15

Pauline was lying in a drying pool of her own blood when we opened the trailer door. We lifted her onto the bed and I saw Jimmy crossing himself as my legs buckled under me. O, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee...

Her hands were cold, so cold that she might have been dead for days, but, somehow, the blood from her wrists hadn’t covered her beautiful fingers.

The broken whiskey bottle lay in a corner of the trailer. I sat looking at her and Jimmy put a lighted cigarette between my lips.

‘She was playing ‘Come Back to Sorrento’ - that was in Butlers Town.’

He said something but I knew he didn’t remember. Why should he? He hadn’t fallen in love with her. How good it had been to find her sitting at the piano, the edge of bitterness to almost everything she said, the Canadian flavour to her Dublin accent, like the music she played. I sat remembering her like that... unable to believe that the cold pale slip of a girl on the bed was my favourite pianist of all time.

The deceased took her own life was her mind was unbalanced. She had been drinking heavily for a long time. The failure of her marriage contributed, the court feels, to her manic depression.

It was all jumbled up, stilted formality, cold as the corpse when we found her, God rest her soul. The Coroners verdict was something we worked out for ourselves weeks earlier. So what! None of it changed any thing. No help there for either Pauline or me.

Whiskey helped because it was insulation, and Jennie carried me through the weeks that followed the death of my amazing young wife who, in her offhand way, was too good for this world.

Ma used to say that it was an ill wind that didn’t blow some good, and I thought of this as we worked to packed houses night after night until we left Milltown.

Jimmy and I, we had used the microphone on town and country, hiring locals to help us do chores, generally getting ordinary people on our side, since they can be your best source of getting to the ordinary people which generally formed ninety per cent of our audiences.

Mind you, we got lucky that Jimmy rang a pal of his on The Herald, which is what the Dub calls ‘my own paper.’ This guy got a headline story out of the tragedy, which earned it time on radio news, while he sent it to every contact he had in the southern half of the country - which earned us business that was just unbelievably good. So good, that it had me deciding that there was a Heaven, and that Pauline was there, cigarette in hand, wearing a huge grin that her story had been such a hit to start out ball rolling into a hugely successful tour that made our Spring a true gift from a loving God.

We made national and local press all over the country with pictures of the company in situ and on our moving days, photos of our small crocodile of trucks and trailers, and three halfway decent motor cars. Imagine us earning captions such as

Hero’s of The Road

And

‘Only the Valiant

And to top all plugs

We received the accolade

There’s No People like Show People:

---------------

Like all halfway decent stories, Pauline’s passing was milked for all it was worth, so I shouldn’t have been all that surprised that a priest from another town, one we had played many times down the years, turned up at her funeral. But seeing the guy with his Mass Card face on, caused me to remember how he had absolutely refused to allow Pauline’s corpse be buried in his local graveyard, since she has, his words ‘taken her own life.’

I need hardly tell you that I felt like punching him in the head, and I have to confess that just seeing him as he gathered whatever hint of personal publicity he could from the media thing that made us seem like hero’s, well, it made me sick to my stomach and I had to work hard to restrain my need to simply whack him with a right-hander.

He was a fine looking man, with the kind of prosperous good looks that were bound to help his congregation believe that he was a big man in the Jesus organisation. I basically avoided the guy but, at one stage, when he had a young newspaper guy in tow, camera at the ready, he zoomed in on me as though we were best friends and set about organising a picture of us, like someone that knew he was just doing me a favour.

‘No thanks,’ I said flatly, deliberately leaving out the word Father, since I didn’t consider him fit to be a Christian, let alone one of God’s chosen, or whatever they were calling Sky Pilots at that moment. The fact is that I had to turn away from the guy for fear that I would punch him right in the mouth, so taken was I by the memory of our last meeting.

This happened as I remembered, yet again, his rejection of my request that my poor, lost and lovely wife, Pauline, would be buried in the Catholic grave yard of his town. This service which I had regarded as a formality, would not be provided, here I was, years later, feeling my face go red again, at the memory of his response to my simple request.

