Like many of the men on the four streets, Jerry had arrived in Liverpool from Mayo, hungry for prosperity and advancement that weren’t to be found in rural Ireland, where levels of relative poverty remained almost unchanged since the sixteen hundreds, and where, right into the winters of the nineteen-sixties, children still walked to school barefoot through icy fields. It was as though the land of his birth were caught in a time warp. The outside privies on the four streets were a luxury compared to the low stone-and-sod houses of Mayo, where an indoor toilet of any description was mostly unheard of in many of the villages.Jerry and Bernadette had met on the ferry across from Dublin to Liverpool on a gloriously sunny but cold and very windy day. Jerry spotted Bernadette almost as soon as he boarded the ferry, her long, untameable red hair catching his attention. Jerry was mesmerized as, from a slight distance, he watched Bernadette do battle with her hair, which the wind had mischievously taken hold of and, lock by lock, teased out from under her black knitted beret.
