Auntie Eileen is the only person I know who isn’t scared of Mammy. She even knows Mammy calls her ‘a one’. ‘A one’ is bad because it means T.R.A.M.P. When Mammy sees Mrs Cohan going around Carncloon in her too-short skirts she always says, she’s another one. We all know she’s a T.R.A.M.P. because she goes up to the big barracks to see British Army soldiers and you’re not even supposed to speak to soldiers. We were trained to not even look at them and their bloody rifles on the main street. They hang out of the doorways and watch the bombed-out shops for people with stones in their hands. They walk in the road because cars go slow in Big Town because of the ramps. The ramps are there to stop the bombers on both sides. Bombs go bang if they get shaken.

Mammy barges past them because they don’t belong here. No harm to them, they’re all someone’s son, says Daddy. One day there will be no English boots on Irish soil, No Siree Bob, and that day can’t come soon enough, says Mammy, who stands like she has a broom up her arse when the National Anthem comes on the wireless after her ceilidh programme. Auntie Eileen is bold to say things and Kathleen’s never done telling her to behave because I have ‘ears like a bat’. I’d never tell on them, though, in this house we don’t carry tales.

Daddy says the worst boots aren’t English at all: they are the boots of the UDR who are just as bad as the USC because the UDR is made up of the lately disbanded B-Specials. It’s not hard to keep up because Mammy goes over my letters with me and I write them in my rough jotter and learn them by heart every time the men add a new set – the RUC, the UUP, the DUP, the IRA, the PIRA – into the mix. Maybe it’s because bad things have to be spelt out?

Mammy always spells out B.I.T.C.H. when she’s talking to her sisters, Auntie Vi and Auntie Harriet. She thinks I don’t know she’s talking about Auntie Eileen who did something terrible in America. She swanned off with an Eye-talian and came home with my Cousin Bernie who’s not well. Bernie’s never spoken a word and she’s older than me by a year. Good Holy God has a way of making sure some people pay for their dirty sins in this life, says Mammy.