The Rices were a competent, and in many ways a fortunate people when compared with the great majority of their countryfolk. This is expressed in a glimpse of their comfortable homestead at Westcourt, Callan, in the Co. of Kilkenny, where Edmund was born. The traditional thatched farmhouse looks across to the mountains of Slievenamon, and the setting sun.
A warm glow on the windows suggests comfort and hospitality, for the Rice family strongly upheld the ancient Irish tradition of welcome to the stranger, the visitor, and those in need. It was here that Edmund learnt not to draw distinctions between rich and poor.
The harvest stooks of oats symbolise the good husbandry of the Rice family. Here we are in the Gaelic heartland of Edmund’s native county which provided the cultural background of his boyhood years. Irish was still the language of hearth and home, of song and dance, of learning and leisure, of hunting hills and playing fields, of all the manifold comings and goings of a small town in a rural hinterland.
Here too is a scene from Edmund’s boyhood. He and Brother Patrick Grace, a gentle Augustinian who was well known and well loved in the Callan area as the Little Grey Friar, sit talking. The two are engrossed in conversation, their bare feet resting on the brink of a well. Perhaps the well is one of Ireland’s reputed 3,000-plus holy wells, or perhaps it is a well of living water. Its surface is disturbed by a spiral-yet another representation of the holy Spirit's never-ending movement.