‘I have to inform you, sir that we cannot permit the remains to be buried in consecrated ground.’

‘Pauline was a Catholic.’

‘But one who found the ways of the church too hard to follow, Mister O’Neill. Your marriage was not a marriage in the eyes of the church.’

He shook his head with the regret of a man that had just lost a trout from the end of his line. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in his final voice.

‘You don’t even know what she took her own life.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mister O’Neill. The Church has laid down...’

‘I’ll tell you why she died.’

‘It won’t alter things, I’m sorry.’

‘She was a lesbian, a homosexual she was queer!’

‘I’m truly sorry, Mister O’Neill.’

‘You’re sorry. Well, Pauline was so sorry that she took her own life. She killed herself because she couldn’t live the way she was...she wanted to be normal, to be a wife to me, to have kids...she wanted to love, be loved...she was a virgin when she died...and all she wanted was to be normal, to love me and be loved by me, to be able to make love like a normal woman, the be able to fuck...’

‘Mister O’Neill!’ he curbed the violence in his voice. I can under you being distraught...’

‘She fought it...she didn’t want to be queer, but when she couldn’t make it with me she began to die...whiskey was taking too long so she used the bottle itself to end her misery...’

I wiped away my tears and I could see him crossing himself.

‘Don’t pray for her, father, and don’t pray for me. I don’t want your prayers.’

He looked at me without anger: ‘I wish I could help you.’

‘Well, if you do, tell me something. Tell me was she wrong, my Pauline? Was she wrong? Like, she was born the way she was, like you were born to be a priest or you wouldn’t be one...God decided that you would do his work, and your God decided that my wife should be a lesbian. He sent her into this world the way that way, so who’s fault is it that she died. Can you tell me that? Can you?’

He looked at me for a few seconds and I hated him for the pity that his eyes poured on me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said turning then to walk into the church.

I wanted to go after him, to punch him in the face because he was better than I was. I hated him for his belief, wanting to choke the life out of him, to deprive him of the security that his unquestioning faith gave him.

----------

It was Jennie that suggested a Protestant burial and I found a clergyman who was a Christian first and a Prod second. He let me bury Pauline in the sacred ground of the little graveyard behind his church was for a moment or two I felt that I knew what the word Charity was all about. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.’

I asked myself could it really be like still waters and soft green grass, pastures of peace and tranquillity. I didn’t think so but I prayed by her grave that Pauline had found some kind of rest, and though I was both heart sick and sad, I didn’t weep. Pauline was free, free from the guilt and the whiskey, and there was nothing to weep about, because the feeling I had for her was there as strong as ever it was, and besides, she would give me a grin and say, you have a woman that loves you, get on with it and just blow me the odd kiss.’

-----------

‘Oh, Jenn, they’re fantastic, they just seem to get bigger, more beautiful, all the time.’

Jennie put her brassiere on the bed and walked over to where I was tying my shoelaces. She put her arms around my neck and I kissed her nipples. When I looked up I could my face in her incredibly lovely blue eyes.

‘They’re getting ready for the baby.’

I took her in my arms and held her close. Then I pulled my head back and heard myself say: ‘Baby, when?’

She held onto me. ‘You’re not angry?’

I pulled her head back roughly. ‘Angry? You nut. You stand there telling me we’re going to have a baby and you think I might be angry. You nut! What am I going to do with you?’

She kissed me and we went together to the bed and I kissed her mouth and her breasts and, inevitably, I felt tears come, while she brushed them aside with gentle fingers.

‘The end of June,’ her eyes sparkled and I kissed her again and held het gently close, already going into the minding game because I felt this to be part of my role.

‘That makes you over four months?’

‘Yes, and I never felt better.

I held her at arms length. ‘And you never said.’

‘I wanted to be sure, like, I’d no way to gauge how you’d feel about becoming a dad.’

