All in a night’s work

This inter-war story of an Anglo-Irish family in crisis opens with a bang. Caroline Adair, recovering from measles at Butler’s Hill, her aunt and uncle’s lovely house in the South-west, wakes in the night to find  Sinn Feiners surrounding the place.

This inter-war story of an Anglo-Irish family in crisis opens with a bang. Caroline Adair, recovering from measles at Butler’s Hill, her aunt and uncle’s lovely house in the South-west, wakes in the night to find  Sinn Feiners surrounding the place. The family are given ten minutes to clear out. ‘Don’t be frightened, darling’, says kind Aunt Moira, ‘they won’t do us any harm, they only want to burn the house.’It’s a big ‘only’. Caroline’s life is for ever altered by the loss of the beloved place, an idyll of ‘soft green lawns, fir trees silhouetted against the moonlit sky, and the sea, satin-grey . . . in the dip of the gorse-covered hill’.