Daisy's Wars Read Free Page B

native Geordies always blamed this, as everything else, on ‘the Irish’. Whenever she met with this kind of bias, Niamh would point out that if the Irish were kept in
low-paid jobs they could only afford the worst housing. So it was from necessity, not choice, that they lived in over-populated tenements with no sewers or drains, and was it any wonder some of
them drank out of despair and became even more maudlin about ‘home’?
    Secretly, though, Niamh disapproved of drink. She thought it a great failing of the Irish, particularly the males, and she had no time for the false sentiment it brought out in them, though she
would never have admitted it outside her own four walls. Her own father in Ireland had been a case in point. He drank to escape his circumstances but he drank his wife and children out of any hopes
they had of improving their situation.
    Niamh had never forgotten that: it was partly why she had seen moving to Newcastle as a step away from that attitude all those years ago. She soon learned that it didn’t matter where they
lived, though. The Irish saw themselves as defeated victims wherever they were, and turning to the bottle was too often their only response to their problems. It wouldn’t happen to her
children, she decided. She would make sure they understood they had to help themselves; and the way to do that was through learning. ‘Now, her I do remember, her I will never forget,’
Michael said with a smile. ‘My, now, there was a busy woman for you. No time for slackers, no time for complainers, she believed in getting on by helping herself. “Don’t feel
sorry for yourself,” she used to say. “Make something of yourself instead.” And all her children learned to read and write, including my father, her youngest. I don’t know
if you remember your Granda Paddy, Daisy, but he always had a book about him, didn’t matter what it was or how many hands it had gone through before his had touched it. He always had a
book.’
    ‘Your Granny Niamh called him her “wee sponge”, didn’t she?’ Daisy replied right on cue, knowing how her father liked to talk about his family.
    Michael nodded, smiling at the memory. ‘Because he read everything he could get his hands on, he just soaked everything up. She was a wonderful woman, you know. She fought for everything
she had, every inch of progress her family made was down to her. And she only took in Irish lodgers, that was her way of fighting back.’
    ‘Well, they were the most needy, weren’t they?’ Daisy said, like a response to the priest at Mass. ‘If she didn’t take them in and provide decent lodgings, who
would?’
    ‘Exactly,’ Michael replied. ‘She was helping men coming over from the ould country like her husband had, and keeping her family fed while she was doing it.’
    So that’s where the practical but helpful and straight-talking gene had come from, Daisy would think. Not from the Sheridans at all, but from Granny Niamh, who had named her Daisy.
    The old woman hadn’t been dying of any disease. She was simply worn out, and the newborn child had been taken to her on her deathbed, where Niamh had insisted on sitting up and holding
her.
    ‘My, look at that wee face,’ the old woman had said as she looked at her new great-granddaughter, ‘as bright and fresh as a daisy.’
    Those were the last words Niamh ever spoke. Shortly after holding the newest arrival she lapsed into unconsciousness and died two days later, and so the child had been named Daisy Niamh in her
honour.
    If Daisy had chosen her own name it would’ve been something glamorous, like Kay, perhaps, who had been named for their mother, Kathleen; but as it had come from Great-Granny Niamh she had
decided long ago that she could put up with it. The fact was that Kay suited her sister. It sounded feminine, bright and sparkling somehow, just as she was on stage. Or perhaps because of her act
her name had been touched by an invisible magic wand