He cut the bacon and a piece of fried bread to go with it. He returned his knife and fork to the plate between each mouthful, the way she liked him to. ‘Hey, look,’ a boy called Slattery had said once, pointing at the steps of the old billiard-hall. ‘That’s where the Tans shot Corny Dowley.’ A padlock secured the doors of the billiard-hall now, but if you climbed up to one of the windows you could see the three billiard tables inside, with big square-shaded lights hanging close above their green surfaces. There were cigarette-butts on the floor and a broken glass in a corner. ‘Corny Dowley was a great fellow,’ Slattery had said.

Beside him at the table, his mother poured what remained of the fat from the frying-pan into a bowl, adding it to dripping that had already set. She ran water on to the pan at the sink and put it to steep on the draining-board. She returned to the range, saying she’d black-lead the parts of it that weren’t hot.

‘It’s unfortunate they decided that,’ she said.

When the girl had mentioned about the bridge, and when the girls she was with had looked in his direction, he’d felt shy but he hadn’t been upset. He hadn’t been upset at the billiard-hall when Slattery had said Corny Dowley was a great fellow, although he’d already known that Corny Dowley had been responsible for his father’s death. He’d never even seen a photograph of his father.

‘Dowley came from the island,’ his mother said. ‘That’s why they’re doing it.’

‘I heard he came from here.’

Corny Dowley’s best-remembered exploit was the ambush at Lahane crossroads. Brother Meagher from the Christian Brothers’ had arrived at the convent specially one morning, to take the class to see the place—a mile out of the town on the back road behind the slaughterhouse. But long before that Tom had heard the story of a man lying waiting for half a night in a ditch at Lahane crossroads. Four other men had been crouched behind the stone walls that skirted the roads which met there; all of them had their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. Less than a quarter of a mile away the road from Mallow was mined to catch the Black and Tans, and when the first lorry was blown up the soldiers in the lorries behind it made their way forward on foot and walked into the trap at the crossroads. In the end nineteen Black and Tans lay dead, scattered around the blown-up lorry and at the crossroads, and there was more to the story still. While the remaining forces in the neighbourhood were searching for those responsible, Cornelius Dowley and his companions raided the barracks and carried away a haul of guns and ammunition. Nothing more daring had been perpetrated in the neighbourhood, or carried out so skilfully.