What are your earliest memories?
Once, when I was three years old, I was taken to a farmhouse where I stayed with my grandparents, my Aunt Mary and two uncles.
What was it like?
I remember the thatched roof, the big fireplace where, on a swivel, would be a three legged big black iron pot or bastable to make soda bread. On two chairs were buckets filled with drinking water from the well.
Is the house still there?
No. After the turmoil of the war of the Black and Tans, followed by the Civil War, when Northern Ireland came about, the government paid to renew all farmhouses. Now they are very wealthy land owners.
Did you live with them?
No. I was only on a visit. One Sunday, my parents came with a pony and trap to tea. Then I heard my aunt say that she would pack my clothes.
You mean to take you home?
Yes. I ran out and hid. Somehow I never seem to forget the past.
What happened next?
I could hear them calling “Rosie, Rosie. Where are you?”. Rose is my English name. Eventually my parents left to go on the eight and a half miles homewards.
Where did you hide?
Not in one of the barns or in the hen houses or even the fields. I laid flat on the floor of a butt used to take pigs to market. A few days later my aunt said “We are going to take the butter to the creamery”, and off we set in the pony and trap. Suddenly I said “But this is the wrong road”. “Oh we are taking a different route” and this is how I got home again. I never stayed with them again, nor did any of my three sisters.
I still write to my first cousin, Tom, the farmer who, at 80, still carries on working on the same farm.
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