I can still picture her parlour in the neat, dinky cottage where she lived just down the hill from my Grandma’s ramshackle old place, and it was crammed to bulging with ornaments and faded satin cushions with embroidered cats staring boldly at us as we ate. I would begin to feel ill as soon as we sat at the table for I could see, in amongst the brown bread and country butter, the scones and jam – the thing I hated most in the world – green, hairy bacon. Lying on a dainty china plate and with slices of tomato arranged tastefully around, as if to take the harm out of it.

Aunt Aggie would look at me over her glasses, her small brown eyes bright like a bird. ‘Eat up girl, you could do with a bit of meat on you’. And so, with her eyes relentlessly fixed on mine, coupled with my Grandma kicking me slyly underneath the table, I would nibble and gag in theatrical fashion, while they would both eat their fill and stare at me as if I was a changeling, shaking their heads in puzzlement as if to say how could anyone not love hairy bacon? Eventually they would lose patience with me and my pernickety ways and tell me to go outside and play.

Aunt Aggie’s outside lavatory was the most enchanting place in the world and I always felt like a princess as I slowly walked down the nine whitewashed steps, wild honeysuckle tumbling everywhere overhead, I can smell it now, and at the bottom of the stairs a white painted door with little heart cutouts, opening to the cleanest, sweetest lavatory ever seen and with real toilet paper. Well of course I compared it scornfully to my Grandma’s, where you had to go out and use a bucket in a shed even at night with strange sounds all around and your heart in your mouth.

Given the choice, apart from the hairy bacon, I would have happily swopped homes and gone to live in Aunt Aggie’s fusty, little house. She had a kind of order that my small self craved and my Grandma’s way of life was chaotic to say the least. I was most disapproving of her!

My own feeling when I heard the news was one of acute embarrassment. I was 14 at the time and I remember looking at my mum and dad one evening as they laughed at something one of us said, and thinking. How disgusting. They are old, she has grey hair for goodness sake, and they must have ‘done it’! To make things worse, my mother insisted on me accompanying her everywhere in those months, (I was the only girl), hanging on to me so I couldn’t even pretend I didn’t know her. I didn’t speak to my Dad for a week, I just glowered at him as only a 14 year old can do. My friends all thought it was very exciting and would make excuses to visit me just so they could get a glimpse of her.

She said it was the easiest birth of all and as soon as I saw him I loved him, we all did. I more or less took him over, fussing over him, feeding him and wheeling his pram and showing him the stars and the moon. Me and my pal Ursula would walk for hours, taking it in turns, leaning over and talking all the while to the smiling baby in the pram. He was the happiest and most good humoured baby and grew up to be a very contented and grounded person. He told me once he watched us all making eejits of ourselves over the years and learned how not to do it.

When he died suddenly a few years ago, I felt a terrible pain as if I had lost a child as well as a much loved brother and friend. But my best memories are the gut wrenching family laughs we shared over the years, where we would be helpless laughing. He had a habit of coming close to me when he talked and thought it was so funny when I would take a step backwards, protesting that he was taking up my air space and he would follow me all the more until I was wedged in a corner.

He brought such an unexpected joy into our house when he was born. Put a ripple in our stagnant pool and made us all nicer people.

She always sat in the first compartment of the train and this morning had been no different. She opened her book, an intriguing forensic read with lots of bloody detail, and settled comfortably in her seat. The train was waiting for the driver to arrive and there was always a ten minute wait, which was nice and relaxing and the rush hour was long past.

It was a small, snorting sound that made her look up from her book and it was coming from the man sitting opposite her, the only other person in the carriage. He was chuckling quietly and looking straight at her and she was about to smile back when she saw the reason for his merriment. It was resting lazily there as bold as brass, displayed with obvious pride and brazen abandonment. Her book slid to the floor and she gave a shout of outrage but quick as a flash he had tucked it away, swiftly and expertly, and ran out of the open door and up the stairs, laughing all the while.

When the police were called by the Underground staff, they gave her a cup of sweet tea and sat her down in the poky office at the top of the stairs. ‘‘Well,’ she explained to the policewoman, ‘It was limp and a bit wonky at the end’ she paused for a moment, then, ‘a rather mottled, unhealthy colour and on the small size to be honest.’ Put that in your pipe and smoke it you pervert, Elsie thought with a small smirk of satisfaction, that won’t look so good when its read out in court, me boyo.

‘Sorry, I meant can you describe the man, the er…perpetrator of the act.’ The young policewoman said briskly, a brand new notebook in her hand.. ‘Was he young? Middle aged? Had he a beard? What did he wear?’ And of course Elsie, try as she might, could not say what the man looked like, all she could see in her minds eye was his dangly bits staring at her. ‘Flaccid’ the policewoman finally wrote in her book after giving it some thought and told Elsie they would be in touch if they caught the man, although how they would find him was a mystery.

