This piece is published in Letter to Daniel

When they first came to Turners Cross my grandparents could see fields stretching for miles from their sitting-room window. It was still 'the country' back then. My mother remembers that there were farms nearby where people raised cattle and spoke with broad accents quite different from the lilting cadences of the city. Beyond the pasturelands was a range of hills which formed the last barrier before the land levelled down to the Atlantic Ocean and the coastal towns of Kinsale and Crosshaven. In winter when the offshore winds swept in around the Old Head of Kinsale, the people of the new suburb could smell brine in the air.

On the other side of Turners Cross, down in the valley, sat the city of Cork built around the mouth of the River Lee on a series of islands. These were joined together by numerous bridges and above them rose the steeples of many churches like a vast and elegant ocean liner. On summer days the entire population seemed drawn to the river, floating on boats or sauntering along its banks in the shade of tall trees. It was a favourite place for lovers and on summer nights their long whisperings floated among the branches and out over the currents. But in winter when floods rose the same people who had walked, fished, swum and loved in summer would curse their proximity to the water.

The building of my grandmother's house

Thus my grandfather was careful to pick a spot high above the city where there was no chance of flooding. The northern hills of Cork had long ago been settled. Here the merchants who had made their fortune exporting butter to the Continent had built great mansions in imitation of the splendid villas of Italy where they holidayed each year. My grandfather built his house, St Declans, on the southern hills seven years before the outbreak of the Second World War. In those days Turners Cross was a place of stillness and quiet. Only later in the boom years of the late forties and fifties would it succumb to the designs of the city planners. Then avenue after avenue sprang up until the green fields had disappeared under a carpet of concrete.

My grandfather's name was Paddy Hassett and he married my grandmother, May Sexton, in the summer of 1932. The house he built for his new bride sat in its own garden with a rockery full of flowers, several apple trees and numerous blackcurrant bushes. It was made of solid west Cork stone and, in the first year of their occupation, they planted ivy which soon spread across the walls. Every few months this had to be sheared back lest it sneak across the windows and block out the sunlight.

A robust love for life

Like many Irish couples of the time my grandparents had a large family. There were eight children in all, of whom seven lived beyond childhood. I believe the decision to have a large family was based less on any deep religious conviction than from a profound love of life. They were devout Catholics, but their sense of humour and warmth kept at bay the more puritanical and narrow notions which infected the lives of so many people in the Ireland of that time.

My grandfather died when I was one year old and what I know of him has been gleaned from the stories of my family. I know that he was a quiet man who neither smoked nor drank. But he had a romantic nature and loved opera and the Irish game of hurling. More than anything he loved his children. Once a week he and my grandmother would go into town for tea and afterwards to the cinema. It was, as far as I know, the only time in the week which was not devoted to the interests and well-being of their growing brood of children.

My grandfather ran his own garage business and made a good income in the post-war years when cars began to appear for the first time on Ireland's narrow roads. He built a seaside cottage for his family near the village of Ardmore in County Waterford where he had been born, the son of a police sergeant. Every June my grandmother would load her family on to the bus and set off for the cottage where they stayed until the end of August. But it was the house at Turners Cross which remained at the centre of the family. My mother remembers it as a place crowded with children's voices and music.

Struggling through hard times

Then in the early sixties my grandfather's business collapsed, a victim of recession and his own unending willingness to give credit to those who would never repay him. For a while it looked as if the bank would take the house, but then my grandfather's eldest son stepped in and took out a mortgage on the property.

He died a few months later from the effects of a stroke. I know that, close to the end, my grandmother brought me, their first grandchild, to see him in the hospital and that he stroked my infant head. He wanted to speak but he could not and he never left hospital. My grandmother returned alone to the house they had built on the hills above the river.

