He has changed some places names, but I think I recognise the location of the big house at the heart of the novel. Perhaps it is a wishful assumption on my part, but I suspect that the place the writer calls Laherdane is near Ardmore on the East Cork/West Waterford border, near the beach at Ballyquin, where William Trevor himself spent time as a child.I broke my ankle near that beach in my early teens. I was escaping in the dark because I thought I was being chased by a father who did not want me courting his daughter. He wasn’t chasing me and his only comment many years later was to say: “God but you’ve got very big since I saw you last.”That was the longest time ago Now I walk the beach with my wife and child. There is a big house situated back from the beach, occupied now by a local auctioneer, which I fancy is the model for the home of the fictional Captain Everart Gault, his wife Heloise and daughter Lucy.

The town of Enniseala in the book is probably Youghal at the mouth of the River Blackwater with its “squat lighthouse” and beach upon which the timbers of ancient coastal defences have survived the battering of endless winter storms I might, of course, be wrong. The towns, villages and beaches described by William Trevor may be a composite of places he has known, though I do remember him mentioning Ballyquin once in a short story.I should reveal a second interest. Although baptised a Roman Catholic, I grew up with close connections to the Protestant community in Cork. My parents always strove to live outside the narrow Catholic/nationalist consensus that had enveloped the country of their own childhood They were both Catholics and both proud of their Irishness. But they knew both were very different; true Irishness was not dependent on being Catholic.My mother spent more than three decades of her life teaching in a Protestant school; many of her closest friends come from among that small community. The girls at the school discos she ran had names like Penny and Sophie and not Siobhan or Eileen; they went to Sunday service and not mass. In the hallway of the school was a great brass plaque inscribed with the names of the boys of Cork Grammar School who had fallen in the Great War.

(Thousands of Irish Catholics fell in that war, too, but our government was disinclined to honour them).By the time I was a teenager, the Protestants of the republic were no longer regarded, by most of us anyway, as part of some strange aristocracy. Except among the wilder elements of republicanism there was little attempt to visit the sins of the Cromwellian past on the descendants of the original settlers. Yet in the years since the foundation of the state, the number of Protestants in the south had dwindled from 10 to 3 per cent of the total population. Most of those who left did so during the period described in The Story Of Lucy Gault, either frightened by IRA and vigilante attacks or unwilling to live in a state that would have a dominant Catholic ethos.

In parts of County Cork, Protestants were subjected to a brutal campaign of sectarian violence. The ethnic cleansing of the Bandon Valley is one of the most odious chapters in our history, though I learned nothing about it at school. It took a Canadian academic, Peter Harte, to reveal the full savagery of the assault in his book The IRA And its Enemies.Yet in the aftermath of the war Protestants would rise to the highest offices in the land. Our first President was a Protestant, and several government ministers as well as our greatest writer, W B Yeats.