Still, whenever we arrived down there was no possibility of going elsewhere for a meal. Generosity to visitors was a helpless affliction in west Clare, and though this was a time of desolation in the west when houses were emptying and on roads lingered the sorrow of a departing people, Making the Welcome remained a kind of constitutional imperative. My grandparents, like all the old people in Faha then, preserved intact ancient courtesies. The cost of it, the way they would be living in the days after we left, was not hinted at, nor did it once occur to me.
