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I know I gave my last pay-packet into my mother's hands as I had given my first, and all those years I had to manage on what she could afford to give me back out of it. Neither I nor my sisters grudged it. The depression threw furnacemen like my father out of work for years, and though he picked up some labouring work for a time - there were jibes about the Callaghans always landing on their feet - he later contracted mouth-cancer and despite making a remarkable recovery was never able to go back to heavy work again.

It is time to say something about 'Papa' - as we always called him, with the accent on the first syllable. He was born in Fanavolty in the same parish of Fanad my mother came from. Donegal was always 'home' to him, and many a story he told us of his young days in the '70s and 80's of last century. They were mostly stories of devilment of one sort or another - he was a natural joker, and in my mind's eye his face is always crinkled in laughter.

He remembered how as a very small 'buchalan' he conceived an envy for a special blue stone that his tiny sister had, and not merely took it from her but threw it into one of the artificial pools for soaking flax they called lint-dams; and then watched her curly little head disappearing beneath the surface when she went in after it. By good fortune his mother was close enough to go to the rescue of Julia when wee Tommy pointed to the bubbles. He had a quick view through a crack in the house-door of Julia standing covered in mud and flax in a tin bath before he took to the hills in a vain attempt to avoid retribution. A few years later he scared the wits out of a nervous elder brother by lying in a ditch on a dark night rattling some harness-chains. The brother arrived panting and ashen-faced in the family kitchen, but put two and two together when he saw that 'the black fellow' wasn't there; and once again Tommy spent some hours on the run.

The sleek black hair which gave him his nickname fascinated me when I was very young. I would sit on his knee and stroke it, and not believe him when he said 'A thaisge, that hair will be white as snow in a year or two, because that is the way in our family'. He was white-haired at forty, and most of his family (including myself) went grey quite early too. Twenty years later he lost hair at the back because of the radium treatment which successfully halted his mouth-cancer; when it grew in it was at first as black as it had been in youth.

It must have been a great change for him when he followed his brothers from Donegal to Glasgow and the hard toil of the Clyde Ironworks. I do not know what age he was when he took the road for the Derry boat, but I know that he had earlier worked as a hired hand on the McAteer farm at Doaghbeg where my husband was to be brought up. (I suppose that suggests a social difference of the sort that my Jim referred to as 'tuppence-ha'penny looking down on tuppence'; but it is true that the McAteers had some standing from the fact that they ran the local post-office and collected the rates, and kept a bull and a stallion. Papa would have known Pat McAteer who had the political quarrels with my mother, and remembered his elder brother William as the strongest man he had known, able to quell and control the big stallion which was far too much for the young hired lad.)

The work he came to at Tollcross was dangerous as well as hard, for safety measures did not have a high priority with masters who took long enough even to accept the system of three 8-hour shifts instead of twelve-hour working. At least once my father nearly lost his own life trying to save a fellow-worker from a terrible sliding death in the molten metal. 'The oul' judge gave me great praise at the enquiry,' he would say, reminiscing about one of the terrible moments of his life; but there was something very wrong about a system which made such horrific accidents possible. When he had many years of experience behind him and had moved up the hierarchy of skilled workers to be a 'filler' he would normally be able to foresee danger as he checked the mix in the furnace through smoked glass. Yet I think it was quite late in his working life - maybe during my Art-school period, - that he was caught by one of the unpredictable surges of heat from the furnace and was carried home with all the skin of his back burned off. He should have gone straight to hospital of course, but insisted on being brought home first, so that my mother would know what had happened and not think the worst when a stranger came to the door.

And that was like him too, and maybe shows why people of such different temperaments as my Mamma and Papa managed along so well together. The affection ran deep, even when his Donegal sense of humour tormented her a bit - as when a perjink kind of neighbour on the way home from Mass enquired after 'his good lady', and Tommy was inspired to reply - 'Im afraid her and me's no' pullin!' - knowing that it was would only be a matter of time before his neighbour's gossipy wife would be slipping in with a long face to commiserate with Rosie. 'Callaghan's Comedian again!', she would say, but there was as much chance of snuffing out his peculiar sense of humour as of separating him from his pipe or stopping him, as Mamma tried to from time to time, from greeting people with the funny twist of the head she called 'the furnaceman's nod'. He was never very comfortable in the world of polite cups of tea and 'hoosie' housewives. His sister-in law Winnie came into the latter category, and on one famous occasion he declared that that he had paid her home his last visit. 'She was all round the house after me with a wee brush,' he said, and she had even suggested he would be better out in the garden if he wanted to smoke his pipe.

The coming of mass unemployment and his illness meant that he had a long period when he was more or less retired. He was good with animals, as befitted a countryman, and used to take in other people's dogs suffering from distemper and cure them by traditional means of his own. One of his successes later won a prize at Cruft's. For some time he worked as a night-watchman on local building sites, and in the hour of dark before bedtime my youngest sister Rosemary and her friends would snuggle into his little shelter near the brazier and listen delightedly to tales he would spin about the night hours when a wee mouse would come out and talk to him. He never lost his good humour, though his time in the Cancer Hospital was depressing enough. None of the friends he made in the ward survived for long; and in later years he would talk about waving to someone as the trolley passed his bed, and never seeing him again. His own apparently complete recovery was so exceptional that from time to time afterwards he was sent for as a demonstration of the successful use of radium. Of course he went back to his pipe and the heavy black tobacco my own little ones loved watching him cut and roll and light with a great expenditure of matches. So it was not such a surprise when the condition recurred fatally around his eightieth year - but as the doctors said to us, nobody would have guessed twenty-five years earlier that he would have had so long to live.

