The Four Streets by Nadine Dorries – digested read

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/13/the-four-streets-nadine-dorries-digested-read

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Let me take you by the hand and lead you from the Mersey river to the four streets in which we find leprechauns and all things Oirish, to be sure. Times were hard in Liverpool in the 1950s, so they were. There was no money and underclothes were only held together by the stains, but everyone was happy because they were Irish and working class.

Tommy and Maura lived at number 29. Because that's how many kiddies they had, contraception not being the thing that Irish families practised, or Father James would have something to say about it, so he would. Tommy and Maura lived for today because you could never predict what would happen on the morrow, so you couldn't, even though it invariably turned out you could. "What's for tea, lass?" Tommy asked, after 128 hours working on the docks – sometimes there weren't enough hours in the day, so there weren't. "Potayto, potayto and potayto," Maura replied with her jolly Galway smile.

Jerry and Bernadette had met on the ferry over from Dublin and had been inseparable ever since, even though Bernadette had insisted they lived apart. "I love you, so I do, my little Connemara pony," Jerry said. Bernadette had laughed her Kerry laugh on their wedding night as they gaily rutted with one another till dawn. Nine months later, young Nellie was born while Bernadette bled to death in the delivery room. "To think this could have happened in an NHS hospital," Jerry wailed.

"He is inconsolable, so he is," said Maura, twitching her nets for the 20th time in as many pages. "I'd help, to be sure I would, only I seem to be having a few more babbies myself." Jerry had stood alone and crestfallen in his kitchen without moving for several years while Nellie changed her own nappies. To be sure, the wee'uns had to grow up fast. So wretched was he, he didn't think it strange when this strange woman Alice with a very obvious personality disorder came to live in his house.

The only thing Alice disliked more than children was sex, but she realised, so she did, that Jerry would never marry her unless he was allowed to take her at least once. So she lay face-down for several minutes to let him get on with it. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, bejabbers and bejaysus," Jerry howled to the silvery moon. "What have I done?" It was a question many readers would come to ask over the next seven chapters as he looked on helplessly while Alice mistreated Nellie.

"'Tis a huge honour, so it is," said Maura, "for Father James to visit us in person to anoint our eldest daughter Kitty in her bedroom." Kitty sobbed as Father James repeatedly abused her. Maura and Tommy thought it strange Kitty never smiled any more, but said nothing, because they knew their place, so they did, and besides the Granada man was installing a television so Maura could watch Coronation Street. "I'm going out to see the Beatles," said Tommy, never imagining they would go on to become a world-famous popular beat combo.

Kitty's only joy in life was going for a walk with Nellie, so it was doubly tragic they should both get run over by a stolen car, and that Father James would continue to sexually abuse Kitty in a hospital cubicle. "Poor Kitty," thought Nellie. "But at least my life has improved since Da's Mammy Kathleen came to stay and had Alice put on 120mg of Valium a day." Alice dribbled quietly in the corner, reflecting that maybe her life wasn't as bad as all that, so it wasn't.

Jerry felt a presence by his side. It was the ghost of Bernadette, so it was. "Ah to be sure, to be sure, you dozy fecker," she said in her familiar lilting Irish spectral brogue. "Get thee down to Tommy's where Father James is up to no good with Kitty." Jerry and Tommy ran as fast as their little legs could carry them, like thoroughbreds in the Irish derby, back to the house to find Father James forcing himself on Kitty.

"You're a monster, so you are," they cried, momentarily forgetting to kiss the Blarney stone. "We're going to hack you to death and throw your body into the Mersey, so we will."

Although the police had their suspicions, they could never arrest Tommy or Jerry because the four streets had their own code of silence, so they did. In the kitchen, Maura had her own suspicions. "Oi tink that Kitty's pregnant. But never moind. Let's have a cuppa. We can get to that in the next book."

Digested read, digested: ... I'm a reader, get me out of here.