Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored Read Online Free

that must’ve been for my dad and my mum in one bed, with my mum’s sister with me and Jimmy in the other. That’s up close and comfortable – not!
    But I loved Auntie Pauline. She was like the big sister I never had – fantastically warm, but at the same time absolutely remote, in the Barry style. Once Shitty Tom died, we had an extra
room for Auntie Pauline, which is where Uncle George came in. I loved that fella. He was so great.
    At Christmas we had to go to church but Auntie Pauline refused. By the time we came back, she’d gnawed the heads off all the toy soldiers I’d just been given as presents. To this
day, I don’t know why. When George came back, he’d bought me a house-building kit on the principles of Lego, but obviously cheaper. He opened that up and stole away my tears. I played
with him all afternoon and I’ll never forget it, because he spent such a long time teaching me things and got me involved.
    After a few years, he married Pauline and they moved to Canada. I was very impressed at the wedding for so many different reasons, chiefly for meeting George’s brother. I can’t
remember his name, but he was an absolute Celtic hooligan with a 45-degree crevice across his face. He was like, ‘Aye reet. Ah goat hit wi’ an axe!’ Gosh, how impressive!
That’s a fucking street fighter, mate.
Wowzers!
    My mother was devoted to making me an intelligent human being. It was her who taught me to read and write at four, a long time before school. By the time I finally got to Eden Grove Primary
School, a Catholic school, it was a very serious problem for the nuns, because I was left-handed, and fluent. It was like, sit in the corner and wait for the rest of the class to catch up. The
indolence crept in, and – for whatever reason, even though I was very shy and quiet – resentment from the nuns. So they’d hit me with, ‘Oh, you’re left-handed,
that’s the sign of the devil.’ What kind of message is that, to give a five-year-old who can already read and write? What evil, spiteful nonsense is that?
    That followed through bitterly, this absolute dislike of me, forbeing a smarty-pants or whatever. They’d beat you with the sharp edge of a ruler on your right hand
but, because I wrote with my left hand, they hit me on the left . . . to make sure that I’d write with my right hand! But you can’t do that. That’s the way my brain’s wired.
And it was utterly ridiculous because I didn’t need reading or writing lessons. I’d done that at home.
    Eden Grove was a small school directly connected to a Catholic church – all the upstairs classes led in through a gang-plank into the church, and the downstairs ones through a courtyard,
so you really couldn’t avoid it. Everything was holier-than-thou, and everything you did was wrong and God would punish you – such a peculiar attitude. It wasn’t anything
I’d been expecting, up to the age of five, just how wicked they were.
    Priests always frightened me. Going to church was terrifying as a young kid. They just always struck me as being very similar to Dracula or characters in Hammer horror movies. Christopher Lee!
They always came over in that dogmatic, dictatorship way, and that condescending judgement. The nuns were worse because they were smelly old women with a bitter hatred of mankind. Brides of Jesus?
I’m sure that’s not what He had in mind.
    Many of the locals weren’t too happy with Irish immigrants full stop, but they certainly weren’t happy with a Catholic school, attached to a church, in the middle of these
working-class council flats. They viewed that very much, I suppose, as people view a mosque today, as an alien agenda, and considered you an outsider for having anything to do with it.
    I never felt Irish. I always felt, ‘I’m English, this is where I come from, and that’s that.’ Because you’d be reminded of that when you went to Ireland:
‘Ye’re not Oirish!’ the locals would say. So it was like,