Holidays One of the effects of the first World War on family custom was to bar us for a few years from our summer excursions to stay with my mother's relations at Tullynadall in Fanad, County Donegal. It amazes me that with our growing family and a single wage - and a furnaceman's at that - Mamma managed to locate and rent a small cottage in Kilwinning in Ayrshire as our holiday home in the war years and for some time afterwards. But she did, and got on such good terms with the owner that he would not entertain other offers for the little place.. Although it was in retrospect a poor exchange for our Donegal holidays, I have happy memories of weeks passed there away from the smoke of Glasgow, and of the local farming folk with their strong dialect which had not changed since the days of Burns

We older ones in the summer holidays would sometimes go down to Kilwinning and fend for ourselves while Mamma stayed at home with the toddlers. I have a clear memory of Susan and myself reading to each other by the light of the oil-lamp long after we should have been in bed, thrilling to some ghostly tale by Robert Hugh Benson, with a cat that was something more than a cat stalking in the moonlight. We had got ourselves into a state of pleasurable terror when we became aware of the sound of horses' hooves clip-clopping in the distance, coming closer and closer along the main road nearby and then terrifyingly pounding and rattling right up to the house, to be followed by a terrific hammering on the bolted door. We clung to each other in silent fear, till the spell was broken by the angry voice of my mother wondering what was wrong with us at all. On an impulse - like her brother all those years ago on the pier at Leatbeg -she had caught the last train from Glasgow and, ever resourceful, had hitched a lift from the station on someone's horse-and-trap.

But although Kilwinning became a great favourite with us as we grew up the pull of Donegal was strong, and some time in the twenties Mamma began to look for a place we could stay for part of the summer not too far from the old home - where of course there was no longer room for a pack of young ladies and half-grown boys. So she answered an advertisement in the Derry Journal and in due course the mail-car from Letterkenny dropped Mamma, Susan, Agnes and myself with our luggage on the Corrie Bog road halfway between Portsalon and Ballylar, at an odd-looking two- storey house with a Dutch sort of double-sloped roof, under the shadow of Mureen Hill. It was worse than odd: it seemed practically derelict, and 'furnished' seemed a strange way of describing what we could see through the begrimed panes. My mother never let a crisis become a disaster. She located the key-holder to tell him we were neither staying nor paying, marched off with us to Portsalon to make enquiries, and by the evening had us settled in a solid house at Knockbrack with the Knockolla mountains above us and within a walk of lovely Ballymastocker Bay. Second-cousins and old friends appeared with bedframes and oil-lamps and blankets to make up what was wanting in the way of basic furnishings.

And that was the beginning of a really memorable holiday. There were long summer days on the beach, and part of the time I would spend trying to capture in crayon or watercolour the changing colours on the Urris hills above the blue Swilly, and the hazy outline of distant Dunaff. And at night there would be impromptu dances to the music of the wind-up gramophone we had lugged with us from Glasgow. Decades later I used to meet folk of the locality who would remember Susan singing and the gramophone and my mother providing 'tay for all hands'.

I think we may have gone back to Knockbrack more than once, but in any case Mamma continued to find places for us to stay for some years, the favourite being Shannagh, since there were Begley cousins there and it was closer to our relatives at Fanavolty and Tullynadall. It was also within walking-distance of Doaghbeg on the Swilly shore of Fanad, where my future husband had been brought up and which, naturally enough, I began to visit more and more in those years.

At some point or other Susan and I made up a car-load to go on pilgrimage to Lough Derg in the south of Donegal - an experience I will never forget and never got round to repeating. It is an ancient penitential pilgrimage in the old Celtic tradition, where you go barefoot for two days and deny yourself sleep like the Irish saints of old, saying interminable prayers and keeping a fast relieved only by dry toast, black tea, and a curious beverage of hot water and pepper. It was (and is) a serious exercise in the Gospel prescription of prayer and penance, and I am glad I did it once in my life. One of our fellow-passengers was a Sister and after we got back to Fanad I overheard our driver being twitted about having a nun with him on the long drive to Lough Derg. 'Aye, I had a nun and some that were worse than nuns,' was his reply. I've no idea what this said about Susan and myself, but anyway I shouldn't have eavesdropped.

At least once when I was a young teacher I went on holiday with two or three friends - Rosie Graham was one, and there was a girl called Grace Chandler who came on Donegal holidays with us as well. The occasion I remember best was a trip to Howth near Dublin, where we had an experience rather like that of Mamma at Corrie, finding that the digs we had booked were not at all what was promised and not such as we were willing to pass the night in. I think we had to pay a night's lodging anyway to the annoyed proprietor, and unfortunately his gruff prophecy that it wouldn't be easy to find another place proved true. We even tried the large local hotel, but the rooms there were well beyond our slim resources. This was where our luck turned, because as we carried our bags disconsolately down the drive a maid came running after us and said the lady who owned the hotel wanted to speak to us. She had watched our departure and been moved to pity: she made us tell our story, and said she didn't want four Scots girls to go away with such a sad impression of Howth, and would give a us a room between us at the rate we had been budgeting on. So the faded snapshots we took during the next few pleasant days have a rather grander background than was usual for us, and we had a memory of kindness to bring back to Scotland with us.

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