‘Right now, I feel great about it. Just as long as you’re okay and you let me help out a bit more.’

‘Relax. Not much is going to change, and anyway, I can handle just about anything, thanks to you being with me.’

‘Which I really am, you know that now.’

‘I feel it, thank God, and I never felt better, and I have to confess, I’m feeling pretty hot at this minute.’

I looked at her in some surprise. ‘But, don’t we have to ease off...’

She pulled me onto the bed alongside her: ‘You let me worry about things like that. Right now, I want you so badly I need to yell. Only I’m afraid the land lady might call the Guards.’

‘Say no more,’ I said, kissing her from somewhere so deep inside me that it was like a gift from heaven or somewhere.’

------

I was singing when I got to the hall. Jimmy had been waiting for me and he looked a bit put out.

‘Sorry,’ I said right away. ‘I just found out we’re having a baby.’

He lit up and shook my hand, ‘Great news, and me here thinking you were having another ride before work.’

I grinned and he said with a nod of the head: ‘I know, you were...having another ride before work.’

‘I couldn’t help myself.’

‘When’s the baby due?’

‘By early June, so Jenny says.’

‘She’s a good woman, Tony.’

‘That’s just what I think.

‘Y’know, when her husband died, what three, four years now, she just switched off completely. Straight... I never saw anything like it, never thought she’d look at another guy.’ He grinned large: ‘Whatever you have you bastard, you certainly brought her back to life.’

‘What she’d done for me, I can never pay back.’

‘Baby’s coming at the right time...the whole summer to soak up the sun.’

‘Roll on, that’s all I can say.’

Jimmy and I went to work then, checking out our booth which we had built ourselves and giving all out equipment and tools a good look-see to make sure all was in good nick. Just as well we battened down all the hatches because in the first week of February the snow came and when it did, it came fast and it came deep, and it was everywhere as far as the eye could see. Like billions of tons of salt, it sat, the king of everything. I hated the snow. Even as a kid I hadn’t liked it all that much - bare foot days that were tough enough already - but now it seemed to be sitting on its arse, in for the duration, laughing at us. We had to buy more heaters for the halls but the cold was a winner and it only followed that people were going to stay home with a bit of fire burning in the grate as opposed to sitting in the local hall freezing their arses off.

The money situation was grin all round, like, I had fifteen pounds in my pocket, apart from the hundred I had given Jenny earlier towards the baby scenario.

Even then she had protested: ‘I won’t need that, I have a few pounds.’

‘I want you to have it, and promise me you won’t say any thing about it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Look, it’s my money, fair and square, don’t worry on that score. I just don’t want it known that we have that much.’

Her eyes were asking me why it had to be a secret.

‘Well, first of all, it isn’t anybody’s business, but, that’s not the point. The way things are going, we look like having a tough few weeks ahead. I’ll do all I can but the few pounds for the baby, that’s it. It doesn’t exist for anything else.

I kissed her and we were passionate enough to dive into bed but I had work to do so the sex had to go sit on the back burner.

Her eyes were soft with gratitude and I knew that I’d never known anybody ask so little from life. I took her face in my hands. ‘You don’t have to thank me. You’re my wife’

Jenny stopped my words with her mouth, kissing me feverishly, her tears all over me as she held onto me. ‘Oh, darling, I love you, my darling Tony.’

Later, I gave Jimmy a ten pound note. This was from my very personal stash, which I had never mentioned to anyone, not even Jenny, despite the wealth of my feeling for her. This was - to help pay Tom and Peter Hunter, and I was glad Jimmy had talked me out of hiring two other artistes to replace May and Maria Maguire. We just wouldn’t have been able to pay them at this time.

Many times during that winter, I actually regretted burning Pauline’s trailer. Yet, despite having to pay for digs, I knew that I could never have lived in it and I couldn’t have asked Jenny to share the bed with me. I could have sold it, I suppose; it was mine as was Pauline’s car, but I didn’t want the money it would have brought into my life.

