He mimicked the position, standing still, arms stretched out in front of them, then began to shudder.

‘He just started going like that, his arms shaking like he’d Parkinson’s or something. “Can I put it down?” he asked. “Can I put it down, sir?” I tried talking to him, but he wasn’t there; he was somewhere inside his head, a different place, talking to different people. I went over to him and shook him, called him “Granda, Granda,” but he just looked at me like I was a stranger. The tears streaming down his face. “I can’t do it no more, sir,” he said. “I can’t hold it no more.” Then he started whimpering, like a baby, his spit bubbling on his lips. “Don’t hit me, sir,” he said. “Please don’t hit me.” Then this smell I can’t forget, the piss running down his leg where he stood. I told my da that evening and he stopped me going to the allotment with him on my own. They sent him to the doctor, I think, and he was put inside for a while. The family didn’t talk about it, like it was a dirty secret, something to be ashamed of.’

‘We were never ashamed of him,’ Sean Mullan said, glancing over his shoulder at them, having been listening to the conversation about his father. ‘He had soldier’s wounds. He died a soldier.’

‘What happened to him in the end?’

‘He took a heart attack,’ Barr said. ‘I went down to the shed one day, about two years later, to leave down lunch for him. My granny had made sandwiches and a flask of tea. He was lying on the floor when I went in.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tony said, quietly.

‘He was a good man,’ Mullan said. ‘He didn’t deserve what was done to him.’

‘I remember for weeks after the incident with the pot, I couldn’t sleep. I still dream about it, about what I should have done, should have said. I thought I should have offered to hold the pot for him, take over his torture for a while, give him a break. Instead I stood there looking at him, not knowing what to do.’

‘You were a kid,’ Mullan said. ‘No one knew what to do. Nowadays they’d be calling it PTSD but, in those days, it was just nerves. He went to the doctor, got a bottle of valium, the tablets rattling round in his pocket everywhere he went afterwards.’

Tony thought of Hamilton and the Land Rover driver who had killed Danny, too. Both of them would have been diagnosed with the same, if then was now, he reflected. Then and now.