RECOLLECTIONS: Alice TAYLOR wrote a warm remembrance of a 1940s-50s childhood in the Irish countryside in Co. Cork in her "To School Through The Fields" some years back that was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Here are two small excerpts: "My grandmother was a formidable old lady. She was six feet tall and, dressed in flowing black with a crochet shawl around her shoulders, she carried herself with grace and dignity. In later years she used a walking stick, but she walked with regal bearing until the day she died at ninety-eight years of age. It could be that she needed the stick to maintain law and order when she was unable to move as fast as she wanted, for while grandmothers are supposed to be loving and soft-bosomed, mine certainly did not fit into that picture: she was strong willed and domineering and ruled the house with a rod of iron. Her husband was dead with years so she ran the large farm herself and thrived on it. She was a forerunner of the struggle for equality and she was confident that most women could run a business as well if not better than men. She did just that, but in her time she was no ordinary woman. She killed her own pig and seldom sent for a vet as she could dose cattle and repair fractures like an expert. Some of her mother's people were doctors so she maintained that medicine was in her blood and, indeed, when one of her workmen was gored by a bull her fast, skilful action saved his life.... My grandmother was a tough woman who did not know the meaning of fear..." And of her mother, Alice wrote: "Despite the fact that my mother was tolerant and flexible in most situations, she did have streaks of uncompromising rigidity. The family rosary was one of these: sick, maimed or crippled, we were all on our knees for the rosary, and helpers, visitors, or anyone who happened to call at the wrong time were apt to be included During the summer months I knelt inside the kitchen window looking down over the fields where the cows were grazing after milking. When my turn came to give out the decade I used the cows in the field to count my ten Hail Marys. I mentally sectioned off ten in a corner, but as my mind floated back and forth across the valley the cows naturally moved around so my ten could decrease to five or six. If I said the Glory before schedule my mother gently intervened in the background -- 'Two more.' Of if my herd increased and my Hail Marys swelled beyond the ten she interrupted with "Glory, now, Glory." She also fought gallantly to keep us all supplied with rosary beads, but they were continually getting lost or broken. She never tried to convert my father to beads, so he cracked his knuckles as he went along to keep count. Her rosary was one thing, but her additions to it were something else. First came the litany starting 'Holy Marys" and we would all chant, 'Pray for us,' in response. After Holy Mary came a long list and somewhere down the list came 'Ark of the Covenant' and 'Gate of Heaven.' After 'Gate of Heaven' one night my mother lost her concentration and she floundered and repeated it a few times, failing to remember what came next. Finally a little voice in the background piped up helpfully: 'Try Nelson's Pillar!' Everybody fell around the floor laughing, and my father took advantage of the opportunity to call a halt to the litany for the night. But the litany was only one of the many additions. There were three Hail Marys for this neighbour and a second lot for another one, until my father would start complaining, "For God's sake, we'll be here till morning." We prayed diligently for years for one neighbor who was studying to be a teacher and of whom my father voiced the opinion that "if a bumble bee had his brains he'd fly backwards," but despite this pronouncement on the neighbour's grey matter he still qualified. It was my mother's conviction that prayer could move mountains and indeed hers often did; at least they moved mountains of ignorance. During exam time she always lit a candle in the centre of the parlour table. I would come home during exams and peep into the parlour to check if she had remembered. It was always lighted. It was a symbol of caring and in later years her children wrote as adults to her from many corners of the world asking her to light her candle and pray for their special problems."