I had my first man shortly after my fifteenth birthday. John Bruce didn't seduce me: I made all the running. He was the farmer I worked for who had an ailing wife who very rarely got out of her bed. I was obsessively in love with him to a degree that bordered on madness. Just under six feet, thirty years of good food and hard work on the land had given him a broad muscular body. His labourers respected him for his upright character and strong religious principles. They knew that if they fell upon hard times they could always turn to him for charity.

In contrast to his clean, well ordered farmhouse, the poor crofter's cottage where I lived was more like a pigsty than a home. It couldn't be otherwise. My widowed mother and her six children ate and slept in this one roomed hovel. During the winter months, with the door firmly shut to keep out the freezing cold wind, the stench was suffocating, for in addition to the children huddled around the peat fire there were hens roosting in the rafters overhead, ducks waddling across the earthen floor, and a young calf tethered to the foot of the bed. It was worse when my father was alive. He was a loud-mouthed braggard and a bully who treated us all, including my mother, most cruelly and spent most of his time at home on our one and only bed in a drunken stupor.

Although I had the constant company of my brothers and sisters I was a lonely child, detached from all that was going on around me, escaping into a world of my own imagination where John Bruce was my hero and my lover.

All my passionate feelings for him, which I had nursed secretly for years, came to a head on the night of the 'Mheillea', a harvest festival supper held in the school house adjoining St Luke's, the lonely little church on the ridge of the Royal Way, a track the Viking Kings had used in ancient times.