I forced myself to check with John that ‘the situation’ was getting worse? He assured me it was: I wasn’t just feeling increasingly panicky because I now had four precious lives to protect and I was lost as to how they would live in such a madhouse! If I couldn’t get myself out of Northern Ireland how would I get my children to safety, to a new life?

Their arrival in my life had changed me utterly. When Serena was born, I only worried about ordinary things like nappy rash and colic, doing all I could to settle her. But with the boys, the whole world suddenly intruded. Sectarian hatred loomed at every turn, every bullet carried their names, every bomb would get bigger until the fallout landed right outside the half-door.

I took to putting them in the orchard for their naps in big navy-blue prams with hoods in case a helicopter crashed into the house. I told John that I, too, needed to be out and about; the walls were closing in on me. He nodded and let me work beside him between bottles and burpings until Serena needed meeting from the school bus at 4pm. I held posts while he tamped them in with a sledgehammer. I carried staples to secure wire. I walked back to the house for a flask of tea when we were both parched. It felt safer somehow as we worked together, cutting the binder twine, throwing bales, and pulling the musty hay apart to push it into the silos.

The victims piled up. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse the IRA revisited the use of proxy bombs. They weren’t new – both sides had stooped to use them in the 1970s – but somehow the horror of them drilled into my brain as I was breastfeeding Shane. The proxy involved tying collaborators – any unfortunate soul who associated with British security forces, maybe even just selling them petrol when they were off duty – into cars packed with explosives and setting them off on their merry way, some of them knowing that their families were being held at gunpoint as they drove to a near-certain death and murder.

Three human bombs were set up to explode on the same day, 24 October 1990. The driver and six soldiers died at Coshquin, near Derry; the driver escaped and one soldier died at Cloghoge on the border with County Armagh; the Omagh bomb failed to detonate.