It was a lovely trailer, but I could never look at it without bleeding a bit, and in the finish, while I was very drunk one night, I threw a can of petrol on it and set it alight. Jimmy was horrified and I doubt he ever quite forgave me for doing it, but then he had never failed to consummate a marriage on the barren bed.

----------

When the thaw came, I wanted to sing with the swollen streams and the running streets. I felt so relieved that I didn’t mind the muck and the dirt, just as long as the bloody snow was gone. The weather was mild for a few days but people were too busy to be bothered about seeing the show. There was too much back-breaking work to be done, the snow had gone, but it had left a very severe mark on the countryside.

We moved to Limerick, wanting to kiss the snow-free tarmac of the road, believing, because we had to go on doing just that, that the snow had purified everything, and that our long, stinking run of so little business was over, that all our ill luck had been sucked up when the thaw rode in like the Seventh Cavalry.

We played a week in Lough Ville and we attracted some kind of business but, nothing to get excited about. Saturday, we decided to give it another week, throwing in Our Famous Talent Contest as bait. This was structured to run six nights, Monday through to Saturday, when the Grand Final took place.

Admission as a performing artiste was free, but of course, each entrant, whether they realised it or not, had to pay to get into the venue, be it hall or tent - while the grand prize for the winner on Saturday night, was a five pound note, BUT, more importantly, a signed certificate from GAYTIME that the bearer was won the contest.

The truth is that on the Monday we had so many entries for the contest that, after the first singer: -who was terrible and had at least fifteen verses in his offering - we had to put a limit of four verses on every entrant.

Even then it was tough going since most of the performers were awfully lacking in anything approximating to talent, but, on they trooped, every one of the, apparently convinced they could win the first prize.

It was like that all week. Idiots of every shape and size, flocking onto the stage to deliver their party piece, and when you consider that all this took place after Our Show, with some cuts in our variety section had ended, you will understand why it was usually one ‘o’clock in the morning by the time Jennie and I got back to bed.

I left it to Jimmy to decide who should go forward to the final. I had no heart for the sham that the whole thing was, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise. But, as Jimmy said, it brought in a few more punters, many more would be more accurate, and after the winter we had endured, you couldn’t argue with that. But, all in all, with the demands it made on each and every one of us, I wondered if it was worth the bother.

Jimmy asked me to judge the contestants with him on the Saturday night and I refused, point blank. He shrugged, knowing that my mind was made up and he sorted out the winner and the second and third placed performer.

So, it left kind of a bad taste in most of our mouths but, it did serve a purpose, earning us full houses for at three week run in Lough Ville, giving the much needed bank accounts a shot in the arm.

But, for me it was a bridge too far, the step into allowing people that were devoid of talent to believe they were entitled to a certificate, and some money, left a rotten taste in my mouth.

And it made me look at Jimmy, and myself and the whole Fit-Up scenario, and though I had no idea how or when I was going to walk away from it al, I heard the discontent revving up to give me a boot up the trousers that might wake me up and remind me that there was a life out there waiting for me to go and live it.

-----------

Jenny was beside me in the car as I followed the big truck with Tom Hunter at the wheel. Jimmy was there behind my car, towing his trailer, and I had my fingers crossed that we wouldn’t get any punctures, or anything else that would make it necessary for us to stop. I was half afraid that if we did stop, we’d never get started again.

Jenny was big with our child and she had to play all the character parts right now - we kept her condition hidden from our audience with a cloak, when it was needed. She had surprised me by the way she managed to get so much out of parts that Maria Maguire had screwed up again and again, and I was proud of her being such a trooper, especially since the mornings were getting tougher for her as the weeks went by, but through all the retching she never once moaned or pulled a face. If that was part of having a baby, she told me, women who wanted babies had no right to complain.

Because Tom Hunter was so reliable, I thought I was imagining things when the truck started to go off the road, while it then, suddenly heeled over into the nearest ditch, even though the wheels found some purchase for a few moments, so that the truck was still moving, although it was almost on its side.

