food, cups, empty tins. It’s got its own toilet outside and a garden full of old stuff.

‘Laman Griffin used to be an officer in the Royal Navy,’ Man tells us. ‘But he started drinking and they threw him out. Now look at him. Dirty, working on the roads for the electricity company, living in a house that’s a disgrace. He hasn’t moved a thing since his mother died.’

  We have to clean up so that we can live in this place. I find a thick book called Pears Encyclopedia. I read it day and night. It tells you everything about everything and that’s all I want to know.

  Laman Griffin comes home at six every night except Friday, has his tea and goes to bed. On Fridays he comes home drunk. He brings his dinner in his coat pockets. A big piece of meat with blood all over it, potatoes and a bottle of beer. Mam cooks his dinner. He keeps his coat on, sits at the table and eats the meat with his hands. He clean his hands on his coat. He’s too drunk to climb up to his room, so he sleeps on the kitchen floor by the fire. On Saturdays he goes to bed at one in the afternoon and stays there till Monday morning. He lies in bed smoking cigarettes and reading books from the library all day. He throws money down for Mam to get his food. He throws down his library card for me to get his books.