When John came home I handed them to him. He was delighted by Serena’s chance at the grammar school and he called her over for a hug. She was all blushes and giggles, still just a little girl whose knee socks didn’t quite reach her knees any more. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He was the best dada in the whole townland and she was the best girl in the whole wide world and I was the most jealous mammy on the entire concrete floor.

He was less than delighted with the contents of the other letter. A pained look travelled across his face as if he had just been handed bad news. I never got to read it because, after he’d torn open the envelope and read it once, John Johns put it straight in the range where it flared brilliantly purple for a second and then curled up and died.

Bridie meets my eye from her chair where she’s in danger of being swallowed by a blanket she’s been crocheting since Christmas. Don’t ask, she mouths, as if I would ever dare! My super-sharp brain allows me to understand that the father had reached out for the son although the son was too upset to let him try but I said nothing.

The timing couldn’t have been worse for daddies with dog collars popping out of the woodwork. One Bishop Eamonn Casey had just been splattered all over the news because it turned out he had had an affair and fathered a son with an American woman. Irish Catholics, high on the list being Mammy, didn’t know what to think or what bit of the scandal was worse. Was it that he’d had the sex, that he’d wanted the child adopted or that he’d robbed some diocesan funds to pay for the cover-up?

Sadie Rattigan was convinced it was a British government conspiracy to destroy the unshakeable faith of Ireland and get us all to run to the other side. It was their way to maintain a Protestant majority and keep the union, Yes Siree Bob! She couldn’t be swayed until she saw it on The Late Late Show, heard it from the tongue of Saint Gay Byrne as he interviewed the ‘hussy’ Annie Murphy, so it had to be true. She marched on Johns Farm to vent her anger in front of Bridie who had always been part of the rot.