Although every one of them would tie me to Johns Farm for longer and longer, they took my heart in their tight little fists when they were born and would never let go. I would not have coped without my daughter and Bridie – Bridie my saviour who did all she could to help me rear them – but I still fell into bed every night exhausted. We battled wind and juggled bottles and Serena carried them around on her back to get them to go to sleep. Bridie wasn’t getting any younger and her arthritis was getting worse so she took to swallowing her painkillers with Guinness to ‘protect the lining of her stomach’. She was often drunk and high in charge of a toddler or two.

John did all he could outside without my help. We had fallen so easily into the roles I’d watched my parents play out over the years. The big animals were his domain, the big fields of hay and grain, the big machinery and miles of stone walls. Mine was the little house and the street, the children, the chickens, the orchard and the garden. We were so well rehearsed we could go whole days without more than a hello.

I was glad, because I needed every spare minute to worry; it was a worm inside me. Every time I looked at their delicate necks the sight of Sean McCourt’s mother came to mind. She haunted the back of the chapel, bald and skeletal, reaching out to embrace anyone who had known him. She was a wreck around babies; they had to be handed over for her to hold too tightly and it was difficult to get them away from her. Her fingers had to be unpicked one by one. Both of her breasts had been removed already but the cancer was still eating her up from inside. It’s amazing what the human heart and body can withstand.

Boys grew up to take sides and they had to answer for their choices. When the worry was bad enough to make me shake, I could almost feel the bullet travelling through Sean McCourt’s head and keep going for one of mine. They had become targets as soon as the umbilical was cut.

The Troubles, the backdrop to my whole life, came screaming into focus all guns blazing. Northern Ireland boiled on all around us. The cocoon of Johns Farm shook to its very foundations during Marius and Eugene’s first birthday party. I had made a rather sad, flat little cake and it had two candles, one each. When we blew them out a bomb went off in the town and scared the bejesus out of the two of them! They roared the house down and didn’t stop shaking for an hour.