Now in my 70th year, every now and then I try to remember what I first remember!

That may sound strange, and maybe it is; but it’s hard sometimes to differentiate between one’s own memory and things learned down the years from others.

Though I was four-and-a-half years old when my father died in September 1961, I have no clear recollection of him at all.

Despite that lack of paternal recall, I think I have a memory of my grandmother- my father’s mother - who died in 1959 when I was two. Maybe I was told that she died in the house and had long grey hair, and that from being told by others, I now seem to think it was ingrained in my own little 24-month-old brain.

When I was young, I had a freckly face and a big mop-head of rusty/foxy curls, and for some unknown reason, the arrival in our house of any one of three people caused terror to me – so much so that apparently I’d burst out crying, run away to ‘the room’ and stay there until the ‘offending party’ had departed.

The strange fact was that the three visitors - two men and a woman - had little or nothing in common!

The woman was a Mrs O’Driscoll of the Travelling community- we called her ‘Curly Nellie’ - and she brought little Holy Pictures, rosary beads and medals. In return for those, Mam gave Nellie tea, sugar, potatoes and milk.

I can remember her husband - I think he was Dan - sitting at the side of our boreen with a sheet of shiny tin and he repairing milk buckets for the cow stall.

There was a lovely television programme on lately about the lives of three generations of one Traveller family where the oldest man was a tin-smith like Dan........

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