How do you turn back time? Or at least fold it so you can shout out some warning to the poor crayturs who don’t know that when they walk past a particular bush on a particular day things will never be the same again? How do you get to just be someone’s girlfriend again and stand about giggling and eating sweets? The rug that was your life could be whipped from under your feet and you’d be left standing in the same spot, totally different backdrop. For me it was Johns Farm; for the poor McCourts it was six foot of freshly dug clay. The thoughts ran around and around until I was dizzy watching them. There was no way out.

The next morning, I was altered. I was a bad rooster who had flown up out of the pen one time too many and now I was hobbled. Even the lowest branch would prove too high. I made a promise to myself that I would take John Johns at his word. It worked for my father: say nothing, show nothing, do nothing, feel nothing, be nothing. John would never hear another word from my lips, he would never catch me alone again. He might tell me some more truths. I’d had enough of them from Mammy to last me.

I started that very day telling myself the story of how badly I had been treated; mine was a sad story and I would make sure I never forgot that. I had the foundations dug and the rocks lined up to make a start on my House of Pity when our Protestant neighbour Arthur Rowley rocked up with a few cans of beer to toast our happiness and to celebrate the birth of a son for Prince Charles and Princess Diana over in England. I was fetched up out of the Lower Room and Bridie slammed the door double-quick time behind me. Farce or not, no one was to see my lofty bed standing as evidence that I was not married in any real sense.

Arthur had to fall back on us to wet Prince William’s head because he hadn’t been able to get into Carncloon and the craic in the Protestant bars. An RUC roadblock had stopped him at the crossroads. The local Orange Order were having a practice march because they hadn’t quite got the hang of walking up and down with banners after two hundred and thirteen years and the whole town was on lockdown.

Cheers, we all said as we pulled the rings on the cans of Harp, and I hoped against hope Mammy couldn’t hear us wishing the best of health to the next in line for the throne and face of the ‘English Crown forces’ that haunted her every waking hour.