She didn’t understand the drama on the wireless, but her daddy seemed frightened enough and the minute it was over, he flicked off the switch and ordered her to bed, and she ran up and said a decade of the rosary at her bedside in a state of terrible agitation.

She was lying on the starched sheets. The horsehair of the bed squeaking underneath her in the manner she detested, and the moon spreading a long shaft of light diagonally from the window across the room and hitting her shoes on the floor beside the wall. The night was warm.

She slept. But only for a short while. The night changed. Clouds from the Atlantic pushed across the little island of Ireland, and there came a sudden wind that ruffled the curtains and woke little Birdie from her slumber.

She screamed for half an hour, even while her daddy, in an attempt to release her from her nightmare of terror, stripped off her clothes and bathed her body in the bed with cold, wet towels. Who was it, Daddy? she wondered. He tried to reassure her. It was only ‘the invisible man’, he said. Don’t worry. He won’t be back.

So we’re all nervous. Why wouldn’t we be?

Forever afterwards life was a struggle of fastidious self-preservation. Round-the-clock alertness regarding any movement more suspicious than grass growing. She was keeping at bay the persistent possibility that an unwanted guest was lurking behind the curtain, or behind the remote glow of the Milky Way, who might come and steal her purse, if not her very life. So don’t talk to Birdie about being nervous!

When she was a teenager, she often opened her daddy’s shoelaces, as he lay exhausted on his bed when he returned from a week’s work, droving cattle from the plains of Mayo down hidden by roads towards the fairs of Athenry and Ballinasloe. She would take the ball of money from his left shoe and put it in the amber-coloured sugar bowl that lay empty on the kitchen dresser. And when she was finished washing his clothes in the backyard, she would count it. Then, with a half-crown piece in the palm of her hand, she’d slip out to the public house on the corner and buy a bottle of whiskey and carry it home in a brown paper bag.

Her daddy, by now stretched on the bed, snored at the ceiling. His enormous weight bending the wire-based mattress as if it was a hammock, and the closed eyelids on his face reminding her of a beached whale in her picture book about life in the oceans.

She was always glad when Daddy came home. He was the biggest living animal she knew. And if the universe was full of invisible enemies, then the safest place to be was under the dubious protection of that enormous sleeping drunk. No matter what the cost. She ate little in those years, and her physical frame was so small that the neighbours remarked with anxiety that she was in danger of falling into an early grave. But she was simply nervous. So how many signs does a mother need?