When I was sick with the chicken-pox my grandfather visited me; I saw him in the doorway with a flagon of orange-cordial. He took me for walks past the Wheatsheaf Hotel and bought me custard tarts and vanilla squares.

Then, like Charles Ebenezer and Little White Puppy and Bob before him, my grandfather disappeared. He was knocked down by a car on the Port Road after he had been drinking.

I went to the house beside St. Teresa for the last time. It was night and I was with Nan. I saw the sleepout and the sunflowers and helped lift the incinerator made from a petrol-tin onto the wheelbarrow. Nan said we might as well have it as anyone else. I felt sad as we rattled away.

Then there was only Great-grandfather Collins to visit. He was a very old man with a square head that wobbled on a thin neck and a bobbing Adam’s apple. There was something serpentine about his long face mottled with age and stubble, its slit of mouth rimmed with scabs in winter, its heavy lids that flickered over rheumy eyes. He had shrivelled hands rashed with spots.

The side gate squeaked as I opened it. I plucked at the bush of southernwood; saluted the canvas water-bag that swung in the fig-tree. At the bottom of the yard past the fence and the tennis-court was the house where a girl who had something wrong with her lived: she had to hold her hanky to her mouth to stop the phlegm (she had a little sister who couldn’t grow).

I thought of her and felt subdued as I stepped into the kitchen. All was as usual: the housekeeper at the sink, the dish of bread-and-milk sprinkled with sugar on the newspaper cloth, the Saints brandishing their swords above November on the calendar, the Major Mitchell cocky in his cage. I swished through the curtains Grandfather Hanrahan had climbed, and came to my great-grandfather’s room.

The blind was drawn and everything was vague. The tongue of the skirting-board licked the linoleum; the slate-grey hollow slumbered on the bed. China figurines of the Mother of God were reduced to phantoms. My great-grandfather was a waxwork figure on a horsehair sofa; his hands folded over a silhouette waistcoat. I greeted him, and lingered by the fireplace where he kept the jar of chalky peppermints stamped with crowns.

And we talked about the virtues of going to bed early, of being a Catholic; of why you should vote for the Labour Party.

I am older. Italian market-gardeners live in Grandfather Hanrahan’s house — the sleepout is pulled down, cabbages grow instead of sunflowers.

I walk down the lane to see my great-grandfather. Carol comes too. She waits outside; pulls faces at Dominic and Elvio.

It is hot. The water-bag flaps on the tree; the doorknob burns my fingers. The wire door snaps crazily shut; the cocky squawks in the empty kitchen.

The dimness is exaggerated by the heat that shimmers outside and for a moment I cannot see. I step forward, grope along the passage; feel the curtain lap about me; breathe in stale perfume.