When it stopped, I braked, hoping to God that Jimmy

had his eyes wide open. Like, all I needed was for him to crash into the back of my motor

Telling Jenny to stay where she was, I ran up to the truck to find Tom somewhat dazed; he’d banged his head on the roof of the cabin; but he’d had the good sense to turn off the engine, which could well have caught fire. I climbed up and pulled the door open.

‘Are you alright?’

He nodded his head and I helped him out, asking him what had happened. He shook his head: ‘I don’t know, Tony, she just went over on me.’

I gave him a lighted cigarette and Jimmy was there: ‘Good divine Christ!’ he said, like someone vomiting words: ‘this is all we needed.

The top of the truck had burst open and property baskets had shot out all over the place. There were blouses and bras and wigs hanging from bushes and trees, and the old drum was holed on both sides.

‘It’ll take a tractor to get her out,’ Jimmy said gloomily.

I glanced at my watch. It was eleven o’clock and we were supposed to open in nine hours time. We had still about twelve miles to go and here was our main truck lying on inside in a ditch like a dying horse.

‘Try and gather up what’s lying around...there was a cop station a few miles back...they should be able to put us on to a tractor.’

I ran back to the car and turned it around. Jennie didn’t talk. She knew when I wanted to be left alone, and I was very grateful to her for the silence. My head was busy. We were to start the show at a quarter to nine the same night, all of us having worked like slaves all day. Maybe we were kidding ourselves, with all that the show must go on jazz but it worked. And maybe, if the people of Milltown had known just what we had come through to open the doors of their miserable hall, they might have come to see us out of respect for our guts. But they didn’t know and they didn’t come.

I had spent my own money to buy a couple of bottles of brandy, and I poured it into everybody to try and give them a lift for the show. The first night was the most important one, like it was the primary advert for the week and we had to be on top form if we were going to do business in this town. Also, I dropped quite a bit of cognac myself because I was carrying the play and I felt like somebody in need or some kind of surgery.

By Curtain Call we had we had an audience of twenty, mostly men that had paid one and sixpence and stood at the back. Even when I told them they could sit up the front without paying extra, they smiled shyly and made it clear that they would prefer to stay where they were.

I think this was the best show we ever gave, and whether it was the brandy or show people’s pride in having made it, I don’t know. And we sent our small band of patrons away laughing merrily, asking them to tell their friends all about us, and promising them just as good a show every night for the rest of the week.

‘You were fantastic today,’ Jenny said when we were in bed.’

‘Only because you were there supporting me.’

‘I was very proud of you. And then you sparkled on stage.’

I gave her a grin that left nothing to her imagination, and I said, ‘I only hope I sparkle in the second house!’

‘Oh my darling, do you want to? I thought you’d be worn out after the day you’ve had.’

‘I felt quite dead, until I lay into your lovely behind.’

She turned to lie on her back saying: I love you.’

I kissed her face and her eyes and her lips, with a long sweet kiss to her glorious mouth which became gradually more passionate and even fierce as we turned each other into hungry, demanding people.

‘Now, my darling,’ she said breathlessly, ‘I can’t wait.’

‘You’re sure, that it’s alright?’

‘I’m sure, I promise.’ She gasped in response to my next move and then she was crooning to me. ‘Oh God, how I want you, want you always buried there inside me. Let me move onto my side, my bump is getting in the way.’

I moved into her, loving her with every breath, my lips on her neck and shoulders, my right hand holding her breast as she began to lunge ahead of me.

‘I love you, Tony, oh my love, love, love...’

My hand on her breasts, moving lower to hold her even more tightly to me, knowing that she was right there with me all the way, so that I felt it begin to break in her feet, while I fought for breath, wanting, above all, to make it the best time ever for her.

‘Jenn, Jenn, I love you...I love you.’

She shuddered as my orgasm found her, threshing quickly, violently against me, slithering then as her tortured breathing became a sigh that turned to a shout of sheer release. She cried then, turning on her back, so that I could lick her tears, while she now held my face in her hands and told me: ‘I never dreamed you would ever love me...it was too much to hope for.’

