She looked up at me and whispered. “Was Auntie Sarah a witch”? Her wee face looked frightened. I started to laugh. When I was a kid walloping about the fields with Auntie Sarah trying to pick out the nicest looking nettles and seeing who liked butter with the buttercups it never occurred to me that  this might be a bit ‘odd’. It seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. The fact that neither my mum nor any of my other aunts picked nettles (and dandelions) didn’t occur to me. This was just something that we did with great aunt in the springtime. Becca hadn’t ever had that experience, Aunt Sarah was too old by the time she had started to toddle.

The older women started to laugh to; I think they were tempted to spin a yarn about her being a refugee from the Salem witch trials.  Mary said “Becca we are talking about your aunties famine recipes. Her mammy and daddy were alive when there was a terrible famine in Ireland and everyone was hungry because there was no food.

It had never occurred to me that a member of my family would have such a close insight into something that happened so long ago (1845-52)Mary was telling Becca that Sarah’s mammy had told her about being so hungry that she had eaten grass and that they made a soup with nettles and onions if they could find one. Whether Sarah had known hunger that bad I don’t know, but the stories must have stayed with her because she still gathered nettles and dandelions and added them to soups and stews to make them go further. That day, history came off the page for me, I understood my Aunt Mary’s bitterness towards the British and her willingness to blame just about everything on them. (even bad weather). She must have been raised on the stories of her Grandmother and grandfather. The real stories not the silly ones my family told me. Sarah’s mother’s family was practicably wiped out by the famine and they lost what little they had that any of them survived was probably a miracle but in all disasters there are always survivors and people do carry on.

That day five generations of my family sat in a little parlour to say their final farewell to its oldest member and I thought five strong healthy generations.  My generation, never give much of a thought to the fact that we are here at all but that day  I couldn’t help thinking I am here because a little girl and boy survived on  grass and nettles, for Sarah’s mammy and daddy must have been very young and born maybe right in the middle of the famine so that they lived at all is miraculous.