We did not go on summer holidays. The holidaymakers came to us. We lived on a farm high up in the middle of a wood with a view of Mount Leinster and the Blackstairs Mountains. "Idyllic," they all said. "Breath-taking" was another word they used. "They" were my English relatives who came from Oxfordshire to spend summer at our house.

At some point every year the letter arrived, Queen Elizabeth's head stamped in the top right-hand corner. The preparations followed, then the car. It thundered up our lane and out of it emerged my aunts, my uncle, cousins. They brought big suitcases trimmed in fake leather, a black Labrador whose tongue was hanging out. They brought a German exchange student. They brought allergies and appetites and kissed us. I was not used to kissing. It was an alien sensation I did not entirely approve of, but they kissed me anyhow and breathed in the fresh air as if it had some calorific value. I thought there was no fresh air in England.

Don't ask me where we all slept. That is a mathematical problem I have failed to figure out. All I know is my cousin Ellen slept with me. She was 22 days younger than I but she had breasts and hair of liquid gold. My Aunt Bridget, too, slept in my room. She stayed up late reading Mills and Boons while the summer wind tousled the sycamores outside the open window. The boys slept in bags in the parlour. I knew that because I saw them with the bags and I could hear them coming upstairs to use the bathroom, the toilet's constant flushing.

They had great appetites and could not be filled. They had strange names for food: they called rashers "bacon". They called sweet "pudding", which was funny, because stewed apples and sago looked nothing like a pudding. They were not allowed to put their elbows on the table.

My mother killed black turkeys, I peeled turnips, carrots, parsnips. I washed heads of cabbage. I dug bucketfuls of Golden Wonders which my mother boiled and heeled out on a willow-pattern serving dish on the middle of the dinner table. My cousins grazed through the orchard, ate blackcurrants, gooseberries, picked the bushes clean. They dipped stalks of rhubarb, raw, into the glass sugarbowl which it was my responsibility to replenish. But they were particular over small things.

"Isn't the milk here pasteurised?" asked my cousin one morning as my mother was pouring a bucketful of warm milk through a muslin cloth. "No, strained," my mother answered. I followed her around after that, watched her carefully. I owned a little brown pullet and was afraid she'd go colourblind with tiredness and chop its head off.

Ellen suffered from hayfever. Our sunflowers bowed their heads apologetically but the ragweed raged yellow through the fields. She sneezed all day and asked my mother if she had a pillow without feathers. Her eyes turned red and watery. She looked always on the edge of some calamity. She burned easily in the sun and I peeled wispy sheaths of skin like moth's wings off her shoulders between her white strap-lines. I rubbed aloe vera on her back like a slave. She had her own bars of fragrant soap, which she allowed me to sniff.

"Cleopatra used this," she told me. I thought Cleo Patra was the patron saint of England.

Uncle Dennis did not care about the price of petrol. He drove us all the way to Carnew for cones. I was not used to going anywhere for the sake of ice-cream. He drove at 70 miles an hour over a hump-backed bridge so our heads hit off the roof, then he did a U-turn and did it again. He drove to the River Slaney and fished for pike. He drove us to Cahore Point where we ate bananas and got stung by wasps. My mother lay on the Foxford rug and rested, knowing the sea air would sharpen our already hearty appetites.

The German student didn't know what to make of us. He was tall and thin and dressed in brown and reminded me of a Chef sauce bottle. Mostly he sat on the steps of the granary loft and admired Ellen from a distance while I rode my pony over jumps down by the dip-tub. My aunt had a tendency to go walking nowhere in particular with the Labrador and our own dogs at her heels. My brother Anthony set up a target at the oak tree on the lawn and practised shooting while my other aunt baked Swiss rolls and seed cakes between meals.

My relatives went back to England at the end of the summer. There was more kissing. They squeezed into the car and waved out through the windows. They left a queer and palpable silence behind them.

One such day I remember in particular. I rode my pony into the kitchen. It was cool and dark inside and my mother was sitting at the table, drinking tea with her back to me. She looked thinner. She did not look up. The silence in the kitchen was mesmeric. I could hear a blue bottle struggling against the windowpane. I could hear the clock again, tock, tock, pushing us happily into autumn. It was a silence whose exact source I could not pinpoint until much thought led me to the toilet. It was the cistern. Nobody was flushing the toilet. The cistern was full.

Claire Keegan is a short story writer who has finished a collection, the title story of which appears in Irish Short Stories, 1997 (Phoenix), edited by David Marcus.