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The year after my mother was born must have been one of considerable excitement and some fear in those parts. There had been a lot of bad feeling about the local landlord, Lord Leitrim, a high-handed and tyrannical man who had served many notices for eviction - sometimes with little cause - on his tenantry, and in April 1878 three local men ambushed and killed him not far from Manorvaughan, his grand house just across the Mulroy from our part of Fanad. The three men who did the deed, Michael Heraghty, Mickey 'Rua' McIlwee and Neil Shiels all came from within a mile or two of my mother's home. Only Heraghty was arrested, and he died in prison before he could be brought to trial. (At least that was the official version, and his grave is there to be seen in Massmount cemetery; but a persistent local legend said that his death from a contagious fever was faked in some way and that he lived out his life in America.)

My mother could give us an account of that event which came from an eyewitness. Michael Logue, driver of a second side-car which was following that of Lord Leitrim along the shore road at Cratlagh wood when the ambush took place, was a family friend. His car had fallen behind because the horse went lame, but came up in time for those on it to see the attackers making their escape to the boat they had hidden at the shore, leaving Leitrim and his two companions dead or dying on the road. According to my mother Michael always had a good word to say for the landlord as a generous and fair employer. But she accepted the story that he was evil in other ways; I remember her saying that 'one of Leitrim's women' had been prepared to give Heraghty an alibi. (We now know that within two years of the assassination a local police informer had sent Dublin castle an accurate account of what happened at Cratlagh that day, including the names of the assailants. But nothing was ever done about it, and the men concerned were respected by their neighbours till the day they died.)

As children we were more interested in other stories my mother had to tell, but I well remember an American lady, a visitor like ourselves to Tullynadall, coming back from a long drive round the Mulroy to announce 'I danced on the spot where they killed him'. Perhaps she had childhood memories of her family being evicted.

We must have missed a good deal of the conversation around us in Donegal, and hence much of the storytelling, because my mother's generation was still Gaelic- speaking; she said her prayers in Gaelic till the end of her days. But English was the language of the schoolroom and of the weekly newspaper which my grandfather read out to a circle of neighbours round the turf fire of an evening. and when he teased his two other daughters, Maggie (the beauty of the family) and Grace, it was in English:

I think my aunts would have been happier if my grandfather hadn't passed that verse on to us.

My Mother's childhood memories had little of the harum-scarum mischief of the ones my father told, and I have an impression of her as an elder sister helping in the little family shop and expected to be serious and responsible. She was a good enough school-pupil to have ambitions to gain the certificate which would make her a pupil- teacher and open the way to the one modest profession a girl of that time and place could aspire to. But by her own account there were other duties which took her away from class: when a baby was due in some neighbour's house, a growing girl would be needed to keep the house and milk the cow and feed the other children. There were too many such calls about the time the Inspector came to the school in the townland of Cashel to put the pupil-teaching applicants through their paces. The first big setback of her young life must have stayed vividly with her, for the scene in the little schoolroom is alive to me a century later as if it was part of my own memory: 'Did I pass, Miss?' - 'Indeed you did not, Rose!' - and out of the school she went and up the road to Tullynadall, and never went back.

Her time at home in her teens would have been occupied enough, helping our in her own and neighbour's homes, doing some of the farmwork - though she was no tomboy and feared to go near the horse - and relieving her mother at the shop counter. She used to smile in her later years at her mother's lack of commercial instinct, never putting more than a halfpence on the yard of cloth, though she had tramped a weary thirty miles to bring it from the wholesaler's at Ramelton. Perhaps it was on one of those trips that her mother arranged for Rose's first proper employment. This provided her with her first glimpse of comfortable living, working as a maid in one of the big houses of the town, fetching and cleaning and carrying for a mistress who was supposed to be an invalid and spent most of her time resting in her room. But on a rare visit home Rose told in all innocence about a strange fellow who called in of an evening after the master came back from business and asked after the mistress's health - though Rose well knew he had come visiting earlier the same day. 'You won't be going back to that place', said my grandmother, and that was that.

Girls married quite young in those days, and my mother had plenty of stories about courting in Fanad which even to us in the first decades of the new century seemed to belong to a quite different world. A romantic attachment between the parties was not unknown but was by no means indispensable. The first inkling a young lady would have about someone's interest in her would be the arrival in the family kitchen one evening of a man in his Sunday best, with hat and stick, who would announce that he 'was speaking' for so-and-so. The persuasions offered would tend to be as much economic as personal: his friend would be coming into a good piece of land and so forth - and directed rather to the parents than to the young lady herself. I am not sure if it was normal to come to an understanding immediately or if all this was a preliminary to the wooer presenting himself; but as far as I can make out my mother, at that time anyway, never let things get any further. Indeed she whispered to her own mother on one such occasion that she would rather have the matchmaker himself than the one he was speaking for. And that was strange too, because my sister and I thirty years later met an ageing man whom we realised was that same matchmaker; and from the way he talked of our mother and asked to be remembered to her we guessed that there had been some feeling on both sides.