I kissed her mouth and moved so that I could suck at her breasts. ‘You’re a foolish lady, a beautiful silly lady, and I love you forever and ever, now stop the tears and go to sleep.’

Thank God for that night, for those moment so crammed with love and goodness and charity, wonderful fractions of time that help give you the strength to go on no matter what a cruel day might send your way.

The feeling was there still as I got out of the bed in the morning. Jenny was sleeping still; it was only seven o’clock, and I stood looking down at her, grateful beyond belief for what had happened to me. I loved her. And I was in love with her and I didn’t want anybody else, and I could hardly believe that this immense feeling of gratitude could come my way.

Even while I was wooing Pauline, I had been crazily sexual with May, and I’d had a few lassies that May knew nothing about, since our sex was outdoors in summer nights. In hay barns too, sheds of golden grass proving sweet smelling mattresses that were made for illicit love.

With Jennie, I couldn’t even think of climbing into bed with anybody else as I bent down to touch her face with gentle fingers, while I wished it was possible for her to sleep into the summer and the booth life, and the baby at her breast.

I left the digs to buy a newspaper, spitting in disgust as the return of the enemy, snow. Damn it and blast it, for as far as I could see, the bloody stuff was two feet deep.

Like glue, the snow remained stuck to the earth, and the price to us was a high one. The countryside was dead, muted by knee-deep drifts covering it and the bare trees were godforsakin’ creatures holding their arms out to Heaven as they seemed to beg for relief.

We weren’t the only ones to undergo hardship. Farmers, shopkeepers, bus and lorry drivers, just about everybody got their share of the misery that the seemingly endless snow brought with it.

People died because of it, animals also, murdered by the hundred by the cruelness of nature, and of course, we died a death since nobody left the fireside unless it was do tend to an animal or gather fuel, while workers fought their way to and from the job, the whole country, apparently, doing novenas that some god somewhere would give us all a break and let the sun out of jail, that we all might not need a coffin.

I need hardly mention that the weather was actually like a serious judgment on our Fit Up Company, and others like us who were trudging all over the land in the hope of gathering an audience that might help them survive until the Spring found its courage and returned to kick winter into its position far away from where we were dying the death.

----------

‘I can’t remember seeing snow in March,’ said the man that bought my car from me. He was civil enough, but I didn’t have much to offer in the small talk department because I was feeling beyond shitty with myself, and generally very down in the mouth, since it was the car that Pauline had left me that was going to pay my rent for the next few weeks.

In one way I was lucky, like, I didn’t have a trailer - Jenny and I stayed in digs all the time - so I didn’t need a car per se, to haul my mobile home around. Jimmy, of course, had his own trailer to move, while Patricia had held onto the mobile home she had shared with her mother, so she needed her own wheels to get moving, which, though it nailed down the fact that I was the poorer of the trio, helped me feel I was better off while the weather was like a punishment to anybody fortunate enough to own a half-way decent set of wheels.

Jimmy had booked the hall in a village called Ladagh, and the eighteen mile journey was the toughest, most nerve racking experience I had known up to that time in my life. We had to use chains on our wheels every foot of the way and still we spent too much time pushing and shoving, and digging to get to what would probably be another week where we died the death once more with feeling. And a lot of swear words!

The village sat down in a valley and the last four hundred yards, a steep downhill slide, was the kind of nightmare nobody would ever want to repeat. I drove the truck - though it was more a case of I fought the truck every foot of the way, spinning the wheel right and left, trying to use the outer edge of the front wheels to stop it running away on me altogether. Mostly, I had the handbrake closed tight, so that the back wheels were locked, the chains digging, gaining some slight purchase that helped me to finally ease the great weight of the yoke to a slithering hall outside the village hall.

