A 14-year-old girl walks through the fields on the farm with the sheepdog. She knows that these same fields and this farm could one day be hers.

She has been living here in Farnane Upper in Waterford with her uncle and his wife since she was five. From the Looby’s home, she had gone to the local National School in Kilbrien.

Born in Barracree on Thursday, January 31, 1918, to John Hickey and his wife Bridget Looby, the newborn girl was christened Bridget Teresa, and known as Biddy. Her parents had four other children, Annie, Mary, Kattie and James.

Their mother’s brother, Michael, had married Johanna Barry, from Bishopstown, Lismore, in 1918. They shared their home with Michael’s brother Tom and sister Minnie.

They had no family so in an age-old Irish custom, young Biddy Hickey was brought to Farnane with a view to having a relation in the place.

Years later, she’d recall going, as Alice Taylor put it, ‘to school through the fields’ and recalled the farming activities that dominated life in west Waterford. The annual tasks of shearing sheep, hay-making and the autumn thrashings.

Going ‘home’ from Kilbrien School, a local man would ask her, ‘well, how many slaps did you get today?’

Biddy enjoyed school and learning. 1932 was the year of the Eucharistic Congress in Ireland - over a million people are thought to have attended Mass in the Phoenix Park on June 26. It was on a grand, fine day that summer that young Biddy Hickey made a life-changing decision.

Out under a warm sky with the dog by her side, she got what she described as ‘a kind of a calling’.

I met her for the first time when she was 100 years old but her memory of that day was crystal clear. She told me her future could have been as a farmer - maybe a ‘match’ would be made for her, and as she said ‘the rest would be history’. She told her aunt and uncle that she wanted to join a Religious........

© Evening Echo