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I have written elsewhere about how the family were all sent to Ireland by my father at that anxious time in 1911, when Rosie must have thought she was kissing us goodbye for the last time on earth. The story I have not set down was what happened ten years later at the birth of the last of the family, my sister Rosemary. This time my mother, in her early forties, awaited the birth in Glasgow's Rottenrow maternity hospital, and the medical people were not at all hopeful. My father was at work when a sudden message came for an adult member of the family to go to the hospital immediately. My elder sister could not bring herself to go, and at seventeen I set off for Rottenrow fully expecting to find that my mother had already passed away. Instead I found my way into the labour ward itself - I can still hear the nurse's voice: 'What are you doing here? - Out!' - and I was the first of the family to see and hold our little darling Rosemary.

My mother duly recovered, and her last-born was the joy of her life during the 20s and 30s, when things in other ways were sometimes difficult for her. My father's unemployment during the depression years meant that the economic burden of the family fell on the older family members. But in their different ways my parents were resilient people. Tommy as I have related elsewhere was not so proud as to stay in the dole-queue because the odd labouring job which became available would be too much of a comedown for a skilled ironworker.

More of the family were growing up and easing the financial burden when the pipe- smoker's disease, cancer of the mouth, struck him in his late fifties. Despite his seemingly miraculous recovery after radium treatment - he lived to be eighty-two - my father was unfit for any but the lightest tasks after that. Still, with four or five wages coming in we became more comfortable in the thirties and the family were able to move first of all to the terrace house called 'Harthill' and later to a similar home in Carmyle.

At some point my Aunt Maggie came to stay with us, a widow with a young daughter who as 'Wee Susan' became very much one of our family. She was a fine- looking girl, very much like her mother, and appears in family snapshots both in Tollcross and on Irish holidays. The arrangement lasted for a year or two at least, I think, and there was some coolness at the end because Maggie found employment as a housekeeper and moved out without taking my mother into her confidence about what was happening. Their family name was McGonagle, which has confused would-be family historians a little. There was to be another Susan McGonagle, a more distant relative (later Mrs Susan Lynam), who stayed with the family frequently during the war years and afterwards, and in her turn became regarded as practically 'family'.

By the time Aunt Maggie came to stay the two next in age to myself, Mary and Hugh, had already flown the nest. Mary married another Callaghan, Charlie, after both had emigrated to the States. The story of how they survived the bad times of the Depression by becoming chauffeur and cook in a rich Long Island household is one of the more hilarious episodes of family history, since of all our family Mary was the one to steer clear of cooking duties, and Charlie had never been behind a wheel until a friend who owned an old banger showed him a few basics before they went off to be interviewed. Luckily their mistress was less interested in their qualifications than in their 'Scotch brogue' and their Christian names. ' "Mary and Charlie"', she said, '"Mary and Charlie" - yes, that sounds swell!' - and engaged them. And she didn't seem to care how much food went into the garbage beforehand, so long as what Mary produced looked like the illustrations from glossy magazines she left every morning in the kitchen. (In due time the pair of them saved enough to return to Britain and settle at Peterborough, where they brought up their family of three girls, Rosemary, Brenda and Anne.)

Hugh was already in the USA when Mary arrived there. An uncle of ours in Pittsburgh had got him into a supervisor's job with excellent prospects for an intelligent young man like Hugh. But with something of the waywardness which had caused squabbles at home and perhaps explained his emigrating in the first place, he threw up his job so as to be in New York to welcome his sister. He spent his working life in New York; later he married in a Jewish ceremony and ceased to practise his faith, which openend up a rift with the family at home which never really healed. Contact was renewed when Agnes went to the States as a 'GI bride' in 1945 and when other family memberrs visited her later on, and he in turn visited Scotland with his wife Marjory in the 1960s. It was good to meet my brother again, and note how closely as he aged he had come to resemble Papa. But by that time my mother was dead, without I'm afraid ever getting back on terms with her first-born son.

Grandma made her last change of home in the late 30s. Her family were happy in Carmyle, but the owner of their house died and his heir wished to sell the property. In hindsight Susan and the rest regretted that they had not given serious thought to making an offer for the house themselves and taking out a mortgage, but the idea was too novel for them at the time. In any case the house they came to at 16 Denbrae Street suited very well. It had a tiny garden in front and only a walled-in washing- green to the rear, but it had its own front door as well as a side-entrance in the close, and enough bedroom space for the family of seven adults. Being close to Shettleston Road it was handy for transport into town - and out to our new home in Airdrie - and Grandma's family got on very well with their next-door neighbours, a large Italian family called Franchetti.

Her second wartime brought out the best in Grandma. The loss of a back garden meant she could not keep a hen or two as she had done in earlier days; but she stored the cream from her milk-bottles and churned some butter, as well as using all sorts of ingenuity with dried eggs and other austerity rations. The war called away memebrs of the family - Tommy to serve in the medical Corps of the Eighth Army, Eddie to work in a military supplies depot at Montrose in lieu of the military service, and Susan with her friend Barbara Sharkey of the Holyrood School staff, to the thankless work of setting up school for evacuee children down in the Borders. But the house never seemed empty, and when Jim and I brought the family down on a Sunday there was often a foreign serviceman - Polish or in the later stages American - sharing the meal my mother managed to produce from her straitened wartime resources.

