There’s a plaited bracelet – the type you buy on holiday – bearing his name, which Mrs Restorick found when clearing out his bedroom. The white crocheted cross, she says, was sent to her by a woman from Bessbrook, South Armagh, the town where Stephen, 23, a lance bombardier with the Royal Horse Artillery, was shot dead by a sniper as he manned a checkpoint. The sprig of rosemary, she explains, is for remembrance.
In February 1997, a policeman and an Army official knocked at the family home. “I wondered why they hadn’t rung the door bell,” remembers Mrs Restorick, 53, whose elder son Mark, 31, was also at home. “They checked who I was, and the policeman said it was about Stephen. I asked whether he had been injured, and he said: ‘Can you sit down, please?’ I knew what was coming I just went into shock. I just said, ‘It’s not true.’ You think things like that don’t happen to ordinary families like us.”The next day it was in all the newspapers and I was reading Stephen’s name, and it still didn’t seem true.

I was almost reading it and reading it to try and make it sink in.”Mrs Restorick, who lives in Underwood, Nottinghamshire, with her husband John, 56, a sheet-metal worker, says the fact that her son was a soldier didn’t make her loss any easier “You always hope that despite the dangers, it won’t be him. I think also, to a certain extent, there’s the stiff upper lip where the Army is concerned. They have to move on, and you’re left as a family to pick up the pieces.”It’s not an exaggeration to say that, for me, it was like having my heart ripped out. There are many days when you carry on because the rest of your family need you,” she says, her voice choked with tears. “But, at the same time, there’s many a day when you don’t want to carry on.”For two years you just exist from day to day, and that’s all you can do It affects your every day.

Even now, I wake up in the morning and I haven’t got any feeling of ‘another day, I’ll do this, I’ll do that’ I have to force myself to get up and do things I still haven’t got any enthusiasm. I do things because they have do be done,” she says, wiping away her tears. “When you do start to find enjoyment in life again, you feel guilty that you can laugh again.”It is anger, she says, that keeps her going. Last year, Bernard McGinn, who was convicted of Stephen’s murder in 1999, had his conviction quashed by Belfast’s Court of Appeal on a technicality.