It’s the late 1940s. My mother is 10-years-old and the nuns in her school have painted a large colander and asked her to stand on it, dressed in white, her elbows bent, hands raised in prayer, a halo of stars over her head. Hers is an angelic face, and they see in it the blessed expression of the Virgin Mary. Click.
As a child, I was fascinated by this photo. I knew all about Mary, attending as I did, a 1970s Catholic primary school. I was the middle child of five noisy children and most mornings our mum would speed us to school in a small Anglia car, a rattling cast-off from our grandad, her father in Cork, where she’d grown up.
In early summer, my two sisters and I would barely make it to the outdoor devotions l
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