Mary of the Curling Hair

It went down in family mythology as the great mink coat heist: the night I tried to steal my mother-in-law's fur. I hasten to say I was blameless, but jokes are still occasionally made, and fingers pointed. What happened was this. We were in north Cork at a family wedding, my husband and I staying in the hotel where the reception was being held. My mother-in-law, who lived locally, arrived arrayed as she liked to be in great style. But where to leave the coat? It was bulky and valuable. I said she could leave it in our room, where it would be safe. Unfortunately, later that night when she was getting ready to go home, she forgot where it was. Unknown to me, an army of hotel staff started turning the place upside down and the worst was feared. A thief had made off with it.

"But I have it," I finally said, when the uproar reached my ears. "It's in my room."

Perhaps by then she was starting to be afflicted by the forgetfulness which dogged her later years. She hadn't always been like that. When I first met my husband in London in the seventies, he told me in trembling tones about his mother. His father, Jack Crowley, had died young, leaving Mary to run the farm, rear five small children and hold down a job as a national school teacher – paid less at the time than her male colleagues and at the beck and call of the parish priest. She needed to be tough and she was. When I finally met her, however, I found not the expected dragon but a tiny, gentle old dear. So what had happened to the martinet her children told me about? The one who ruled over their choices of careers, friends and lovers.

The farm at Blossomfort had been sold off, since none of the family wanted to work it. Mary was now comfortably enough off with that and her teacher's pension. After a hard and self-sacrificing life, she was at last able to please herself. Her indulgence was clothes: she loved style and was always careful to co-ordinate her accessories, fretting terribly if her shoes didn't quite match her bag. I never went shopping with her but apparently it was a nightmare.

She was a Kerry woman. Her parents came from Caragh Lake, near Killorglin, where her father, Michael O'Donoghue, was also a national schoolteacher. In one of my earlier incarnations as a genealogist, I checked the public records for the area and found the family in the 1911 census: there was young Mary, and some of her many brothers and sisters, including Stephen, who was to scandalise Cork when he ran off with the married daughter of Turkish Delight manufacturer Hadji Bey. But that's another story.

Mary lived on into her mid-nineties, sinking further into dementia but mostly in the sweetest way. Forgetting the present, who we all were, but constantly recalling how once they said she was the best girl in her school at Irish.

Whenever we visited from Dublin, as long as she was able, we would take Mary out for a meal in some nice hotel, where she would add a few spoonfuls of sugar to her Liebfraumilch, to take the bitterness out of it. One time there was a piano in the lobby and urged on by my children, she played a snatch of  "My Mary of the Curling Hair", the song Jack Crowley used to serenade her with so many years before, when she was a pretty young thing, her voice now quivering with age.

But the most funny-sad memory I have is another mink coat story. There she was all dressed up ready to come out, but -- consternation! -- she couldn't find her false teeth. She was convinced that a certain someone had stolen them and nothing could dissuade her. Nevertheless we proceeded to the restaurant, where she removed her silk scarf and stuffed it in the pocket of the mink. Thereupon, like a magician performing a trick, she pulled out the teeth and triumphantly held them aloft. We all burst out laughing and Mary Crowley, my Kerry mother-in-law, had the grace to join in.