I am doing fine these days, with a farm. Now, this is why I am writing. I’m not getting any younger and could do with some help and I wondered whether there was anyone in the family who’d like a new start in life? As you see, I live in Jersey, have done since the funeral. That’s a long story, for another day.

Because you didn’t want to know about it, even back then. Yes, there was a lot of hurt, a lot of bitterness to swallow, bile, even now. He paused a moment, read over the letter. No, let bygones be bygones, make the peace. He had an uncle, their mam’s brother, who’d emigrated to America in the 1920s and wrote back from Boston, your loving brother. It had made his mam cry, so he thought he’d try it now.

Your loving brother, Joseph O’Cleary.

He put it in the envelope, wrote O’Cleary & Sons, Family Butchers, Main Street, Cloghane. He had no idea if Pat still lived above the shop, but he reckoned that Cloghane wouldn’t have changed so much that the postie wouldn’t know where they’d moved to. It was about time he put out feelers, like, to see if they couldn’t make it up now.

It was forty years ago, after all. The war had been over for two months. Joe had got off the Tralee bus and walked down the main street in Cloghane. He could imagine his mam’s face, and his daidí’s, as he walked through the door. Will you let me take a look at you. Kettle on for tea in the big brown pot and his daidí bringing out the Jameson. Oh, there’d be a grand party. Cissie Mooney’s soda bread lathered with butter, cold beef and black pudding from the O’Connors, beer and whiskey and the Waring cook’s poitín. The kitchen thick with tobacco smoke, stubs in brimming ashtrays, smouldering pipes. Good to have you back, Father. The whole of Cloghane squeezed into the tiny front parlour which doubled as the dining room at Christmas. Singing and dancing. His mother and little Bridey and his Uncle Gerald’s wife, pushing through with cups of tea, while his brothers and his daidí and uncles and the other men stood to the side with bottles of beer and picked tobacco from their lips.

But his father’s butcher’s shop was shut, a black ribbon hung on the front.

‘Well, our prayers have been answered,’ his mother Bridey said as Joe walked through the door, as if he’d only been round the corner for five minutes and not lost in the war for five years.

His brother, Pat Junior, clapped his hand on Joe’s shoulder. ‘Sad times, eh?’ He pulled out his cigarettes and offered one to Joe. ‘How was your war?’