I sat there in my own sweat, my hands locked to the wheel, my stomach in such a knot that it hurt bad, and I had a burning pain across my neck and shoulders. Jimmy had to allow his car to slide into the back of the truck, his brakes simply not able to contain the weight of his trailer.

Jennie and Pat were walking down the hill while we went in to inspect the hall. It was small compared to most but it was alright if you ignored the fact that it didn’t have electricity laid on.

‘You’re not serious,’ I said, really feeling that I had now been shafted by life in a major way.

‘I know,’ Jimmy said, without any excuse in his tone. ‘It was there, all that there was - a bare hall and we could have it for very low rent - and I hadn’t the juice to go any further.’

‘Sorry, Jimmy, that was out of order,’ I said, remembering that he had been out trying to find a venue while I was trying to get a halfway decent offer for my car.

‘It won’t be too bad,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should have told you there was no electricity, but, well, I thought you had enough on your mind.’

I nodded and as he was relaxing, I said: ‘Don’t mind me. I’m still crapping after that skid patch.’

The hall did have a stage, which was something, and we got the Fit-Up organised in a couple of hours. By which time, Pat and Jenny had created a two gallon pot of stew, and the six of us got ourselves crammed into Pat’s trailer, murdering the hot food, and taking a couple of snorts each, from a bottle of whiskey I bought in the village pub while I was giving out some of our leaflets and posters.

In all honesty, Ladagh wasn’t so much a village as a forty yard street in what looked like the middle of nowhere, but we were stuck with it - stuck being the operative word - and there was no point in sitting around moaning about it when we had enough ingenuity between the lot of us to give the kiss of life to what looked like a very dead situation.

As the hot foot and the whiskey warmed everybody up, we began to sound quite positive, with, predictably, Jimmy being the one that amazed the rest of us by saying, very suddenly, in a loud, positive voice: ‘Tilley Lamps!’

Now, rather then bore you with the history of how to light up your life in a backward country hamlet - well, you could barely call Ladagh a village - we move ahead to our opening night and, believe it or not, our first full house in god alone knows how long.

To me, the word serendipity means ‘an accidental good happening’ and I’m happy to record that this blessing dropped on us because Jimmy had gone scouring, just walking around waiting for some thing to stand up and present itself in time to service a need that seemed to be in one almighty hole.

We would learn later than a wild show-band- company - a new phenomenon in Ireland - had passed through Ladagh just a couple of weeks before. This new phenomenon had brought its own supply of booze, and god knows what else. They gave this a very quick death, demolishing them selves in an all night orgy,

Before departing on the following noon, while leaving behind all their unwanted rubbish, this including four, empty, one-gallon-cans of some foreign beer that none of us had ever heard of. And, god bless him, Jimmy had found the cans, and in his own flash of genius, had solved the problem of how we were going to light our show so that an audience could see what was going on.

Before this happened, we had to make do with flopping as best we could on that first night in Ladagh. Jennie went sleeping with Pat in her caravan, Jimmy and I and the others, wrapped up in anything we could find, slept on the stage.

In the morning, Jenny found a double bed available in the extended cottage of a widow who would make us very welcome even as she rented a room to us for next to nothing. At the same time, Jimmy and I got lucky with a decent skin of a farmer who said little more than ‘call me Sean’ and refused to take money from us for what he gave us.

And what he gave us were a number of huge beer cans that the show-band had dumped in the village on their way out of there. He also loaned us five or six Tilley lamps - which produce a spitting glow of fairly decent light - refusing to take even a complimentary seat, though he made no bones about being ready to see a good show.

Jimmy split this large can down the middle to make shades, and by attaching these between the lamps and our curtains, we protected the material while shedding light out onto the hall. When we were about to begin the show, we reversed the shades so that whatever light there was, fell inward onto the stage.

I couldn’t help smiling when it was all set up, thinking that all we needed was straw lying about and we would have a great set for The Murder in the Red Barn, a very famous melodrama in which my late pal Gary had hammed it up as William as William Corder, who was anything but a nice man.

