For most of us, the recent Valentine weekend, with its diet of commercialised sentimentality, was merely irksome. For Rita Restorick, however, it was an unbearable reminder of love of a different kind. Because it was on February 12th three years ago that her son Stephen was shot by a sniper, the last British soldier to be killed in Northern Ireland by an IRA bullet.
Stephen is buried in Shropshire on the Welsh border, and last weekend Rita, her husband John and Stephen's elder brother Mark visited his grave. "We stopped to buy some flowers, and they had some music on in the shop," Rita explains. "It was I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, a tune that I always associated with Stephen. And it hit me right here." She hits herself with a clenched fist in the chest.
I have come to see Rita Restorick in the house north of Nottingham where she and her husband moved last year. A new beginning, somewhere with no memories of Stephen, although of course there are photographs and an oil painting of Lance Bombardier Restorick in full regimental uniform sent to them by "an old gentleman", a neighbour where they used to live. But otherwise nothing would suggest that this is a family numbed by tragedy: the walls are newly painted icingpink and Rita is dressed stylishly with a fuchsia-pink silky top.
It is the little things she still finds difficult: "a tune, the back of a young man who reminds you. But the feeling that I had with Stephen as if your heart has been ripped out - it is an actual pain in your chest - that's gone and the anger's gone."
The writing of Death of a Soldier, Rita Restorick's account of what has happened, both to her and to Northern Ireland since February 12th 1997, certainly helped to focus her grief, although she insists it was not her motive for writing it. Like most English people, she says, she had been pitifully ignorant of Ireland's history and was determined to find out just what had caused the conflict that led directly to the death of her son, a boy who had enlisted in the army simply because he was unemployed.
She also felt she owed it to the hundreds of Catholics, from both the North and the South, who wrote to her immediately following Stephen's death, many of whom just signed themselves "a Catholic mother".
It was another Catholic mother, Lorraine McElvoy, who had just handed Stephen her licence at a checkpoint at Bessbrook, in south Armagh, who was with him when he was shot. "It was a combination of what Lorraine McElvoy said in her interview and what those people wrote in those letters that stopped me from saying, to put it bluntly `bloody Irish'."
Photographs of the handsome boy who, according to Lorraine McElvoy was smiling even as he was shot in the back, had captured the public imagination. In the spotlight for the first time in her life, Rita Restorick too impressed all who met her with her quiet dignity. She belongs to no group of activists. What she does, she does because it feels right to her. When she handed a Christmas card to Gerry Adams the first time he set foot in Downing Street, it was entirely her own idea.
His response - that there were thousands of Mrs Restoricks in Ireland - hurt her deeply.
"Because he totally misinterpreted where I was coming from. I wasn't saying, Oh I'm a British mother, I've been hurt by the conflict. I was saying, I'm a mother and I'm trying to say for all the other mothers who have buried their children, enough is enough. Tears aren't green or orange or red, white and blue. They're all the same."
Death of a Soldier is both moving and measured. Rita Restorick is articulate and informed. She has to be, she says, if her views are to have any credibility with the politicians. Events of the last few days have shaken her. The only ray of hope, she says, is that over the last few weeks both sides have shown they can work together. For both sides this was a major breakthrough. On the question of decommissioning, she believes, the time of sitting on the fence has gone. There has to be something tangible to offer to the Unionist side. David Trimble has as difficult a task as Gerry Adams, she says, in holding the outer fringes of their communities.
"He has Paisley on his heels . . . and part of his own party is veering towards Paisley's point of view. Some of these people don't see that there was anything wrong with the old Ulster, they don't even accept there was gerrymandering and no equal rights for Catholics. So if they're not careful it will be just a repeat 1974 again. Trimble can't risk splitting his party. He's just hanging on by his teeth at the moment."
As for the Republicans, she says Gerry Adams must do what Eamon de Valera did in 1938 and cast off the men of violence. It is crunch time, she says. Neither Republican nor the Unionist politicians who represent the ordinary people can be subject to the veto of a minority stuck in the past. The problem, she believes, lies in Armagh, where there isn't a family that hasn't in some way been affected.
The two men implicated in Stephen Restorick's murder were both from south Armagh. The brother of the man alleged to have fired the fatal bullet had been killed by a British soldier in 1990.
"I know it's hard to stop that feeling of `What did our dead die for?' But I think you've got to turn it round and say we believe in what they died for, but it's time to move a different way. You can't forever keep up the conflict because of the dead, otherwise we'd still be at war with Germany, we'd still be at war with France. There comes a time when you have to heal over the wounds."
The two men were tried and convicted nearly 18 months ago. She would like the opportunity to talk to them, she says. Just so that they might feel her pain.
"We found that hard, that they were allowed home to celebrate Christmas and the New Year with their families whereas . . ." her generally controlled voice falters. "It's a painful time for all families who have lost people in this conflict."
"We've always known about that, even before the trial. We knew there would be early releases. It was part of the [Belfast] Agreement. We are fortunate in a way that we live in England, so we're not likely to meet them in the street as could happen in Ireland."
As for the current impasse, Rita Restorick doesn't believe decommissioning need be the major stumbling block it has become. "A statement from the IRA that the guns are silent, and a token handover: a token amount of Semtex, a token number of guns. I would say to them: why not use children, so you're binding yourself even more? Children from each community would hand the guns over to de Chastelain and that way it would be so symbolic. The trust has to be there. Because everyone recognises that not every single gun would be handed over. But it is this trust that the guns will be silent that is so desperately needed."
Death of a Soldier: A Mother's Search for Peace in Northern Ireland, by Rita Restorick; Blackstaff Press, £9.99 in the UK