I’d not an ounce of intention of thinking about it! Imagine me trying to sit in a classroom when I was her age the last time I’d studied. I would look and feel ridiculous! She didn’t need to know that and she would report back to her father that I was considering a change in my circumstances. I must be such a disappointment to him after Catherine. He’d likely dance a jig in the street if he came home to find I’d flown away. The only thing weighing me down was my heart so all I had to do was find a way of cutting it out and leaving it behind. I’d have no use for it.

26

I tried not to soften too quickly towards John but even Bridie noticed when I lightly touched the back of his neck at the dinner table. She raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘Well, now this is a real breakthrough,’ and the children all looked up in time to see me go bright red when she guffawed. He was telling me that peace was breaking out in the countryside a lot quicker than it was in the cities. There was no fanfare in Carncloon but slowly roadblocks disappeared and there were fewer torn Union Jacks and ragged Tricolours hanging from every tree and lamp post.

The edges of the pavements which had always been kept in pristine red, white and blue or green, white and gold were allowed to fade. The weight of all those colours drifted away like a rainbow of smoke and I found myself walking taller and breathing easier. I put it down to the joy of my family being safer than it had ever been. It had nothing at all to do with the fact that I had smiled at John Johns – only once so far – and he had smiled back. Nothing at all to do with that, No Siree Bob!

We limped on to the Northern Ireland Assembly elections and we got the UUP’s David Trimble as leader and the SDLP’s Seamus Mallon as his deputy. It felt as if the Six Counties might just make it if everyone played by the rules. We planned what fields we’d change from hay to corn the following year, what walls needed strengthening, what fences needed repair to keep our beasts protected.