BrianKeaney.com
Title
Brian Keaney - Writer
Description
I was born in Walthamstow in East London. My parents were Irish and we were a very close family. We still are. My parents’ house was always filled with people, mostly Irish people who had come over to London to work and who were staying with us while they found somewhere to live. Some of them stayed for years. Nobody minded. It was nice having people around the house all the time.
It was from my mother that I learned to tell stories, though she always shakes her head when I tell her this and insists that she could never have been a writer. But she could, if she’d had the chance, because she’s the sort of person who turns everything into a story. I used to follow her around the house when I was a child, listening to the tales she told me about relatives I’d never even met and the things they got up to back in Ireland.
Ireland was the place I always dreamed of. Every Summer we would go there for several weeks. Either we’d stay with my mother’s family in Cork; or with my father’s family in Leitrim. Either way, it was right in the middle of the countryside: there were green fields all around and a huge sky overhead. There were younger cousins to play with, older cousins to take me out on the horse and cart, to the creamery where the milk was sold or up the mountain to cut turf for the fire.
