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)