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Mayo’s stony wet soil with a few hardy sheep and resigned-looking cattle, Mr Daly also had a couple of horses and a long driveway. This exotic combination of horses and driveways meant that whenever our father was going on a ‘call’ to Mr Daly’s we would clamour to go with him. Not that it was terribly exciting (after all, my horse-mad middle brother had a sweet but tired old pony called Toffee Apple, who did her best to ignore us in the field beside the house) but ‘Mr Daly’s’ provoked in us a Pavlovian response of giddy excitement.
    Ostensibly we wanted to go so we could ‘drive’ the car. At Mr Daly’s gate, my father would stop the car and put you on his knee so you could clutch the steering wheeland ‘drive’ up the long grass-and-gravel driveway to the big house, while he worked the pedals and jiggled you on his lap and tickled you and pretended to make you crash the car into the ditch, while my sisters screamed in pretend fear in the back seat. But, really, we just wanted to spend time with our dad. A small-town country vet doesn’t get days off and on the rare occasions he’s at home his small children are often already in bed. So, spending time with our vet dad meant spending time out ‘on call’ with him in his muddy car that smelt of animals and rain, and rattled and clanked with glass bottles of medicine and scary-looking implements, which were covered with dubious dark stains and the gloopy saliva left behind by muscular cow tongues.
    At Mr Daly’s I saw a horse being ‘covered’ for the first time. The mare was standing in the centre of the yard, her ripe horse-womanly pheromones clearly driving the prancing, sex-addled stallion wild, his hoofs clattering on the cobbles till eventually he rather clumsily mounted her, his big bouncing rubbery horse-hose seeming to have a mind of its own as it sought out and found her lady bits, while the men stood around chatting and watching with detached interest. The mare didn’t seem to enjoy it much, the stallion was so addled that I doubt he even remembered it, and the men looked as if it fell somewhere between a chore and a local football match. I started out with pretty realistic expectations of sex.
    Although the Dalys lived in the infamous captain’sformer home, the house, though handsome (a Mayo child’s crayon drawing of a farmhouse: a two-storey stone square with a big solid door and five windows), wasn’t particularly grand and the Dalys themselves were regular Mayo folk.
    But on the other side of the town in Partry House, another of the local ‘big houses’, Mrs Blosse-Lynch was the real deal: exotically Protestant, imperious and magnificent. The elderly widow of Colonel Blosse-Lynch (or ‘Moo’, as she called him), she lived in isolated shabby splendour with her lady ‘companion’, Pat, at the end of her own long driveway, a couple of miles from the town on the edge of a shallow, sandy-bottomed lake. We knew her because on occasion she’d call my father to attend to her friendly dopey Labradors, but most of the town had no reason ever to meet Mrs Blosse-Lynch – but everyone knew her. She would
put-put
into Ballinrobe in her little Citroën 2CV and park with imperious unconcern in the middle of the narrow street outside the grocer’s, and until she had collected and packed her shopping into the car, the rest of the town’s motorists simply had to wait. And I thought that was fabulous. I already knew a diva when I saw one and Mrs Blosse-Lynch was my first Madonna.
    In the hot summer of 1983, after my first year in boarding school, a young American student called Sandra came to stay at Partry House and help harvest the raspberries that Mrs Blosse-Lynch grew in a sizeable plot at the side ofthe house. Presumably Sandra had come as part of some kind of student ‘working abroad’ scheme, but it must have been quite an adjustment for an American teenager to find herself living alone with two elderly ladies in the isolated, faded