By the time she was thirty the people of St Martin’s Terrace had crowned her Queen of all Spinsters. Boiling pots of lard and suet to feed the birds and reeking of carbolic soap after the hours she spent soaking her daddy’s blisters were all signs of self-neglect, they said. If it wasn’t for the birds, the house would be full of cats. Cobwebbed knickers. Mothballed petticoats. No two ways about it. She was already a spinster.

There were others said that she set her sights too high in the early years. They said her father was only a cattle drover. He had no land. No shop. And there were plenty of boys in the terraces and the cottages on the outskirts of the town who might have made her a good husband. But she turned her nose up at them, didn’t she? All of them. As if a coalman or a lorry man or a man who made a living from manicuring the gardens of the professional classes was somehow not good enough for Bernadette Waters.

And then Birdie proved them all wrong. She caught the biggest fish in town. In the autumn of 1953 Bernadette Waters appeared in the Connaught Tribune, grinning from ear to ear with a bouquet of flowers in one hand and Alex Delaney, bachelor of Cork city, veterinary surgeon, and former captain of Kilmallock Golf Club, in the other. ‘Hand in hand’ the caption said above the photograph. There’s swank for you now! The life of the golf club beckoned for Bernadette Waters.

The newly married couple moved into a lovely big house on the outskirts of the town, and off the main road, in the quiet rolling fields of east Galway where the ditches were clean jumps for horses and the mature beech trees made copses on every hillside.

The house was an elegant monument to the aspirations of Galway gentry in the nineteenth century. A detached dwelling, in grey stone, it went for a song to Mr Delaney from Cork, who had it re-roofed, pebble-dashed and painted blue, so that it became a posh love nest for Birdie and the Vet. The meadow between the house and the road was dug up, re-soiled and re-seeded to become a green lawn, where children might play croquet at a safe distance from rough neighbours, or the brats who cursed up and down the terraces of the town all summer long. Birdie and the Vet were away from the road. All alone on the verdant lawn.

The transformation was sudden. The lawn was so green and the pebble-dash so blue that the townsfolk would stroll out the road on a Sunday afternoon just to admire it from a distance. A posh paradise for Birdie Waters from the terraces whose marriage was an event that caused more astonishment locally than the Shah of Iran’s recovery of Persia.

Birdie’s wedding album has cream covers as soft as sponge, and it’s still wrapped in the original cellophane. She has a special place for it at the back of the wardrobe in a box and she is thinking about it as she plugs out the heater, and closes the drawing-room door and climbs the stairs once again. The night is endless.