In retrospect, much of my grandmother's later life seems to have been a hard struggle for emotional survival. She had already suffered the loss of her husband and the death of a child shortly after birth. Then she lost a fourteen-year-old son, Ben, to polio. But it was the death of her third son, Michael, in a fire in New York City, which came close to destroying her faith in life. Michael had been a favourite. A talented theatre director, he had emigrated to America in the 1950s but was weeks away from returning to Ireland when a fire in his apartment claimed his life. Warm-hearted, artistic and handsome, he closely resembled my grandfather. The mention of his name would bring tears to my grandmother's eyes until the day she died.

Warm memories of my childhood

And yet, in spite of her immense sorrow, May Hassett kept going. She still managed to smile and make us laugh. Although I suspect her own hope disappeared on the night Michael died, she communicated her love for others with such power that those around her always felt happy and wanted. I spent most of my childhood summers living with her in St Declans. My memories are of a happy place where comfort and reassurance were always at hand. Because of my father's alcoholism, my own home environment was neither happy nor secure. Taking the train to Cork and St Declans and the warm arms of my grandmother seemed to me an annual deliverance.

When my parents separated permanently in 1970, I went to live in St Declans for two years. It was a traumatic time, a time of great upheaval, and I would almost certainly have become lost in bad places had the lights of my grandparents' house not beckoned. I remember many things about that house: the smell of brown bread baking in the kitchen, collecting armfuls of apples in the garden for crab apple jelly, picking blackcurrants for jam, playing endless games of 'kiss or torture' with my friends' sisters, choking desperately on my first cigarette in the shed at the end of the garden while my grandmother laughed to herself in the kitchen.

On rainy afternoons my grandmother would bring down the big box of toy soldiers collected over the years by her own sons and I would lose myself in imaginary battles and conquests. Later, when I saw a girl I wanted to ask out, it was my grandmother who gave me the courage to venture forth, a teenage Romeo in brushed denim jeans, and suggest a trip to the cinema. 'The worst she can say is no,' she told me and, as always, she was right. In fact the girl said 'Yes', and our relationship lasted, believe it or not, for eight years. When we broke up and I was plunged into extended youthful misery my grandmother was waiting in St Declans with a mug of cocoa and a sympathetic smile.

Venturing forth into the world

I left Cork and the world of my childhood in 1979 and began a journalistic career that would take me to places my grandparents had barely heard of. As the years went on, I saw less and less of my grandmother. Yet each time I came back to St Declans she seemed to be the strong warm person I had always known. And then, while living in Belfast, I received news that she was suffering from cancer. When I went to see her she seemed frail and suddenly old, and she told me she believed she was dying. 'I'm on the way out Ferg', she said and then added, 'but we all have to go some time.'

That evening I went up to St Declans and the house felt empty and strange. There were no voices now. Only her photographs on the walls, some of them fading into yellow, spoke of its crowded past. My grandmother was eventually transferred to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London where the doctors seemed more optimistic. At about the same time I was appointed BBC correspondent in South Africa, a job I had wanted from the moment I joined the Corporation. My grandmother was delighted for me and even spoke hopefully of being there to greet me at St Declans when I came home in the summer.

In fond, loving memory

On the way out to South Africa my wife and I stopped off in London to visit her at the Royal Marsden. There, among other old people, in a city she did not know, my grandmother seemed small and vulnerable, a little old lady for whom unseen shadows were lengthening every day. We spoke about the past and about our large group of relatives, and she told me to take care of myself and my wife, Anne. 'Mind that little girl,' she joked.

When I got up to go I noticed that my grandmother had tears in her eyes and we both knew, without saying a word, that I would never see her again. She took my hand in hers and whispered into my ear, 'Always remember, love, that I will be watching out for you, wherever you are, always.'

A month later she came home to die. I was given the news early one morning on a long distance call from Ireland. I walked out into the garden and cried for a long time. And then, with the birds of the highveld singing their hearts out, I went back inside and woke my wife. We sat for hours drinking tea and remembering my grandmother, and I am happy to say that most of my memories involved laughter. After her death my uncle decided to sell St Declans and the rest of the family agreed. There seemed little point in clinging to bricks and mortar when the people we had loved, who had made the place special, had passed on.