It’s the early 1970s, a time when the Carpenters are playing on the radio, the Milk Tray man epitomises sophistication and, in the small town outside Belfast where teacher Cushla Lavery lives with her mother, bombings and beatings fill the headlines. At 24, she is able to recall a time before the Troubles, unlike her class of seven-year-olds at the Catholic primary school, whose vocabularies already include words such as gelignite and internment.
Theirs is a “mixed” town, but community relations teeter on a knife edge. At the family’s pub, run by Cushla’s brother, Eamonn, Paras pointedly grind their cigarette butts out in the carpet and the “ould lads” propping up the bar reminisce about the second world war, “because this war was unspeakable”.