My youngest sister Rosemary, whose natural attractiveness was well set off by her trim Auxiliary Fire Service uniform, went out with one or two of the Poles who had become regular visitors, and in one case things became serious enough for there to be talk of an engagement. I think both Grandma and myself were relieved when it came to nothing; certainly the young man Rosemary brought to visit at Cairnhill Road did not endear himself to Jim or myself by remarking that in his country nobody would dream of having small children sharing the same table as the adults.

In the end it was Agnes, on a visit to my sister Mary in Peterborough, who fell in love with an American serviceman from New Jersey called Joe Barry. The phone-call announcing their engagement took us all by surprise, but when Joe appeared on the scene we found him a very engaging personality, cheerful and warmhearted, full of wisecracks and anecdotes about pre-war times when young guys like him were down on their luck in the Depression and making their way as best they could. Their wedding in the little church of St Mark's, across Tollcross Park from where my family now stayed, was quite an event. It was the first family wedding my own children had attended. They were fascinated by the American servicemen with their twangy accents and their distinguished-looking uniforms. There was a few months' wait before Agnes made her tearful farewells at 16 Denbrae Street and went south to join the Queen Elizabeth at Southampton, to cross the Atlantic with thousands of other 'GI brides' and meet up with Joe on his native soil.

I could write a lot about Agnes, who was in many ways her mother's daughter. She had a special quality of concern for other people and a vivacity and sense of fun which made her one of the favourite visitors in our house in Airdrie. 'Aunt Aganes, Aunt Aganes,' my wee ones would shout when she came smiling through the doorway. The kindheartedness which endeared her to the folk in Carmyle where she managed the local Cooperative store also made her willing to give a lot of her time to the little McIntyres, for whom she had often something unusual in her bag, even in those days of austerity - like the pink and white marshmallows she dexterously toasted before our front-room fire.

My mother must have had many anxious times in those years, especially about young Tommy in Cairo. By a fortunate chance a bad bout of sandfly sickness kept him there when he could well have found himself in the desert campaign, and instead he ended up stationed for some time in the Holy Land before he was finally demobbed. Eddie too, despite the health reasons which had kept him in civvy street thus far, actually got his call-up papers to the infantry in 1943 - but the local OC valued his military supplies work in Montrose enough to send to London and make sure the order was cancelled. It was at Montrose that the war for a moment came home to our family. Agnes and Rosemary had gone up to see Eddie and enjoy a few summer days there, and were sunbathing when an aircraft came in low from the sea - so low that they were waving at the pilot when they realised that there were black-and white crosses on the wings. While they scampered up the beach they could hear explosions as the plane continued on its way over the town. There were people killed in Montrose that day, and the German plane itself was ultimately destroyed by British fighters.

The ten years between the war's end and her own final illness were contented and comfortable ones for my mother, and maybe it is best to complete her tale just now before going back to my own. There were three family weddings in the postwar years. Tommy married Marie Lafferty and they set up home first in the flat above Grandma and then just round the corner in Wellshott Road. They had five children, all girls, before Tommy sadly died in his fifties from Hodgkin's disease. Eddie's work took him to Irvine after he married Mary Brown, and it was there that they brought up their own four girls. Rosemary married John McFadyen; their home was again not far from Grandma's, in Hillview Street, Shettleston. In more recent years these two, who were not blessed with children, have been closest of all to me and a great support in my own old age.

My mother never lost her love for her home place. In the years after the war - and I think possibly for a year or so before it - she and members of the family took a house in Rathmullan, a few miles further away from her relations in Fanad but a lovely little spot on a sheltered southern bay of Lough Swilly. The house itself was a little unusual, being part of the old Coastguard station which dated from the days when the Swilly had some strategic importance as a sheltered anchorage for the British fleet. But it was with us in Doaghbeg that Grandma spent her last Fanad visit. She was in her late seventies and suffering from distressing 'turns' in which she lost consciousness and prayed volubly in Irish until she came to herself. There were daily tablets to control the symptoms but typically she did not take them if she felt in good form. But she had the opportunity to see the places of her girlhood again and meet aged cousins who remembered the young girl who married Tommy Callaghan (God rest his soul) in the old church of Massmount by the Mulroy.

The final parting came early in 1956, in the home she had made for her family in Shettleston. She had said good-bye some months earlier to my son John, just finished school and off to Rome for three years, the first stage in his course for the priesthood. She refused to make it a sad parting. Although they both realised the truth, she said she would see him again; and I am sure she will. She never lost interest in the wider world: it was the era of Kruschev and Bulganin in Russia, and on the day she died she asked for the morning paper -'...till I see what Bulge and Krush are up to!'

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