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six o’clock tea in the kitchen and then she went upstairs to put on her uniform.
    Years afterwards, when Josephine related all that, we tried to establish between us when it was that Michael Collins had first come to Kilneagh and decided it must have been a few months after she came to the house herself, in the early summer of 1918. She remembered my father saying in the hall: ‘I’m honoured to meet you, Mr Collins.’ She remembered being puzzled because Michael Collins didn’t seem the kind of man for someone like my father to make such a fuss of: she didn’t know then that he was a revolutionary leader. He and my father remained in the study for more than two hours, and when she brought in warm water for the whiskey they ceased to speak. Two other men waited in a motor-car on the gravel in front of the house. ‘Josephine,’ my father said, ‘bring out bottles of stout to those fellows.’
    By that summer the war in Europe had been won, but this was not apparent at the time and in Ireland everything was unsettled and on edge. De Valera was in Lincoln Gaol, and Collins was increasingly in disagreement with him about Ireland’s eventual status. I know that now, but even in retrospect it is impossible to guess how my father’s acquaintanceship with Collins had begun, though it must in some way have been related to the Quintons’ longstanding identification with Irish Home Rule. For this, we were seen by many as traitors to our class and to the Anglo-Irish tradition. The eccentricity of my great-grandfather in giving away his lands had never ceased to be remembered in the big houses of Co. Cork and beyond it. And one of Johnny Lacy’s stories retailed an incident in 1797, when a Major Atkinson of the militia at Fermoy had ridden over to Rathcormack at the head of a band of soldiers and shot six men in the village street. On the way back he had called in at Kilneagh, hoping to rest his horses there, but had been angrily turned away. In the barracks at Fermoy that display of inhospitality had not been forgotten either.
    ‘You are English, Mrs Quinton?’ I heard Collins politely enquire as he left the house after that first visit.
    ‘Yes, I am English.’
    My mother’s voice conveyed no note of apology. I could not see her from where I stood in the shadows of the hall, but I guessed that as she returned his stare the eyes that in calmer moments reminded me of chestnuts had gleamed fierily, as they always did when she was challenged or angry. There was injustice in Ireland was what my mother maintained: you didn’t have to be Irish to wish to expunge it. She told Michael Collins that she was the daughter of an army colonel and did not add that her marriage had taken place in an atmosphere of disapproval and distrust, just before her father’s regiment had been recalled to England. She had told me also, but the years that had passed must have calmed that atmosphere away for I remembered my grandfather and grandmother visiting us quite often in Kilneagh and seeming happy to be there. ‘I could stay for ever,’ my grandfather used to say. ‘There’s nowhere to touch Kilneagh.’ He was tall, like my mother, and stood very straight. I liked his voice, and was sorry when he and my grandmother left England for military duty in India. They did not ever visit Ireland again.
    ‘I’m much obliged to the both of you,’ Michael Collins said in the hall. ‘God bless you, sir.’
    Seasons changed; time slipped by at a dawdling pace, or that at least is how it seems. Incidents remain, isolated in my memory for reasons of their own. Moments and the mood of moments make up that distant childhood. A monkey puzzle died; new dogs were added to my aunts’ collection.
    In his unemphatic way Father Kilgarriff pursued in our history lessons his theme of warfare’s folly, still illustrating the absurdity of it with reference to the Battle of the Yellow Ford. ‘That bald English queen,’ he softly murmured, ‘answered defeat