Yet when the summer ended, and they returned with their wailing geese to the stricter regime in Northern Ireland, their lives were racked by the pervasive sentiment of their summer home. Names of neighbours and their doings in Belmullet and the rest of the peninsula were more commonplace topics of conversation among the Adamses than were their neighbours in Fermanagh or the increasing violence in the North. Soon they began going down every weekend, though the drive took more than three hours. They installed an old fashioned, balloon-like leather suite. Desk lamps. Set sea-holly. The girls hung Chinese bells. Did their home work for the college in Fermanagh while looking out on the wild seas of the Atlantic. Bit by bit they were trying to banish from the house the temporary air.

Jonathan Adams would hear of all that was happening on the peninsula through his daughters and his wife. Maisie read the Southern papers to him as they sat close to the range in the draughty kitchen. The kitchen was always cold. They never succeeded in getting the range going at full heat because of the spartan amounts of coal and turf they added. They were divided between two houses. In the North, heat sped through the house. They had an electric cooker, a fridge. In Mullet, in a house twice the size of the other, they cooked on a picnic stove for more than a year, kept food in plastic boxes, added single sods of turf to a miserable fire.

It was in these conditions that Jonathan Adams heard how Mr Blaney, who had been involved in the arms trial that toppled the Irish government a few years before, was now running as a Euro-MP; that Mr Haughey, thrown from a horse and out of his party, was now installed in power again; Gay Byrne was opening boutiques; a Mayo bishop was calling for an International Airport in Knock. The Adamses gossiped scandalously and bitterly in low whispers about Irish hypocrisy, and took hot water bottles to bed.

It was a temporary sojourn, or so it appeared at first.

Soon their summer journeys to the South spread into the autumn, into the early spring. One year, they spent Christmas there with the girls. A wind of a ferocity they had never before experienced kept them indoors for the entire festival. Instead of news about Northern Ireland they began to listen to weather reports from Radio Éireann, something they had never done before.