As I type, there are two little boys bringing the cows in with Daddy (a safe distance from the cows may I add). They are in shorts, knees coming up high over grass, giving orders to two collie dogs who obey or not; depending on their humour. It fills me with delight to see them free to ramble through green fields of a summer’s evening, at last.

To give you some perspective, and in doing so, it is not to cast judgment over an otherwise happy childhood or to belittle my beloved Cork city in any way but to give you a bit of background. From my childhood bedroom window, I looked over the steeples of Murphy’s Brewery in a place called Blackpool on the Northside of Cork city, Jack Lynch country. Our alarm each morning came by way of a pigeon from next door’s yard cooing on our window sill. A neighbouring tenor began his repetoire of favourite old songs from 7am each morning when feeding these pigeons so that by 8am, we were getting out of bed, putting on the uniform for school, a fifteen minute walk away.

We lived in a set of terraced houses surrounded by lovely neighbours. To the front of the houses was half an acre of green grass that the city corporation was obliged to mow every so often, when funds were in. A cow never grazed there I promise you. In 1980’s Cork city, maintaining grass was never a priority and so city children rarely had a green place to sport or play as it happened. There were very few parks and we had little opportunity to walk in nature.

So you can only imagine the countryside through my eyes. On my walk through our farm, the branches are heavy this year with white thorn and elderflower. My sons understand their city mother’s delight at the available wild flowers for her kitchen vase and take it in turn to bring me daisies, buttercups, purple clover, forget-me-nots, dandelions and cuckoo flowers. The furze, to me, smell of coconut. Swallows swoop over my head from their nest in our shed and I’ve come to love their return to us. I await the first honeysuckle. June brings abundance, weighty hedgerows, heavenly smells, the sound of young birds chirping, mowers and the motion of summer activity all around.

As I watch my little boys, I am grateful for their freedom to run through grass. For children must always have freedom for summer fancies and flight in open space. It brings them ‘to their senses’, ignites their imagination and guides them gently into the world, learning that there will always be somewhere beautiful to return to when they come to know that the world can sometimes be harsh. All children should know this, city children as well as country.