Of my two grandmothers, my father’s was the most popular with us as children. My mother’s mother was a grimmer kind of person. I eulogised ‘Granny-in-Cork’ in my memoir A Runner Among Falling Leaves (Liverpool University Press 2001). The poem below is a characterisation of my maternal grandmother whom I spent many a night with when I was seven or eight, ‘to keep her company’. This is yet another poem I had forgotten about as my literary trajectory took various swerves and directions. As I now realize, it is no joke to be the age my ‘Granny-in-Callan’ was when I was seven or eight!
GRANDMOTHER
Blackcurrants, apples
in the back garden, turf
and wood heaped in the yard.
The hens’ feeding troughs
were halves of a sliced tyre.
She had the electric light,
a chemical latrine.
The acre was well let.
Fresh eggs in the morning
from the roosting shed.
Mick Reilly brought goats’ milk.
“How bad we are,” she said.
Tom Butler brought her pheasants
with half an eye to the acre.
“I’ve no meas on game,”
she declared and kept them for
my aunt and uncle who’d come
to keep her weekend company.
With precious little patience
for children on the stray
she’d be on the road with a switch
to beat me under the knees.
“Galang outs that,” she cried.
“Wait till your father hears.”
Funeral attendance
rates were of importance
to her: she’d count the cars
from behind her kitchen curtains.
With carving knife or breadknife
she’d cut hens on the head
and pluck them on the table.
“We’ll ate our ’nough,” she said.
Published in Trio 4 (Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1985)
