English with little leprechaun inside

Growing up English was complicated when home felt unmistakably Irish.In 1960s and ’70s London, Chris Campbell came of age caught between two very different worlds. At home was a noisy Irish family shaped by Catholicism, loyalty, humour, old grievances and the tensions carried across the water. At school was St Marylebone Grammar, where tradition, discipline and the cane were meant to turn boys into men.Chris had other ideas.As family life became more unsettled and school increasingly felt like something to escape, he began testing every boundary he could find. Football gave him somewhere to belong. Friendship offered temporary refuge. Truancy, rebellion and a growing distrust of authority carried him in another direction entirely.London was changing around him too. The old rules still seemed to matter to his family and his school, but outside both of them, people were beginning to question almost everything. Chris was probably doing the same, although at the time he would simply have called it getting into trouble.But this is more than a story about a difficult childhood.Told with humour, honesty and the perspective that only comes with age, English with a little leprechaun inside is a memoir about family, identity and the lasting influence of the people and places that shape us. It looks back at the pain without allowing it to overwhelm the joy, and at mistakes without pretending they belonged only to other people.At its heart is the story of an English boy raised inside an Irish world, trying to work out where he belonged and discovering, many years later, that perhaps he never needed to choose. 6