One suitor who proposed to my mother without benefit of matchmaker was the coachman at Fanad House, a fine 18th Century mansion in another part of the parish. His plan was that she should come to America with him 'where any little differences in the matter of religion can be got over easily'; but she was not to be tempted. Not that the matchmaker was the only acceptable way of doing things. Mamma would often tell us how an uncle of hers, teased by companions about how long it was taking him to look about him, and how there was a she-farmer some miles away waiting to be asked, declared - 'Well, if it's to be done it will be done tonight!' and was betrothed and wed, to someone he had hardly spoken to before, within a day or two. They had great happiness together and brought up a fine family. Theirs was a home it was always a joy to visit, even when the old folk had passed on (she at the age of 90) and it was their children or their children's children who welcomed us to their home.

Some water was to flow under bridges before my mother stepped down the altar of the main parish church at Massmount for her marriage with Tommy Callaghan. There was plenty of temper in her, and when her mother said that if she waited much longer it would be Maggie the men would be asking after, she snapped back that she would not stay to be in Maggie's way. Without delay she wrote off to her brother Eddie in Manchester to send her the passage-money which would take her on the emigrant's road to England.

The year or two - it cannot have been very long - that she passed in service in middle-class homes in Manchester were quite a happy time for Mamma. She was too independent to pay much attention to her brother's sage advice - 'The sooner you leave behind your Irish ways, Rosie, the better it will be for you' - but she learned a lot all the same. In her first job, where the family were Catholic like herself, she was just the little Irish maid to be ordered about and kept very much in her place. But later she found herself in a home where she felt really appreciated. The mistress was scrupulous about letting her have time to get to Mass on Sundays, and her husband called at the fishmonger's every Friday on his way from work, so that Rose could keep the Catholic rules which must have seemed very strange to him. It may have been in this household that she became a very competent cook, and developed the sewing and general housekeeping skills which served our large family so well in later years. (If you have read Mollie Weir's Shoes were for Sunday you will know the attitude others in Glasgow's East End took to the Irish immigrants; it was my mother's pride never to give any excuse for the hated jibe 'the dirty Irish'.)

Her mistress was a kindly person who obviously valued my mother for her dependability and her way with the growing family of children. In later years her stories made those Manchester girls seem as real to us as our own relations, especially the harum-scarum one who was always staying up late when her parents were out in the evening, or getting up to some other mischief, and whom Rose would try to hide from the heavy hand of her father. There was a son as well, the eldest in the family, who was seldom seen but came to stay over Christmas. My mother saw there was some difference of feeling concerning him between his parents, and heard the father insisting that he was not to stay past Boxing Day. What it was all about she never did find out, but remembered how the young man was interested when she told him her brother Eddie was a tram driver. He asked her if Eddie ever 'got good tips' on the trams, so she concluded later - when she realised what he had been talking about - that he was a gambler and a ne'er-do-well.

At some point she was sent for from Fanad, in a hot summer when 'the fever' was going the rounds in Donegal and every member of her family was ill. It must have been a worrying homecoming and a daunting prospect for a slip of a girl to see to the house and farm as well as nursing half-a-dozen very sick people. The epidemic, whatever it was, struck fear into everyone's hearts, because there were memories of earlier outbreaks which had carried off numbers of people, and the elderly could even recall the fever of the late forties which was the final terror for the starving survivors of the great famine. My mother naturally wondered if she would quickly catch the infection herself, but the doctor said that the good feeding she had had in England would keep her resistance high; and so it proved. She who had been afraid to go near the horse would bring buckets of water from the stream to cool his poor hoofs, sore from standing in the stable, unworked in the heat of the summer. She always remembered how he would lift one foot or the other as soon as he saw her coming, and would do the same thing long afterwards, when he had no need of her soothing assistance.

The family all pulled through and things returned to normal, and maybe it was on this long visit home that she arrived at an understanding with Tommy Callaghan of Fannavolty, several years older than her and maybe well enough off, with his furnaceman's wage from the Clyde Ironworks, to come home with his brothers for a few days at the Glasgow Fair.

How long she went on working in service after promising herself to him is not vey clear to me. She told a story about meeting Fanad girls home from Glasgow who told her the banns had already been called in St Joseph's Church in Tollcross, and herself saying - 'He might have asked me!' But she certainly went home from Manchester for the last time with everything planned, because her mistress gave her a present of a beautiful nightdress, and said 'When you are settled in Glasgow, Rose, you must write to me, and I shall come to visit you in your own home'. She was married in the old church of St Davadog at Massmount, and they said she was as nice a bride as ever walked to the altar-rails in that strangely-designed chapel with the altar on the long side and wooden galleries crowding down upon it from three sides. The church still stands among the gravestones of our ancestors on a little height overlooking Mulroy Bay, and although the interior has been greatly changed, outwardly it is much as it was a century ago. I cannot think of a more beautiful setting in which to be married, or to lay your bones to rest.

