WHILE politicians of all persuasions debate our responsibility to aid others in distress and even avowed Christians assert that there are hierarchies of obligation with our own loved ones firmly at the top of the list and the stranger within our gates at the bottom, it helps to remember that Jesus told us that there is no merit in caring just for those we love: even unbelievers do that! I’m paraphrasing, but see Matthew 5: 46-48.

If we are going to love our neighbour, we must expect it to come at a cost and sometimes at a risk.

Recently, I was talking over a century-old family anecdote with my son. The story involved my Irish grandmother, wife of the English head gardener of an “ascendancy” estate. Many aristocratic English landowners lived lives of privilege in pre-independence Ireland.

The legend has grandmother harbouring and tending a wounded English “Black-and-Tan” soldier in the estate cottage after a roadside ambush by Irish Volunteers nearby; a risky undertaking in the early 1920s with her two small boys in the house. My son scoffed at the tale and went looking for evidence.

He discovered that the Dromkeen ambush of a convoy of army lorries which left 11 dead happened on February 26, 1921, on the very road that passed Grandmother’s isolated cottage.

It was planned in retaliation for an attack on a dance held on December 26, 1920, at Caherguillamore House by Irish Volunteers fundraising to buy weapons for the war of independence. The house was surrounded by a large Crown force, mostly Black and Tans, who opened fire, killing five and capturing 100.

Caherguillamore was the dower house on the Rockbarton estate where Grandfather worked. It looked as if the story might be true.

Grandmother seems to have taken an enormous risk to harbour a stranger, a combatant, at a time when both sides were summarily executing captured enemy fighters.

I wonder how I or any of us would react in such a situation. Would we turn a wounded man in, slam the door or tend his wounds and get him to safety?

Sara Moult

Churchwarden, St Austell Parish