on her knees and kissed his hands like he was the Pope.

A doctor in the family. Well, we’re all hoping.

Clerkenwell, ‘Little Italy’, London, 1911

PEGGY invested in the future, the past – a pit to fall down,

but sometimes memory was stronger than the mind

and there she was, sweet Margaret ‘Peggy’ Robbins,

whose long brown ringlets bounced down to her waist,

whose white cotton petticoats were always starched,

whose button-up boots were always hand-me-downs,

looking up as the strange Zeppelin bird glided overhead,

or the wonderful Corpus Christi procession paraded

before her in Little Italy where they lived, the dazzling

monstrance held up by the priest, golden rays shooting

out from The Host, older Italianate girls from church

wearing white veils and walking ceremoniously behind

a statue of Our Lady on a stretcher, scattering petals.

Or long-dead Gran appeared at No 31, Old Emma Robbins –

an apparition in front of the front parlour’s coal fire,

come to pull Peggy back to a childhood where Gran

was a shapeless sack of black in front of the hearth:

black bonnet, rustling skirts, gnarled, brown-spotted

hands knitting blankets. Not talking to anyone – ‘living’,

muttering in a language only she could understand.

Birr, Ireland, 1849 –

EMMA was delivered into her mamaí’s dying arms

in a damp cottage in the frozen wasteland of winter

just as the reign of the Great Hunger was coming

to a close. Its monster jaws had ravaged the island

for four murderous years, masticated the emaciated

bodies of a million poor souls, sucked the flesh

off them and buried their bones in earth blighted

with potatoes rotting with black and green mould.

Britannia, the Protestant Conqueror, who’d long ago

throttled Catholic Hibernia between her two

mammoth hands and stamped it to the ground,

did little to help, inventing scapegoats instead.

Ireland is a human swinery, an abomination,

a black howling Babel of superstitious savages –

like Widow Caitlin, who raised her grandchild Emma

in the iron crook of her arm; who’d lost five daughters

to the Hunger, her husband to Typhus, her only son Lorcan

to the exodus to find work overseas. But oh no not she.

Caitlin swore to the Good Lord that she would raise

at least one grandchild in her beloved homeland

and she made young Emma swear on the Holy Bible

never, ever to abandon Ireland.

‘THEY WANT to make us suckle Sasanach words,

to cut out our own sweet Gaelic tongue at the root,’

Caitlin told Emma, gripping the skipping child

in the vice of her hand as they crossed the sun-sprinkled

fields after Sunday’s long morning service,

their bare feet sinking into the swill of the rains.

‘A curse be upon those that invented laws

to persecute Catholics in this, God’s own country.’

In the woods, Emma ran ahead to pick bluebells,

the sun dappled her tattered cream smock,

long black hair a twisted rope down her back.

‘How dare they rob us of our right to Home Rule.