Don’t Tell Mummy: A True Story of the Ultimate Betrayal. Toni Maguire

and friends found one another.

      Everything looked and sounded so different as we searched for my father. We saw him simultaneously, coming towards us with a huge smile. He hugged my mother tightly as he kissed her, picked me up, swung me into his arms and kissed me loudly on each cheek. Judy sniffed around his feet suspiciously, and for once her tail didn’t wag.

      He said how much he’d missed us, how pleased he was we were there and how everyone was looking forward to seeing us. Picking up our suitcases, he led the way to a car.

      He’d borrowed it, he told us with a wink, for the last stage of our journey. My mother glowed with delight when she heard how he didn’t want her to travel to Coleraine by train, wasting precious moments when he could be with us.

      With me wrapped up warmly in a tartan rug on the back seat we started the final lap. He held her hand and I heard him say, ‘Everything’s going to be different, you’ll see, we’re going to be happy here. It’ll be good for Antoinette too, all the country air.’ My mother leant her dark head against his shoulder and he rested his auburn one briefly against it. That day their happiness was tangible. Young as I was, I could feel it.

      For the first time I felt excluded. My father kept his attention focused on my mother. I saw her smiles, which today were not for me, and knew they were absorbed in one another. A feeling of apprehension, as if I’d been given a warning of changes to come, settled on me as I watched the unfolding landscape.

      I saw the indigo Irish mountains, their peaks still shrouded in early morning mist. Across a rugged landscape squat, grey square houses, so unlike the pretty black and white thatched cottages of Kent, broke up the acres of 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 scrawny chickens 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 toddlers playing 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 and apple-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 father told me were his younger brothers, my uncles Teddy and Sammy, were next to be introduced. They obviously looked up to their big brother. Teddy, a whippet-thin, red-haired teenager with an infectious grin, was a young man impossible to dislike, whilst black-haired Sammy was several years older and more serious looking. Although seeming pleased to see us, Sammy was more restrained in his greeting.

      Teddy volunteered to take Judy for a much-needed walk and gratefully I handed over her lead. Feeling shy of my new surroundings, I did not wish to venture out just yet.

      My grandmother and Nellie bustled around us, putting food onto the table and pouring boiling water into an aluminium teapot.

      ‘Sit you down, now,’ Grandmother said. ‘Sure you must be hungry.’

      Chairs were hastily pulled up to a laden table and the relatives watched as my grandmother piled my plate high. There was an assortment of sandwiches, some filled with spam or corned beef, others with fish paste. There was brown soda bread and small, thick Irish pancakes spread liberally with butter and strawberry jam. A fruitcake followed, which must have used the whole family’s ration budget. I needed no encouragement to eat as I tucked in with gusto, surrounded by the friendly buzz of the adults’ conversation as they plied my parents with questions.

      When I could eat no more my eyes started closing as the heat of the room, the long journey and the food took their toll. I heard laughing adult voices exclaim that I had fallen asleep, then felt the strong arms of my father as he picked me up and carried me to a bedroom upstairs.

      The four o’clock twilight had fallen when my mother woke me. Sleepily, I allowed her to wash and dress me for another visit. It appeared that my entire father’s family wanted to see us, and I, used to my mother’s small family of one grandmother and a few rarely seen cousins, felt overwhelmed by trying to remember all the names I was hearing. Supper was to be served at my great-uncle’s house in the same road. Uncle Eddy and Aunt Lilly, as I was told to call them, and their two teenage daughters, Mattie and Jean, had laid out a special meal for us which, I was to learn, was typical Irish fare: thick slices of chicken, boiled ham coated in the sweet sheen of honey and mustard, hard-boiled eggs, bright red tomatoes and potatoes boiled in their skins. Home-made trifle and numerous cups of tea followed and again I felt the warmth of my father’s family wash over me.

      They asked about our life in England, how our journey had been and what my parents’ plans were now. Where were we going to live? Where was I going to school? I noticed their surprise when my mother informed them I was to be sent to a private school, as that was what I’d been used to. When I was older I realized that only scholarship pupils from Park Street, one of the poorest areas in Coleraine, would have attended the school my mother had chosen for me.

      They