Brigid had asked her parents if she could look for a job in Dublin or Galway, but her father had said she was needed on the farm to help her mother and grandmother, especially now that Granny was getting older and less able to run her own smallholding. ‘Perhaps in a few years, pet,’ he said, ‘but not right now. The boys have to be educated as well. You did well that we could afford to get you to Inter Cert level. Plenty around here only got their Primary Cert. John will be going to ag college next year, if he gets a scholarship, so it wouldn’t be the best time for you to leave us. Sure, I’d be lost without you,’ he declared, his blue eyes crinkling, his tanned face creasing in a smile. Even though she loved her father, it wasn’t what Brigid wanted to hear. What was the bloody point of having her Inter Cert if she couldn’t put it to use? You didn’t need a cert to do housework in Dr Murray’s house!

Brigid climbed over the stile into Low Field, her wellies sinking into the mud on the other side. Was this to be her life? She was sixteen, and still stuck in the back of beyond. What, she wondered despairingly, could she do to escape from the binding ties of family and home?

*

Imelda pulled back the curtain under the press and rooted for the polish box to start black-leading the range. Her mother had finished plucking the chicken and was preparing mash for the calves. Sometimes Imelda reckoned the calves and the cattle were more important to her father than she and her siblings were. His whole life revolved around the ‘stock’ – buying, selling, rearing, milking them – and it was those large slobbery animals, chewing their interminable cud, that decided the financial circumstances of the Dunne family. Imelda loathed them.

She wanted to be a costume designer in Hollywood, like Edith Head, and design glorious gowns for Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly and all the film stars who filled the pages of Photoplay magazine. Photoplay was her bible. Her Auntie Peg, Elizabeth’s youngest sister, had emigrated to Boston, and the previous year she had sent them a package with a few of her old magazines, along with cuttings and magazines about Jack Kennedy’s wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier. Auntie Peg adored JFK. Everyone in Boston did, she wrote to Elizabeth. Imelda wasn’t interested in politicians, but she thought she was in heaven, immersed in the magazines her aunt had sent, reading about the film stars and studying their fashion.