The roof stayed on Johns Farm when peace descended on Northern Ireland. I don’t know how, when we’d roared and danced through the kitchen like banshees! Bridie nearly broke a leg. We’d been sitting out the storm for so long that when the sun finally broke through we were dazzled by it. Tony Blair – or Saint Anthony, Patron Saint of Miracles and Lost Items as Auntie Eileen calls him – delivered the Good Friday Agreement in April. With Mo Mowlam and Bill Clinton and even the Pope wading in, he’d wrestled Ian Paisley, David Trimble, Gerry Adams and a score of other opponents on to the blank canvas.

I’d longed for an end to the madness as if it was the last boiled sweet in the whole of County Tyrone. Now it was here! Things can only get better! That’s what D:Ream, a bunch of lads from Northern Ireland, were singing last year for Tony Blair as he sailed into 10 Downing Street, all dimples and pigeon toes and promises. Things are a thousand times better already.

Serena is on the edge of sixteen, my boys will be teenagers in a peaceful country, they would not have to pick a side. They could leave the house and I’d have a good chance of them coming home again in one piece. Tony Blair, Senator George Mitchell and Bertie Ahern were all teeth and gums as the governments in Belfast and Dublin ended British rule and gave us a new Northern Ireland Assembly where Nationalists and Loyalists would have to share power. We just had to make it to 1999 when the agreement kicked in.

Serena announced that she had known all along that it would happen sooner rather than later! She was so confident, she knew what life could be like. Her and the cherished Nora Reilly were going to take on the world. Now the Troubles were over the Six Counties would need teachers and doctors even more. She thought she could see the future. I remember being just like her, daft. Lizzie Magee and me had thought that life was as easy to choose as a lollipop.

I watched her a minute, lying up against the pillows in my bed with the sketch pad she never left out of her hands now tucked under her arm. I marvelled at having produced her but even more remarkable was the fact that I hadn’t ruined her. We could talk, hug, kiss; we were MUCKY! There was never any talk of boys; they seemed to have been demoted in the overall scheme of a girl’s experience. She didn’t need anyone to make her feel good about herself. She was an open book, so when she settled herself nice as pie and tried to look casual I knew straight away she had been sent by John, sneaky.