Tommy sighed and gave in. He had been filled with his own rage when he had first seen Harry’s hands and was consumed by an urge to put his coat back on and march down to the schoolhouse to give Mr Cleary a piece of his mind. But breathing deeply, he’d waited for the red mist to pass. The last time someone harmed one of his children, a murder had been committed… What was more, Tommy knew, as did Maura, it would only make things worse. ‘Cleary comes in on a Friday night, I’ll have a word with him then.’

Maura nodded. ‘Aye, well make sure I’m stood next to you when you do.’ They both knew which one of them the villagers feared the most and it wasn’t Tommy.

In bed, Maura slipped into the crook of Tommy’s arm and draped the other arm around his waist.

‘It’s better than me being on the docks, isn’t it, Maura? Us being here? Better than always worrying when the next ship was coming in and if I’d be taken on. It’s getting bad there, you know; the docks are only half as busy as they were.’ Tommy always spoke more freely in the dark.

‘Aye, but you always were taken on,’ she said. ‘You were one of the hardest workers. Like Jerry used to say, you’re small and stocky, built like a brick shite house. You never went without a day’s work.’

Maura, who set her alarm around the bells for morning mass and the Angelus, knew she should give thanks for what she had and be grateful and this she managed for most of the day, but, when the lights were out and she was lying in Tommy’s arms, it was near impossible. ‘I miss the four streets,’ she whispered and the hot tears that prickled at the back of her eyes broke free and ran down her cheeks.

‘Eh, come on, queen,’ Tommy said. ‘Don’t be crying now. Isn’t this what we wanted, to be back in Ireland, running our own business? Home is where the heart is, Maura.’

She buried her face into his chest to stifle her sobs. ‘But our Kitty’s grave, it’s in Liverpool…’

And for that, Tommy had no reply. He had left his Kitty all alone in the churchyard, his precious eldest daughter and the best friend any daddy could have. How had he not thought of that on the day they left, when he had taken the flowers he had bought in the market to her grave? It would be her birthday soon and who would be there for her, to lay flowers on her grave now?