When the train eventually arrived at the station, steam screaming out in relief, Uncle Jack was waiting outside with the pony and trap. ‘Hop in’ he said ‘we best hurry, she is in fierce bad humour’.

I soon discovered that my Grandma had no intention of going gently into wherever she thought she would be going. She intended to die just as she had lived, in as gruff and self centred a way as possible. My mother had told me something of my Grandma’s past, of her disastrous marriage to an old farmer who treated her with such cruelty that even the villagers were uneasy when they saw her battered face at Mass. He had died one day when he was out trout fishing in the river which flowed at the back of the cottage and, according to my mother, there was a huge sigh of relief all round. My Grandma started to blossom from that day.

I had given a great deal of thought to my Mother’s story and had formed my own opinion. I was only nine years old but I could not forget the images and dreams about that spring well. It was at the end of our lane, hidden by a furze bush and the water was cool and silvery. It had always been my job to collect the water for all our household needs but from the very start, I would feel such a malevolence emanating from that dark, fathomless well that my heart would race and I would run in fright, losing half the contents of the bucket. It held a terrible secret and was constantly on my mind. I knew my Grandma had called me to her side so that she could confess all. I could hear her coughing as I came in from feeding the chickens and I put the kettle on the fire to make her some tea. She could drink a gallon of tea a day.

She was propped up on her pillows and looking out of the small window, plucking at the eiderdown in her impatient way. I put the tea by her side and sat down on the sugan chair. I put my small hand in her worn one and said, very gently. ‘It is all right, Grandma, I know all about it, what you did in the spring well. I have had visions’.

When she finally recovered and had explained, in between some unladylike guffaws, that it was not Grandpa Pete who drowned in the well but O’Brien’s goat which she had lured onto our land so she could milk it as she had a fondness for goatsmilk. In any event the goat had lost her footing one dark night and drowned in the well and she and Jack had weighted it down and told nobody. ‘I’m sure it made the water all the sweeter’ she snorted and wheezed some more when she saw my outraged face.

But, afterwards, I didn’t feel too foolish as I knew I had felt ‘something’ and whether from a man or a goat well it was a spirit, wasn’t it?

Whatever it was, whether it was from all the laughing or my presence, Grandma made a full recovery from her new monia and took great delight, whenever I came to stay, in handing me the bucket to fetch some water.

‘Enough daydreaming, now’ Grandma said suddenly, her large grey eyes looking straight at me as though she could read my mind and making me jump, ‘time for bed.

It wasn’t as if I hated her, but there was a disconnection between us, like two people walking side by side down a long narrow road but never quite touching. When I grew up I realised that I had been sent to the countryside because of my illness and my Grandma had no alternative but to put up with me. She was kind enough in an off -hand, rough sort of way but she was more at ease with men and boys and even treated my mother, her only daughter, in a vague, almost puzzled way as if she was unsure of the rules.

When the men from the Aran Islands came by on their way into the small town, everyone would rush down the lanes to hail them. They were fine, handsome men with great heads of hair and bad teeth and some of them carried their currachs over their heads with a great ease. They were like film stars until they laughed or smiled. On one of those hot summer’s days, amid all the shouting and gladness at their arrival, I saw my Grandma take a big sack from one of them and deftly put it at the bottom of a creel of turf. I kept quiet but that evening of course I had to take a peek and see what she was hiding. She had told me it was fish and carrageen moss.

‘I know your secret’ I blurted out and the words seems to bounce from wall to wall. ‘And it is a Mortal Sin!’ A long silence as we both clutched our Rosary beads, our fingers not moving. My Grandma did not stir but she had lost all the colour from her face and seemed to bend forward as if she would faint but she didn’t and when she turned those grey eyes on me, I swear I could see red lights darting from them and they were coming in my direction.

‘What are you talking about?’ she said quietly and I was afraid.

‘The poteen in the creel of turf!’ I shouted as if it would allay my fear, and I felt a sense of release as it all poured out, my words tumbling over each other. I told her how I saw her that day, and the men with no teeth, and the creel of turf, and that she was a wanted criminal and it wasn’t fish at all and she would most likely be hanged in the square. And I would be left here alone and my mammy and daddy were miles away in Dublin.. I started to sob as by now I was feeling very sorry for myself.

She laughed in a great burst and the colour had come back to her face. ‘The poteen, is it? And how do you think I would find the money for those fine shoes you are wearing? And other fripperies and ribbons and things. Sure everyone is doing it around here, it is how we survive ’ She chuckled as she resumed the prayers and she looked like my Grandma again. ‘ In anyways, they don’t hang women in these parts.’

The strange thing was that we stopped saying the Rosary from that very night and I was mighty relieved, I can tell you. Maybe she thought that it would not be appropriate for a wanted criminal to pray every night, especially as she had been found out, unless of course she went to Confession and told all but I was sure she would not, she would have to renounce her sins wouldn’t she and it didn’t look like she would be doing any renouncing.