One house in particular was a home from home for Sean. It’s a few miles from here, and out in the country like ours. We used to drop him there and collect him a lot; when I look back at my diaries I see that he often walked or cycled there when he was 11 or 12.
Sean got friendly with Robert and Martin, two brothers, at primary school. Their parents, Sarah and Graham, had moved to Ireland from Lancashire some years previously. (I won’t mention surnames because of the nature of the Internet.)
Martin continued to be one of Sean’s very best friends right to the end of his life. It was Martin that drove Sean and Clio here late on the night of Friday, 15 October, and Martin was one of the first at our house when the bad news broke on the Sunday morning. Continue reading