Free At My Mother's Knee by Paul O'Grady

home to meet the folks. It must have been a culture
shock for my mother. She felt as if she'd stepped back in time.
They stayed with my uncle James and aunty Bridget Grady and their numerous offspring in their two-bedroomed farmhouse.
She'd been to Ireland before to stay with her father's family in
Dundalk, County Louth, but it was nothing like this. This was
rural Ireland or, as she put it, 'the bogs'.
    The plumbing, or rather the lack of it, horrified her. Not
only was there no toilet inside the house but there wasn't one
outside either. You simply went over to a patch of ground just
beyond the apple trees and did what you had to do, using a
collection of dock leaves and a handful of grass to wipe up
afterwards.
    I think my mum was constipated for the entire time she was
in Ireland. It wasn't until the sixties that the house had a bathroom
and toilet built. The tap in the scullery supplied
rainwater collected in a big tank outside the house and this
water was used for washing. Drinking water was collected each day in a bucket from a natural spring in one of the fields
and kept cool in the tiny dairy alongside the big bowls of
yellow milk. My mum liked the countryside; she liked it from
the top of a bus though. She found the silence eerie, the cows
and other farm animals unnerving. I can just hear her moaning
to my dad in the bedroom with the sloping roof and tiny
window that they shared with my brother and sister.
    'Let's go home, Paddy,' she'd plead, sat perched on the end
of the bed staring out of the window in her best Blanche
DuBois manner. 'I can't stand it, all this mud and cowshit,
chickens running in and out of the house and, worst of all, no
toilet! I can't get over it,' she'd say, getting up and making herself
busy tidying the room and combing my brother's hair. 'No
toilet! At least we had a lav down the back yard in Lowther
Street. I've never known anything like it, it's like the Dark
Ages.'
    My dad, trying to pacify her, wouldn't have stood a chance.
She was warming to her theme.
    'And they don't like me. I can tell. It's because I'm English,'
she'd moan and the tears would fill her eyes. 'Let's go home,
please! I hate it here.'
    My brother Brendan, who was four at the time, went
straight downstairs and repeated most of what he'd just heard
to Aunty Bridget, who was in the kitchen making soda bread.
    'Did she now?' she said, waving a floury hand at my brother.
'Well, you can tell ya mammy that if she doesn't like it then she
knows where the road is.'
    They didn't exactly get off to a good start.
    Aunty Bridget was a sensible, no-nonsense countrywoman.
She could be quite a formidable lady and extremely brusque
when dealing with fools, but she was also sensitive enough to
realize that this young woman who had lived through some of
the worst air raids during the war was like a fish out of water
in rural Ireland. My mother was uncomfortable in these strange new surroundings and suddenly shy among the many
unfamiliar faces, and she'd got it into her head that they didn't
approve of her. She felt excluded at the big family gatherings.
    Bridget, who had an endless supply of fresh eggs, milk,
cream and butter at her disposal, discovered that my mum
liked to cook. Apples and pears hung from the trees in
abundance. On the land grew potatoes, onions, beans and
enormous green cabbages. There was pork, beef and chicken,
as much as you could want. My mum, who hadn't seen an egg
in years and was still under the parsimonious yoke of rationing
back home in Birkenhead, set about demolishing this food
mountain.
    With Bridget's encouragement she produced sponge cakes
filled with freshly whipped cream, soufflés light as a feather,
scones, apple pies, biscuits, luxuriant egg custards and rich and
creamy rice puddings by the score. She baked from morning till
night. My mum was a wonderful cook and was delighted to be
able to show off her skills, particularly since she had this
infinite well of culinary riches to draw from. She