They had chosen a peninsula where not one non-Catholic lived. The Carters, the Binghams were gone. The Protestants of Rossport, Rinroe, Portacloy, Laughmurray and Gorteadilla – all gone. Or if they were out there he could not find them. The Adamses were alone. He wrote down the stories and yet contended with his own life in a logical and legal way, as if fairies existed only in the minds of the people and not in his. His own mind, he believed, was an exact apolitical place guarded by sanity.

Disreputable locals who found their way into the house threw bleary looks at the girls. With the help of intoxicating liquor the Sergeant coaxed from them scandalous verse on local landlords. The wording of curses, old cures, songs of losses at sea, historical verse as Gaelige. He bought books in Irish for his daughters which no one could read, even with the help of a dictionary. Then he began a history of the place names of the area where the old evangelists and missionaries had lived. In America Street himself and Maisie visited the ruins of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. Inside not a whit remained, only stacked benches against the wall. The light from the shuttered windows fell onto a pool of water beneath a leak in the roof.

Maisie stood in the middle of the floor and said: “My father would die if he saw this.”

“America Street?” asked Jonathan Adams of Joe Love.

“Oh, a fellow called Seán Reilly from Muings bought up the entire street. It was then Ballyglass Street. And he named it America Street. He’d made a mint in the States. They called him locally, wouldn’t you know, Seán America.”

Through Joe Love he was given sight of a bundle of letters in a local house that had been written by Presbyterian emigrants who’d left for America in one of the Famine ships. The list of deaths and trials at sea read to him like poetry. For the first time in his life he felt that literature might open the door that politics had closed on him.

Jonathan Adams stomped round the townlands drawing maps and marking in the boundaries of the old landlord’s houses while Maisie sat in the car reading gardening books. Each place name had a different resonance and sound depending on who was talking. He wrote down the different versions and then tried them out on his neighbour Joe Love, who would guess their meaning. He watched Bernie Burke heading past the house with plastic bags of fish. A greeting in Irish was called. His lack of Irish began to infuriate him. Every door to the peninsula’s past was closed to him. The Irish language was denying him entrance.

“I need books,” he told Maisie, “and I need maps that are not Catholic maps.”