‘It captures a time before Dad became a public figure’: at home with Seamus Heaney

Catherine Heaney remembers gatecrashing her poet father’s kitchen photoshoot

This picture was taken when I was six years old. The photographer, Geray Sweeney, had come to our home in Dublin to take a portrait of my father for an exhibition on Northern Irish poets. I happened to be in the kitchen with my jar of bubbles as she was setting up, and she just started shooting. Clearly nothing was going to distract me from my task.

I don’t recall the occasion, but, looking at the photograph now, I have an almost physical memory of everything I’m wearing or touching. The beaded necklace was a gift from a family friend and I still have it in a jewellery box somewhere. The cardigan was knitted by my mum and was a bright, cherry red. But most of all, I remember my green bubble pipe. It made big, luxuriant bubbles – far superior to the little ones you’d get from the wands in bottles. My brother says it looks like a crack pipe.

Related: ‘As a young footballer, it was something you dream of’: the day my school team beat QPR