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gave me all her cigarette cards.
    Of the four Ryan sons two * were then curates, one was studying for the priesthood in Rome and the youngest was an army cadet whose buttons I loved to polish. Of the four daughters two were missionary nuns – educational pioneers in the remoter parts of Nigeria – and two lived at home. It was taken for granted that the Misses Ryan, though young, attractive and intelligent, would remain unmarried. Their ageing parents needed them and, having given five children to the Church, deserved them. They were never allowed enough freedom to be noticed by eligible men – though a father who had sired, in all, eleven children, and who could provide little financial security, might have been expected to consider both their emotional and economic needs. But in rural Ireland forty years ago Mr Ryan’s despotism was not rare; and it was encouraged by Irish Catholicism, which has always given to involuntary celibacy the status of a virtue.
    The Ryan family had produced several distinguished Gaelic poets and I much preferred their spontaneous ‘Irishness’ to the Murphys’ turgid and embittered nationalism. Yet this comparison was unfair; for generations no Ryan had been directly involved in Irish politics and it is less easy to avoid bitterness when you have spent some of the best years of your life in jail, being treated as a common criminal. But perhaps what really appealed to me about the Ryans’ tradition was its genuineness. They had a cultural integrity not often found, for historical reasons, in Dublin families. When my father and his brother were sent to Saint Enda’s – the school founded by Patrick Pearse – and when the family went to the Donegal Gaeltacht for their summer holidays, to learn Irish, they were searching for something the Ryans had never lost.
    In other ways, however, the Ryans’ simplicity irritated me, even at the age of six. Everything was good and bad, right and wrong, black and white; and children who suggested the possible existence of grey areas were just being impertinent. I soon learned to hold my tongue, partlybecause it seemed right to conform to the standards of the household and partly because The Boss shared with my mother – for very different reasons – the unusual distinction of being able to frighten me. To an extent I probably found the Ryans’ authoritarianism reassuring, but sometimes I was driven to secret tears when my rudimentary intellectual probings evoked an altogether unmerited sarcastic reprimand. To this day I remain puzzled by my emotional ‘adoption’ into this outwardly unyielding family. Clearly the Ryans liked having me about the place to soften the harshness of daily life; I was impulsively affectionate and as a family they conspicuously lacked demonstrativeness. But why did they not cultivate a child less liable to outrage their various susceptibilities and generally more tractable? Perhaps they furtively relished the stimulus of being outraged, or they may simply have enjoyed trying to raise my moral tone.
    The Ryans and my parents never fraternised; whatever they might have in common, their differences far outweighed their similarities. So the relationship stuck at meteorological comment, though for years I spent as much time in the Ryans’ house as in my own. Moving daily between two households whose attitudes, opinions and standards were often opposed might have led to some confusion had I been more pliable. But for me this tension was healthy, part of the process of learning to accept other people as they are.
    During the ’30s my parents’ only local friends were a Catholic curate, a Fianna Fail senator and the senator’s elderly widowed sister, Mrs Mansfield.
    Father Power was pompous, smug and plump; though a good deal more intelligent than Jane Austen’s Mr Collins there were prominent affinities, including a weakness for titled nobility. Few people in the parish were prepared to talk interminably about his obsession