Opal Fruits

In Ireland, they don't call them fruit chews or candies-they're sweets, and my mam's friend Norah was made of them. Not literally, though her softness and warmth could have fooled a child into believing she was constructed from dissolved Opal Fruits and reformed into human shape.

She had that particular kind of Irish kindness that makes you feel like you're being wrapped in a warm jumper, even when you're standing in the drizzle outside Porter's newsagents on a grey Cork City morning.

Norah had been my mother's best pal since they were thirteen, back when leaving school to work at a dry cleaners seemed like the right step forward, rather than the peril of time and circumstance.

The friendship that bloomed between those two teenage girls among the chemical fumes and wire hangers outlasted 6 decades of marriages, strife, separation, cancer, deaths, personal heartbreak and the ever-changing parade of shops along St Patrick's Street.

I was 6 when I first understood that Norah wasn't actually my aunt, which seemed like a clerical error in the universe. Surely someone who called my mother ''mar'' with the same genuine affection only heard from the lips of my uncle John must be related to us by blood. But no - she was something better: a friend chosen rather than assigned by the lottery of genetics.

Every time we'd meet her in town, she'd buy me a packet of Opal Fruits. The routine never varied - she'd hold them just out of reach, eyes twinkling, and say ''I'll get you these, Gem''. My mother would protest weakly ''Nor, put away your money'' but Norah would wave her off with ''Ah, sure, let her have them/ you're only young once, isn't that right Gem?'' - a philosophy she seemed to have carried intact from her own thirteen-year-old self.

What I didn't know then was that these two women-these quiet architects of survival-were raising nine children between them with husbands whose prospects had evaporated like morning mist on the Lee. The Celtic Tiger was still years from stirring, and Ireland's black economy was where men like their husbands found whatever dignity the dole queue had stripped away. My mother and Norah patched together childhoods from thin envelopes on Thursdays and whatever grace could be conjured week to week.

Nora, though paid a high price for a man's fractured pride. This I learned as a teenager, the knowledge settling inside me like a stone. How could anyone be so cruel to her? This woman who dispensed sweets and kindness with equal abundance.

Years later, when I learned that Opal Fruits had been rebranded as Starburst, it felt like a personal betrayal. You can't rebrand memories. You can't update the taste of childhood. Somewhere in Cork City, there's still a thirteen-year-old girl starting her first day at the dry cleaners, and a 5 year old standing outside Porter's, and they both know these sweets by their proper name.