I wanted it to be romantic and floaty and painless. If it made you into a woman, it should be enjoyable? Afterwards, when Joe and his willy magically disappeared from the picture, Lizzie and me would compare notes on the event just as we had compared notes since we were five. We were best friends for a reason: she was forward, I was backward and we’d always known that about each other. I was the sheep to her Judas goat with my eye on her dainty little hooves always a step ahead of me on the mountain.

The same week we had our rubella booster jabs, the nuns wrote home about Gortnahook. Every Easter the convent sixth form was sent to the old monastery near Belfast for a week with the corresponding class from the Christian Brothers.

We would be thrown together for an ‘exchange’ and evidence that we were from the same species after all. We would ‘discuss’ whatever we want, as long as it’s in line with everything we’ve ever been fed by said Church, society at large, the newspapers and our families who don’t ever question anything they hear.

The rest of the weekend would be taken up by feeling embarrassed, the overwhelming desire to be anywhere but under the eyes of teachers playing trendy hymns on the guitar, Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya, sponsored walks in the rain or shine and long-boiled cabbage. Oh, and if Lizzie Magee gets her Easter wish, my deflowerment.

The Six Counties was boiling over. The IRA’s Bobby Sands MP had starved himself to death in the May of 1981 and the other nine hunger strikers had followed him within months because they wanted to be documented as political prisoners.

We watched them on the TV, wandering around their prison cells like filthy beggars in dirty blankets. It was too sad to bear. They were someone’s sons and brothers. As each one of them passed away Mammy crowed that it was another six feet of clay closer to freedom for us.

In common with towns across the Six Counties and indeed Europe, when Bobby Sands’s death was announced, Carncloon erupted into rioting and hadn’t stopped a year on. It was littered with rocks that bounced off the Saracens as they tried to pull into the barracks. Margaret Thatcher said his death was a choice that his organisation – the Irish Republican Army – did not allow to many of its victims. Crime is crime is crime, she said, it is not political. He was only twenty-seven and it took him sixty-six days to die. Sadie called down every curse she could think of to land on Maggie’s iron head!