But on the very first evening a man knocked at our door to sell us turf. He saw the light, he said, though he didn’t mention where he saw it from. He must have been hanging around on the edge of some cliff or up the mountain. His name was Peter. I suspect he saw a car passing and when it didn’t come back he loaded up the van and drove out just in case. We bought two bags at six euro a bag. Peter wanted to talk. He stood half-in, half-out, not looking at us except every now and then when he wanted to check how we were reacting. The wind howled past him. The inside started to feel like the outside. And the outside was the North Pole. He told us the house was built before the famine, that once upon a time a hundred people lived up here on this side of the cliff, and further out there was another empty village and a hundred and twenty-two people lived out there and now there was one and he was an old man and a cranky man at that, and sure all the young people were gone from this place, America, Australia, England, it was only all old people were left, dying away one by one, since The Crash nearly everyone left, no work, no money in the fishing or the farming, no one wants to be on the dole all their life, you couldn’t make the land pay around here, it was mostly bog, even the sheep got foot-rot and maggots were as common as flies, you couldn’t even cut turf without a licence, it was like the famine all over again only they weren’t hungry or they weren’t too hungry anyway and nobody was paying their fare to America, but every second house was empty, and those that had inhabitants lost someone every winter, for it is winter that kills the old people, only for that they would live forever around here, his own neighbour, a young man who had a bit of a farm and who was only two fields away, came in one morning and handed him the key of the house, Look after that for me, Peter, he says, I’m off to Australia, I’ll be back in a year, didn’t he have a job in the mining in Adelaide or wherever they had the mining, his cousin set him up with it.