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a treat for us city slickers, but we hated it. The local kids teased us about our English accents, threw stones at us and told us we had no place in their country. This was not conducive to snogging, so while Sarah racked up experience during her summer months, I got pelted with stones in Ireland. To top it all my auntie Nora was a bitter old witch.
    When Finn said he didn’t like black pudding – hardly surprising as it’s made up of boiled pig’s blood and pork fat – she ate the face off him. ‘Well, I’m sorry it’s not good enough for you. What do you get in London, then? Caviar and smoked salmon, is it?’
    ‘No, just cornflakes,’ mumbled Finn, squirming in his seat.
    ‘Oh, well, little Lord Fauntleroy, you’ll just have to do without breakfast. Coming over here refusing to eat good food, who do you think you are?’
    Auntie Nora could be really mean sometimes, but there was no point in telling my father because he wouldn’t have believed us. He thought she was wonderful because she had moved in with Granny O’Flaherty when she was sick and looked after her until she died.
    In the meantime, she had inherited Granny’s house and land, all of which my father had bought for his mother when he started doing well in London. And Granny had had the decency to die within three months of becoming ill – come to think of it, she’d probably died of black-puddingitis – so it wasn’t as if she had ruined her daughter’s life by taking ten years to die, thus thwarting her chances of getting married – not that Auntie Nora had had a hope in hell of getting married: all men were terrified of her.
    To my father and his brothers, Auntie Nora would always be the saintly one who had stayed behind to care for Granny while they had moved to London to work together, and that was all that mattered. The fact that she was a bitter, jealous old woman, who made our summers hell, was irrelevant. She was a martyr and my father had the utmost respect for martyrs. In fact, the only reason she had us to stay was money. He paid her a princely sum to immerse us in Irishness for three weeks every year.
    After the three weeks with Auntie Nora, my parents would come over on the ferry and take us on a two-week tour of the country. My father would bore us to death with the history of Ireland – always remembering to note the four hundred years of oppression by the English – and we would try to look interested and ask relevant questions. Well, Siobhan asked relevant questions. Finn and I played hangman.
    On our tour we would visit every dead relation’s grave, followed by every living relation’s house. The pre-arrival routine was always the same: before we got out of the car, my mother would try in vain to glue my hair down with her spit, sometimes aided and abetted by Finn gobbing on to my scalp. He thought it was hilarious. I didn’t. The spit never worked, but she never stopped trying. Eventually she would sigh, rustle in her bag and fish out an elastic band. The big brown ones that are supposed to be used to hold paper together, not human hair. No matter how hard I prayed, she always found one. Those elastic bands actually create knots and cause much suffering the world over when misused as hair ties. But on it would go, despite my squeals of pain – my mother was a determined woman when she wanted to be. Then a hankie would be produced, also spat on and our faces rubbed raw.
    Despite the mind-numbingly boring afternoon ahead of us, it was a relief to get out of the car and away from our saliva-frenzied mother. As my father rang the doorbell he would remind us to behave ourselves, accept only one biscuit and never, ever take the chocolate one, always the plain. This was Ireland, where chocolate biscuits didn’t grow on trees.
    The door would be flung open and in we’d troop to the kitchen, smiling politely and playing down our English accents. The uncle/aunt/second-cousin-twice-removed would proceed to tell my father how