We took seven pounds on the door that first night, which was like a miracle when you considered how the weather had been, and if I was bothered by the spitting noise that the Tilly Lamps made, our audience clearly never gave them a thought.

They applauded everything we did, delighted, and very grateful for anything that would take their minds off the problems that the snow had brought into their lives.

As for ourselves, we were freezing, wearing as much as we could bear to combat the way the cold really got into our bones and, god bless Tom Hunter, one very handy chap, who had found an ailing generator in a shed behind the hall, he and Jimmy falling on it like it was a gift from heaven.

To me it looked just like a rusty old engine of some kind, but they went to work on it and in two days they had it working as though it was brand new. I was able to help them lift it into the back of the truck; it had to be under cover with the snow being so reliable about arriving, and we bolted it to a six by six timber frame that made it pretty secure.

I know this was pretty crude but it was a real godsend and when we added a lead from it along the side wall, we managed to run it across the floor of the single dressing-room to the stage.

When Jimmy gave me the word, I turned the engine with an ordinary starting handle and a few seconds later, we had our own electricity.

I was surprised to the point of being amazed, but while Jimmy was delighted that the generator performed at all, Tom Hunter was apprehensive about how reliable it was likely to be, and on his say-so, we held onto the lamps. ‘It’ll probably be alright,’ he said, ‘but it’s been out of action for a good while.’

Tom Hunter’s misgiving were justified in the middle of our first all electric show, when, halfway through the play I heard some kind of explosion at the side of the hall even as the lights went out.

Tom and Jimmy left the stage and rushed out to check what had happened, and while Peter Hunter organised the tilly lamps once again, Jennie and myself sang ballads, some of the audience, to my amazement, joining up is a sing-song.

Jenny looked wonderful, blooming, even though she could still manage to hide her bump, this not so obvious because of her magnificent breasts, but my guess would have been that most people would have gathered she was with child, and I have to say, I felt a certain sense of pride that she was carrying my child.

After the first couple of numbers I apologised to the audience for the break in the play, and they were marvellous about it. From somewhere near the back of the hall, a man called out, ‘Begob, sir, ye can’t whack the ould tilly, so ye can’t.’

This remark was greeted by laughter that swept through the hall, helping the atmosphere more than all the ballads that Jennie and I could have sung in a fortnight.

‘Can do nothing with it tonight,’ Jimmy said when he and Tom returned. Let’s finish the play.’

Later, while I was removing my make-up, he told me what had happened. ‘I couldn’t tell you then or you’d have had a fit. There was just nothing we could do.’

I guess I should have been grateful that nobody was burned in the explosion of the generator and the truck that was housing it. But, I was sick to my stomach when I thought of all my books, Gary’s books, and my marriage lines, all precious possessions, the loss of which, was like losing a serious part of myself.’

‘It spewed all over everything,’ Jimmy said quietly. ‘Tom nor me, we couldn’t get near it. All we did was finally put it out, and try to feel grateful that nobody killed or injured by it.’

He was right, of course, and I allowed him see that I accepted this, but my books, they were my wealth in this world, and the loss of my marriage lines, well, I wouldn’t have had that happen even if it meant saving everything else.

When Jenny and I got into bed she held me gently for a while and then she said quietly: ‘I’m sorry about your marriage lines.’

‘Oh, Jenny, don’t, for God’s sake.’

She was hurt. ‘Oh darling, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

I took her face in my hands. ‘You haven’t...you wouldn’t know how to hurt anybody...and I feel ashamed, that’s all. I’m such a bloody baby.’

She kissed my mouth, ‘my baby?’

I pressed her to me, ‘your baby.’

She undid the buttons of her nightdress and put her hands under her swollen breasts. ‘Let me give you a present.’ She pressed them to my mouth. ‘I love you, Tony.’

I kissed her breasts and her hands were on the back of my head, pressing me tight against the balls of milk. And I went to sleep, cuddled warm and close, safe and sound, in the bounty of Jenny’s love.