User:Joekyne14/Eric Cross (writer)

Later life & death
In 1953 Eric Cross moved to his new home with the Kelly's in Westport, County Mayo after responding to an add offering accommodation in exchange for the tutorship of the children. Eric Cross home-tutored the five children of Sonia and Joseph Kelly, offering them excellent tuition in mathematics. The three daughters did not continue their education past being home-schooled but the two sons later went to college where they both excelled in mathematics. Cross settled into the rural life and spent most of his time doing various household chores such as gardening and walking the dog and handyman jobs like repairing broken china and pottery items as well as being adept at metalwork, and involved himself in the "Crios" project for cottage weaving, he enjoyed conversing with newcomers when the Cloona Health Center was opened but otherwise he lived the remainder of his life in relative seclusion. Cross was "a polymath," and so he formulated a way of giving turf the durability of coal and thus creating a new mineral like substance similar to marble in appearance named "magnastone". In 1968, Cross released a "Map of time" depicting a messy record of Irish historical events dating back to the year 400A.D. He continued to write short stories for the BBC and for the RTE radio series Sunday Miscellany for which he wrote more than 200 short stories. He wrote several essays during his remaining years in Westport but none were published during his lifetime, his final published work was a series of short, folk stories Silence is Golden and other stories which was published in 1978, two years before he died, unmarried, in 1980 having been found dead in his sleep by the man of the house, aged 75. He is buried in Knappagh Churchyard, just a few miles outside of Westport.