John nursed one while Serena nursed the other one. Bridie took a fit of crying and limped away to her blue roses. I had no room on my lap because Shane was trembling at my neck. He was so small still, just eight weeks old, and already his poor wee ears had had to withstand such a bang. We all waited for the sound of the Saracens on the river but none came; it must have been Catholic premises that was flattened.

They couldn’t have been born into a worse time. Every day the television brought news of deaths: them and us. A lot of RUC officers and British soldiers were killed in the late 1980s and so were a lot of IRA. I added the SAS to my long list of acronyms. The Special Air Services took out eight IRA men who had just bombed an RUC base at Loughgall in County Armagh. By way of retaliation the IRA let off a bomb at a Remembrance Service for military dead at Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. The bomb was meant to kill a whole parade of UDR soldiers but the timing was wrong. Ten Protestant civilians were killed and one police officer. Sixty-three people were injured. The IRA said they had made a mistake! A mistake is getting yourself pregnant, a mistake is forgetting to put self-raising flour in a cake because your eyes are crossed with tiredness, a mistake is thinking life will be what you always wanted one day.

The SAS popped up again when they killed another three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar and then, to cap it all, the UDA’s Michael Stone opened fire at their funeral in Milltown Cemetery in Belfast, killing another IRA man and two civilians. We all shook our heads in disbelief around the fire at Johns Farm. We hugged our children tighter, cupping their delicate skulls in our hands as if that would save them, and Bridie prayed and prayed and prayed. We shouldn’t have let her pray; God was not listening. He hadn’t been listening for years.

Just days later two off-duty British soldiers were shot when they accidentally drove into an IRA funeral procession. Our jaws were on the floor and our spirits were at an all-time low. Once again the Catholics were as bad as the Protestants, and the Protestants were as bad as the Catholics; nothing was sacred any more. Bridie threw her rosary beads into a drawer and slammed it shut.

We heated milk to mash into rusks, changed nappies and washed the downy heads on our three small boys as the Lisburn van bomb killed six more soldiers in County Antrim and the Ballygawley bus bomb killed a further eight soldiers in County Tyrone.