I am sure her wedding-day was a joyful one, but she was not short of troubles in the next few years. She never wrote the promised letter to her mistress in Manchester, because she would have been ashamed to invite her to the squalid little house in Clyde Rows which was the first family home.

Listening to her in later years it was clear that she never fitted into the way of life of her neighbours, where wives frequented the local pubs as much as their husbands. She had a story from those days of a virtuous husband confining his wayward wife to barracks because she would disgrace him at the pub, and coming home to find her sitting glassy-eyed with drink by her door in the Rows; kind friends had provided a bottle or two which she had hidden well-corked in the water-butt beside her. Mamma was resolved to stay in Clyde Rows not a day longer than she had to, even though Tommy was hard-drinking as well as hard-working, and would have none of her dream of setting up a little shop with help from her people in Donegal - 'God nor man will never see me sitting on an egg-box!' She put by whatever she could, and I don't think she told him when she 'put down her name' for a proper house in a tenement block which was just being built. When it came out that they were flitting to 'Greenview' her neighbours were unbelieving: 'How will you ever pay that big rent, Rosie? 'With my beer-money,' she answered, and I can just hear her saying it.

Even in her new and better surroundings, the home of my own early childhood, things could never have been easy. My father was a loving and happy-natured man, but his drunkenness was a great trial to my mother at the time she was bringing her first children into the world. I know this because the story of how it all changed was one that my mother confided many years later. Susan, the eldest infant, began to take fits of some kind, and it happened that the local curate, Fr Matthew Hennessy, was visiting the house one day when one of these attacks came on and both parents were distraught with anxiety. The priest took it on himself to say 'Tommy, you know if you would take the pledge to give up drink that child would never have another fit'. 'Do you tell me that, Father,?' said Tommy - and he took the pledge and stayed off drink for many years; and the priest's brave prophecy came true.

What I have had to say so far about my mother has been hearsay, since I only entered upon the scene in 1903. Indeed it is only with difficulty that I can disentangle my own earliest recollections from often-told family stories. But there are scenes and moments which are so clear in my mind's eye that they must be genuine memories.

I am standing half-dressed and my mother is kneeling in front of me, tape-measuring and pinning things before getting to work with the Singer machine at her elbow. Wherever she learnt it, she was a capable seamstress, and kept the family budget and our appearance the way she wanted them by making most of our dresses herself. A neighbour came in - it was the sort of community where people were frequently in and out of each other's houses - and said, 'Rosie, you would think you would tidy round your house before you started that sort of work!' I'm sure that is what she said, and when you put it on the page it looks very insolent indeed. But I think she was a simple and ignorant soul, not above having a wee refreshment at odd times of the day, who would say just what came into her head. Anyway my mother looked up and across my shoulder and said rather deliberately an utterly unusual phrase: 'You go to hell'. I looked round and saw the stout form of the neighbour woman scuttling through the door, before I was pulled frontwise for further pinning and measuring.

It is more than time to return to my own story, but there will be more to be said about the fortitude and intelligence my mother brought to bear on all life struggles. But I would not have it forgotten that at the centre of things was her own religious faith. This comes through in one or two stories she used to tell herself.

She had never had any bigoted feelings about our Protestant neighbours the Kyles, but there was an occasion when some silly quarrel about children's behaviour led to a falling out with Mrs Kyle; for months the two passed each other every day without speaking. Mamma later told us -maybe by way of a wee lesson on being Christian - how at one of the periodic Parish 'Missions' she told the holy Father (which is what folk called the Redemptorist or Passionist priests who preached the Mission) how she had not been speaking to her neighbour. He was prudent enough to ask 'If you spoke would she speak?' before telling her where her moral duty lay; and harmony was restored the next day.

Again when I was very young I contracted a distressing and quite dangerous skin trouble which threatened to destroy a whole area of my face and yielded to none of the treatments provided by our doctor or at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. I can remember the almost-crying feeling sitting with my mother as the tram chugged its way towards High Street, wishing the journey would never end because what lay at the end of it always meant stinging pain and never seemed to do any good. The affliction must have gone on for some time and been much talked about, because I can remember visitors from Ireland saying - 'Oh, is this the wee girl with the sore face?' My mother did what any devout Catholic of her time would do - she prayed to a favourite patron saint, St Gerard Majella, and touched the afflicted part with his relic. And the awful thing died away and left only a little cross-shaped mark which I bear to this day.

Much later in my life a visiting nun would say sweetly to me: 'That mark is a sign that you will be one of us some day'; which shows that even holy sisters sometimes say silly things. I remember that that particular nun was supposed to have been Lady something in private life before she 'entered', and that I was not attracted to her order anyway because there seemed to be some kind of class-distinction between 'choir- sisters' and other members. The local Sisters of Charity seemed different. As a teenager I came across my great friend Sister Gabriel, who helped with parish dramatics and was something of an artist, scrubbing the convent floor. I said, ' Sister, you shouldn't be doing that!', and she gave me a funny smile and said: 'Cassie, I just say -"All for thee, O heart of Jesus, heart of Jesus, all for thee."'. To read now about my schooldays click HereTo return to the top click here.