Colm Tóibín - The Blackwater Lightship

'Declan doesn't eat eggs,' Helen said.

'I never heard worse,' her grandmother said. 'The things your mother has to put up with. She's too soft.'

And so the battle began, the battle that raged daily, Declan filling his pockets with crusts, Helen reaching for the waste bucket, and days when there was no way out, when Declan put the onions and the carrots or the cabbage and the turnips to one side of the plate and refused to eat them, and their grandmother insisted that he stay at the table until he had them eaten, only to relent as soon as he started to cry.

'He can't eat them, Granny, he'll get sick,' Helen would say.

'Stop giving back-answers, Helen.'

'I'm not giving back-answers.'

As soon as her grandmother began to talk about sending them to the two-teacher school in Blackwater, Helen set up a classroom at the kitchen table and for much of the day, in between meals, she and Declan worked at their schoolbooks, Helen playing the role of teacher. They discovered school as a way of excluding their grandmother, until she put a paraffin heater into the dining-room for them so that she could listen to the radio in peace. They did algebra or Irish or decimal points at the times of the day when she was most likely to hover around them; often they did the same exercises over and over, pretending this required total concentration and not looking up if their grandmother came into the room. They opened Declan's books at random and went through lessons he had done long before, or began entirely new ones without fully understanding them or finishing them. When they were bored, they laughed and whispered and played cards.

Their mother wrote short letters to their grandmother saying there was no news and mentioning tests and prayers and hoping that Helen and Declan were not too much of a burden on her. Their mother was staying in Rathmines with her cousin, one of the Bolgers of Bree, and his wife, and they too sent their regards. There was no mention of their father.

Helen and Declan found a box of games under one of the beds and amused themselves in the long, dark evenings playing Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. Helen found boots she could wear and went often with her grandfather to fetch the cows for milking or to open and close gates for him. Declan had no boots; he hated the muck of the yard and the lane, he seldom went out and often in the afternoon, in the clammy heat of the parlour, he became tired and irritable. Alone together in these first months, they never mentioned home or their mother or their father, or how long they would be here. They worked out strategies to get them through the day without confrontation.

Slowly, their grandmother began to treat Helen as an adult and Declan as a child, although Helen and Declan continued to treat each other as equals, even if Helen remained in the role of protector. In the first week or so, Helen had an argument with her grandfather; it was the only time he said much during their entire stay in the house. He was reading something in the newspaper about Fianna Fail – he himself was a member of Fine Gael, which was strong in Blackwater – and he turned to Helen and her grandmother and said, 'They're only a shower of gangsters, bloody gun-runners. Liam Cosgrave will put manners on the whole lot of them.'

'Jack Lynch is not a gangster or a gun-runner,' Helen said.

'The rest of them, then,' her grandfather said. 'And I'd string Charlie Haughey up. He's a feckin' gangster.'

'Oh, language now,' her grandmother said.

'But Jack Lynch is the leader,' Helen said.

'Oh, I know who you've been listening to,' her grandfather said. 'Did we ever think that Lily would have a little Fianna Failer for a daughter?'

'And the Irish Independent is only Fine Gael propaganda,' Helen said.

'Propaganda? Where did you learn that word?'

'Oh, Helen knows all the words,' her grandmother said.

'It's saying your prayers you should be,' her grandfather said and went back to reading the paper.

'Good girl, you stand up to him now,' her grandmother said later when he had left the room.

From then on, her grandfather let her watch the news on television and, after a few weeks, one Saturday night Helen realised that she was going to be allowed to watch The Late Late Show, which her mother and father had never permitted her to watch at home, except for the night when Lieutenant Gerard from The Fugitive was a guest on the show and she was called downstairs. Now in Cush she sat on one of the armchairs in the kitchen and wondered if they had forgotten about her as the news ended and then the break for advertisements ended and the music for the show began and Gay Byrne appeared.

'If something conies on that's not fit for her now,' her grandmother said, 'she'll go to bed.'

Helen remembered the slow preparations for the programme, her grandmother making sure that all the housework was done. Tea things and biscuits were set out on a tray, the kettle filled to be put on a hotplate during the second break. Her grandmother loved the programme, and, Helen realised, loved having Helen to discuss the guests and the controversies in the days that followed.

Her grandfather, on the other hand, disliked it and muttered to himself when something was said of which he disapproved.

During that season, Helen remembered, hardly a Saturday night passed without a group of women wanting rights, or a priest in dispute with the hierarchy, appearing on the programme.

'Oh, look who it is now, look at her, look at her hair!' her grandmother would shout at a woman who appeared on the panel.

Her grandmother commented throughout, but her comments mostly took the form of exclamations of shock or wonder at what was being said, and on the personal appearance of guests. But sometimes, with extraordinary vehemence, when women's rights or politics were being discussed she would bang her fist against the armchair and shout her total agreement with an opinion being expressed. 'She's right, she's absolutely right!' she would roar.

She hated breaks for music and the appearance of writers or film stars or English people. They told too many funny stories; she wanted argument, not amusement. But she remained silent and tense when religion was discussed, watching some nun or priest or concerned layperson out of the side of her eyes. Once or twice, during these discussions, her grandfather threatened to turn the television off, but he never did so. All three stayed up until the end of the show, and it often went on until close to midnight, as an ex-nun cast doubt on the power of the Pope, or a student leader denounced the Irish bishops or the education system. Contraception and divorce were discussed regularly; her grandparents watched in embarrassed silence, but the only time when they threatened to send Helen to bed was when a woman on the show pointed out that most Irish couples had never seen one another naked, even people who'd been married for years.

'Oh, Lord bless us and save us!' her grandmother said.

The item on The Late Late Show which unsettled them most, however, was not about sex or religion. It was when an American woman, middle-aged, "with penned hair, and glasses, wearing a red dress, appeared on the show. She could, she claimed, make contact with the dead. She did not use the word 'dead', but talked about people who had passed away, people on the 'other side'. Gay Byrne asked her questions as though he believed her.

'Did you ever hear such nonsense?' her grandmother asked. 'Did you ever hear worse?'

The woman stood in front of the live audience with Gay Byrne beside her. She held a microphone and pointed at individuals in the audience.

'Yes, that woman there,' she said. 'I'm getting very strong messages for you. You have only one sister, is that right?'

The woman in the audience nodded.