My mother was born on this day 100 years ago - May 15, 1925. She was just 71 when she died in 1996 and scarcely a day passes that I don’t think of her.

From the day she married my father in 1952 until we got married in 1981, Mam lived in this house so her memory and spirit are all around us.

My grandfather, John Twomey, had four sisters; Mary and Johannah died as children, Nora qualified as a nurse, worked in London and died during the Spanish Flu epidemic. Elizabeth, or Auntie Lizzie as she was called, died in 1957 - the year I was born.

As the only son, it was probably expected that John Twomey would follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps and become the farmer of the ancestral acres at Kilcor, Castlelyons. People that knew him spoke of his brilliant mind, common sense, and intelligence.

His father died whilst felling a tree in 1921, and by then my grandfather had set out on a different path in life. He got a position with the newly set up Free State Department of Agriculture.

Initially, he worked on the Cow Testing (milk recording) Scheme. Later then, he got promotion and became a Senior Livestock Inspector in the province of Leinster.

I don’t know if my grandfather John Twomey ever used the words ‘besotted’ or ‘infatuated’, but it seems that’s exactly how he felt one autumn day in the early 1920s.

The Leahy family of Killamurren, Bartlemy, and Abbeylands, Castlelyons had a threshing ‘set’ out on hire to farmers in the area. They were short of help one day and asked my grandfather to give them a hand. He agreed - it proved to be a fateful occasion.

The threshing was at McCarthy’s of Ballinaskeha in Leamlara in Lisgoold parish. That night, on his return home, my grandfather was said to have declared: “Oh lads -today I saw the girl I’m going to marry!” And he did.

She was Nora McCarthy, my Granny Twomey. They married in Leamlara Church and had the ‘reception’ in Ballinaskeha.

The young couple settled down in Kilcor and, on Friday, May 15, 1925, their first child, a baby daughter, was born. Next day she was taken to Castlelyons Church to be baptised........

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