And there you are again! Back to Gussie. Everything comes back to Gussie. No matter how you try to be elsewhere. Gussie, who couldn’t read road maps. Couldn’t even watch the fucken road.

Your liberation was a washing machine. No. Before that, it was a cooker. The first year you were married. Remember the cooker? A magnificent electric cooker that cost five pounds. Five pounds. That was liberation.

And it was only when you were fifty that the thought occurred to you that there was nothing mechanically, physically or theologically wrong with women driving cars.

Of course the Vet couldn’t understand your point, though it didn’t bother him, and eventually you found a retired district nurse to teach you.

She gave you one lesson, during which you forgot to close the door and almost fell out of the car. But there was no stopping you after that. You went to the golf club and left the Vet (who was by then retired) to look after himself for the afternoon. That is to say that when you had served him his dinner at one o’clock, and washed up the dishes, you put an egg in the egg saucepan and left it on the cooker with a note saying not to forget the water. You left buttered bread on a plate, and two spoons of loose tea in the pot.

That was liberation.

So yes, Birdie, yes! You sailed into old age as a lady of leisure. Liberated enough to play a round of golf with Mrs MacDermody, who had a foghorn voice on the fairways and smoked forty Sweet Afton a day and denounced women who work on the wireless as a pack of cunts.

One day the wireless women claimed that young girls nowadays have better chances and more opportunities than in the old days. And they do, no matter what Mrs MacDermody feels in her bitter old heart.

‘It’s definitely true,’ you said. ‘The young ones nowadays have a far better chance.’

‘A better chance at what?’ sneered Maura MacDermody and then she went on to answer her own question in a thunderous voice, and her old rotten breath like a dragon’s coming out of her cancerous lungs. You were only afraid the Reverend Tompkins would hear her, for he was just ahead of you, near the ninth green.

‘Well, to hear you talking,’ says MacDermody, ‘you think that women in my day were a crowd of fucken eejits pissing holy water.’

All Birdie said was that she thought young women nowadays were getting a better chance.

‘A better chance at what? A better chance to make the likes of you and me out to be gobshites because we went through life without a fucken job. We never needed jobs. Didn’t we have husbands?’

She bellowed like an old rhinoceros, and then she belted the ball straight across the ninth fairway, as far as the next green, nearly knocking the head off the reverend clergyman, who had to duck, before she replaced her driver in the bag as if she was returning a sword to its scabbard.