The sea was just twenty or thirty yards away, but in all those months \a151 from January to June \a151 she caught sight of it maybe once or twice from the clifftop: this turbulence below them, the waves crashing hard against the cliff-face. Her grandparents, she remembered, behaved as though it were not there. In all the years her grandmother had been in Cush, she had hardly ever been on the strand. They paid no attention to the sea, and Helen and Declan learned to pay no attention to it either.

The first dispute arose over food. Declan would eat only sliced bread, it had become a sort of joke in the family. But there was no sliced bread in Cush, only brown bread and soda bread that her grandmother made, and loaves of white bread with a hard crust which they bought in Blackwater. There were other things which Declan wouldn't eat \a151 cabbage or turnips, carrots or onions, eggs or cheese. He was obsessive about this, carefully finding out about each meal, or possible visits to other houses, and making sure that the food would be to his taste, and making himself pleasant in every other matter, and always getting his way.

On Sunday visits to Cush their mother packed sandwiches for Declan, and during longer visits she brought and cooked their own food. But Declan knew that their grandmother disapproved of this.

'You don't eat because you like the food, you eat to live, that's why you eat,' was one of her sayings.

As they drove from Enniscorthy to Cush, Helen knew that Declan thought only about food, and what was going to happen. The first dinner in the middle of the day was a stew; her grandmother served out four plates of stew with a big ladle and then put a plate of potatoes in the middle of the table. Her grandfather took off his cap and sat down and blessed himself. Helen made a sign to Declan to say nothing, do nothing. She peeled two potatoes for him and he mashed them up and slowly began to eat them. But he didn't touch the stew. Her grandfather read the Irish Independent and said very little. Her grandmother bustled about \a151 she seldom sat at the table \a151 and when, that first day, she went out into the yard, Helen took Declan's plate and scraped the stew into the bucket of waste her grandmother kept for the hens. She put the plate back in front of Declan; he sat there amazed, trying not to smile. Neither of their grandparents noticed anything.

When teatime came, Helen helped her grandmother set the table. For tea there was brown bread, thick slices of white bread and boiled eggs. Declan came into the kitchen as the eggs were being taken from the boiling water.

'These eggs now are fresh,' his grandmother said, 'not like the ones you get in the town.'

'Yuck,' Declan said.

'Declan doesn't eat eggs,' Helen said.

'I never heard worse,' her grandmother said. 'The things your mother has to put up with. She's too soft.'

And so the battle began, the battle that raged daily, Declan filling his pockets with crusts, Helen reaching for the waste bucket, and days when there was no way out, when Declan put the onions and the carrots or the cabbage and the turnips to one side of the plate and refused to eat them, and their grandmother insisted that he stay at the table until he had them eaten, only to relent as soon as he started to cry.

'He can't eat them, Granny, he'll get sick,' Helen would say.

'Stop giving back-answers, Helen.'

'I'm not giving back-answers.'

As soon as her grandmother began to talk about sending them to the two-teacher school in Blackwater, Helen set up a classroom at the kitchen table and for much of the day, in between meals, she and Declan worked at their schoolbooks, Helen playing the role of teacher. They discovered school as a way of excluding their grandmother, until she put a paraffin heater into the dining-room for them so that she could listen to the radio in peace. They did algebra or Irish or decimal points at the times of the day when she was most likely to hover around them; often they did the same exercises over and over, pretending this required total concentration and not looking up if their grandmother came into the room. They opened Declan's books at random and went through lessons he had done long before, or began entirely new ones without fully understanding them or finishing them. When they were bored, they laughed and whispered and played cards.

Their mother wrote short letters to their grandmother saying there was no news and mentioning tests and prayers and hoping that Helen and Declan were not too much of a burden on her. Their mother was staying in Rathmines with her cousin, one of the Bolgers of Bree, and his wife, and they too sent their regards. There was no mention of their father.

Helen and Declan found a box of games under one of the beds and amused themselves in the long, dark evenings playing Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. Helen found boots she could wear and went often with her grandfather to fetch the cows for milking or to open and close gates for him. Declan had no boots; he hated the muck of the yard and the lane, he seldom went out and often in the afternoon, in the clammy heat of the parlour, he became tired and irritable. Alone together in these first months, they never mentioned home or their mother or their father, or how long they would be here. They worked out strategies to get them through the day without confrontation.

Slowly, their grandmother began to treat Helen as an adult and Declan as a child, although Helen and Declan continued to treat each other as equals, even if Helen remained in the role of protector. In the first week or so, Helen had an argument with her grandfather; it was the only time he said much during their entire stay in the house. He was reading something in the newspaper about Fianna Fail – he himself was a member of Fine Gael, which was strong in Blackwater – and he turned to Helen and her grandmother and said, 'They're only a shower of gangsters, bloody gun-runners. Liam Cosgrave will put manners on the whole lot of them.'

'Jack Lynch is not a gangster or a gun-runner,' Helen said.

'The rest of them, then,' her grandfather said. 'And I'd string Charlie Haughey up. He's a feckin' gangster.'

'Oh, language now,' her grandmother said.

'But Jack Lynch is the leader,' Helen said.

'Oh, I know who you've been listening to,' her grandfather said. 'Did we ever think that Lily would have a little Fianna Failer for a daughter?'

'And the Irish Independent is only Fine Gael propaganda,' Helen said.

'Propaganda? Where did you learn that word?'

'Oh, Helen knows all the words,' her grandmother said.

'It's saying your prayers you should be,' her grandfather said and went back to reading the paper.

'Good girl, you stand up to him now,' her grandmother said later when he had left the room.

From then on, her grandfather let her watch the news on television and, after a few weeks, one Saturday night Helen realised that she was going to be allowed to watch The Late Late Show, which her mother and father had never permitted her to watch at home, except for the night when Lieutenant Gerard from The Fugitive was a guest on the show and she was called downstairs. Now in Cush she sat on one of the armchairs in the kitchen and wondered if they had forgotten about her as the news ended and then the break for advertisements ended and the music for the show began and Gay Byrne appeared.

'If something conies on that's not fit for her now,' her grandmother said, 'she'll go to bed.'

Helen remembered the slow preparations for the programme, her grandmother making sure that all the housework was done. Tea things and biscuits were set out on a tray, the kettle filled to be put on a hotplate during the second break. Her grandmother loved the programme, and, Helen realised, loved having Helen to discuss the guests and the controversies in the days that followed.