I'm going to speak about my mother, Agnes Gillard, Mammy, Ma or 'The Auld Wan'. That was the nickname she received late in life from her adult children and grandchildren, but it was a nickname given with love.

Agnes was born two weeks after the Wall Street Crash. A childhood in 1930s Newcastle and Northumberland during that hard time could have sounded grim, but that was never the way she described it. She described a childhood in a large and loving Irish family, with her Kilkenny mother and her Newcastle Irish father working hard to raise nine children.

One story she told tells you how precarious it was. One day her father came back from signing on the dole five miles down in the middle of Newcastle but he came back with a bloodied face. Granny Quinn was cleaning him up and asking what on earth had happened, when he opened his hand to show ten bob - £45 in today's money - which he had won by surviving three rounds in the prize-fighting booth on the Town Moor. 

Doing everything you can to support and protect your loved ones came naturally to the Quinns, and it did too to Mammy. The Quinn family moved to a Land Settlement Association smallholding in Stannington in 1937 where unemployed miners and dockers could work themselves into security. Her parents seized this new independence and they raised nine children to adults at Stannington and Granny and Granda Quinn stayed there the rest of their lives.

They were Irish and proud of it and Catholic and proud of it. This faith in her religion and faith in her heritage was very important to Mammy. The Quinns worked hard and did it together.

She talked of sitting cleaning up countless trays of eggs round the kitchen table with the radio tuned to Radio Eireann, and going out with frozen hands to harvest sprouts or dig 'taties' when they were ready. She said whenever you found a rotten tatie you turned to your brother or sister and said 'Catch' before you lobbed it. I didn't say they were saints.

There is one story that stuck in my mind about when Mammy and two of her sisters were going to the grammar school in Newcastle and a relative asked Granda Quinn why he was wasting money educating those girls, who would just go off and get married. "I've seen too many widows scrubbing steps" was his terse and accurate reply. More of this later. 

Mammy passed her leaving cert and went out to work in Boots in Morpeth but knew there was more she could do. So at 17 she went, like her sisters, to train as a teacher. This meant that she ended up at the age of 19, teaching her first classes in Bedlington School to some children who were only five years younger than her. But like her mother, young Miss Quinn had a straight back and a steady eye when she needed it. 

One night young Miss Quinn's steady eye was persuaded by enthusiastic friends to look at the very neat quickstep of that nice Jack Gillard from County Mayo who was at the Catholic church club dance. Her eye was turned and in 1957 Agnes Quinn became Agnes Gillard and that's where the rest of us start to come in.

Agnes and Jack moved down to Yorkshire with his work and by 1966 had to move to a larger house, where the sixth and last of their children was born. In order we are John, Patrick, Mary, Cathrine, Anna and Agnes. And we are all so close in age that on one dreadful day we ended up all walking off to secondary school at the same time, looking like the Bisto kids going up the ginnel. 

Mammy and Daddy brought us up with love and hard work and a healthy degree of 'marching to the beat of your own drum'. What kind of Daddy will open the back door of the works van and lift out a donkey foal to come and live in the field next to us? And what kind of forty-something Mammy announces that her next teacher training course will involve potholing?

Mammy made our house a busy, warm and slightly eccentric beehive of a home, with lots of putting the world to rights over the kitchen table, and Mammy always the last to leave the floor at the end of it all. She said her own mother called her a 'blacklock' - the beetles that scurry out at night, and that Agnes "never went to bed on the same day she got up". This was true.

If something was going to be a pain she'd say "you'll have to offer it up". I didn't quite know what she meant – maybe itif was about the penance of listening to six children learning tinwhistles and fiddles – but we soon knew.

In 1977, after six months of illness, our father died of cancer at the age of 59. Mammy was 47. You remember the bit about widows scrubbing steps. Mammy was back teaching by then and she rolled her sleeves up and raised the six of us on her own. No blame, no hysterics, just the same love and warmth they had shown us when it was Mammy and Daddy.

She saw each of us out into the world, off to work or to university, and over the next few years the house gradually emptied. I asked if she jumped for joy when the last of us left. She said "I went into every room and cried my eyes out." But she said it with a smile.

Soon after the last child left the first grandchild arrived. And that was the next chapter, the one that seven people in this church know her from. She was very proud of all her grandchildren, a tireless babysitter, possibly a slightly subversive alternative to your parents, and loved for who she was, for what she did, and also – I admit – for her bottomless jar of liquorice allsorts. 

A welcoming kitchen table was the place where I see her most easily in my imagination. Our childhood table followed her to each of her subsequent houses, and it has borne more pots of tea than you can imagine. And the world was put to rights there, and Mammy was in the middle of it. 

She lived a long time – nine years beyond the last of her siblings – and she occasionally said she thought God had forgotten about her. He hadn't, clearly. She had a few more years than she really wanted, but bore her loss of memories with good grace and was loved by her carers. In spite of her dementia, she still had her sense of humour, and loved to talk.

And she knew that she left this world with love around her, in the same way that she had come into it, and that she had taught her family to love as generously as she had. 

Goodbye Mammy, Agnes, Young Miss Quinn, Ma and the Auld Wan. Your God hadn't forgotten you, and nor will we.