The first problem with Eileen is one of job description.
She had started off her life with us as a nanny, stayed on when us children got bigger to be a sort of child minder then even with us all grown up and most of us gone she was still in Tree Tops as a sort of housekeeper.
To all of us she was a sort of second mother, and often in fact a first mother should the truth be known.
She came to us first at the age of fourteen when my brother George was a baby, it must have been in the early ninteen forties, she was purloined from a neighbours, the O Flynns, but she can’t have been there long.
Her home was in north county Cork.
Glen Collins, Ballydesmond, Mallow Co. Cork.
The address mantra still slips easily off my pen because Eileen used to talk about her home so much.
She was one of six children, Dan the eldest had gone to the states, had his own life and family over there and worked as a prison warder.
Sheila was sent for a nun and despite escaping over the wall home several times, and then sent back, she had eventually stuck in the convent and was then in Australia.
The two other brothers Sean and Dennis, ran the farm in Ballydesmond and Kathleen, younger but closest to Eileen was in service in America.

By the time I came along Eileen’s place in the family was altogether established.
She ruled the kitchen area, often being the commander of two or three parlour maids, a transient breed who came and went rapidly, most of them country girls who “lived in” in the “back room”, the only room in our narrow house which was lit by a north facing window.
Her domain was the kitchen, there even my mother had to play second fiddle when she entered Eileen’s territory to make jams or cakes.
She also usually ate with us, in what we called “the breakfast room” as distinct from “the dining room” where my mother and father ate in rather more style.
When my mother was away she was in total charge, ruled the whole roost, including the various gardeners, whom she fed, and especially of the seven of us whom she adored to a man.
To me Eileen’s love was as unstinting and as unequivocal as any mother’s. I was without doubt the favourite,( then the youngest often is,) the best tease line was when I had been victor of what my siblings saw as yet another miscarriage of justice.
Then was chanted;

Eileen’s ball of fluff
He never has enough
Except when he’s stuffed up
He’s Eileen’s ball of fluff !

Not exactly Shakespeare but it usually did the job to enrage me, and to bring further punishment down on the heads of the chanters should Eileen hear it.
Despite this partisanship I think that all of the family returned Eileen’s love.
That the devotion was that of a mother was plain for us all to see.

When I started school I was petrified of getting the bus home on my own.
There was perfectly sane reason to this, I was extremely short sighted and couldn’t read the numbers of the bus, but this wasn’t discovered until many years later.
On an early attempt I had got the Mayfield bus instead of the Tivoli one and can still feel the cold grip of terror as the bus started up Summerhill to places unknown and I had to leave the bus, sobbing and frightened to walk the two miles home, the fare given to the wrong conductor.
(Being a “ball of fluff” did make me 100% wimp!)
Eileen’s solution to this new terror in my life was simple.
Every day she came in to town on an earlier bus and was waiting at the bus stop at the Coliseum when I came out of school to escort me home.
Eventually as I began to recognise other boys getting the same bus I was prepared to risk getting the right one home but even then for a long time she used to walk the half mile down the hill to meet me and walk me the last bit home.
I was, as they used to say in Cork; “Rooned”

Eileen used to talk about her home a lot and about “the boys” as the two brothers were known.
She was still the official woman of the house there, so had responsibility for the décor when “The Stations” hit the house every couple of years.
Then there was pure panic as Eileen used to get extra leave to head down to Ballydesmond and repaint the whole house, scour and clear out the dirt of the brothers , put up new curtains and generally put on the best face for the neighbours.

Eileen’s young sister Kathleen was doing well in America, service was obviously far better paid over there.
She had always been a bit more flighty and indeed glamorous than Eileen.
I remember Eileen telling me how Kathleen used to hide close to the neighbours house on May day and then rush out before her to wash her face in the dew, the tradition being that the first to do so would achieve beauty.
When I was about nine I came out of school one day and there with Eileen was a woman of incredible glamour.
She was, I remember, dressed all in powder blue with a hat and veil exactly the same colour as her costume and a short fur coat flung casually over her shoulders.
Kathleen had come on a visit.
She turned out to be just as kind as her sisters and from that day there was always individual parcels for me in the larger “parcel from America” when it arrived just before Christmas.

Tragically Kathleen was to arrive home again a couple of years later, this time dying of cancer, she stayed in Tree Tops for some time, weak and feeble but still cheerful, before her death.
This turned out to be an exact dress rehearsal for Eileen’s own death some years later.
As we all grew up and started to bring boyfriends and girlfriends home they would have to be passed fit by Eileen before any continuation was assured.
My first serious girl friend, Noreen, was so loved by Eileen that when I eventually broke it off with her she cried for three days in the kitchen.
That was in fact the measure of the woman.
Just as she became a second mother to us she loved us as her own.
We became her family.

She died exactly the same way as her sister in 1973.
I remember my now brother in law telling me that there was a phone call from home to say Eileen had died.
I remember his horror as I burst into tears in his face.

We called our second daughter after Eileen.
I’m sorry she isn’t here to watch my children grow up.
She would have loved them like her own.