As I look back over this document I realize that I may not have given as clear a picture of Venetia as I have of Sarah. That hasn’t come from any wish of not wanting to portray her, no selfishness of holding her to myself—it comes from inability; I simply can’t. The subject is too embedded in my heart, and I don’t wish to chisel it out; not from any lack of generosity—I’m simply not objective about her, not even now, so many decades later.

I can tell you—and already have to some degree—what she looked like, I can tell you how her skin felt, I can tell you how she walked, but I can’t describe her essence. I can tell you how she looked at me—as though I were the dearest person ever born, as she was to me.

Perhaps she’ll appear clearer to you through the company’s reactions. I observed them all when I became part of that group, and I’ve since then searched for and found as many of them as I could. They helped me to deepen and copper-fasten the impressions of Venetia that I can convey. And they confirmed for me how unusual she was; “quirky,” some said; “lonely,” said another; “a gift for doing the unexpected,” said somebody else.

They pointed to her diligence, the assiduous learning of her lines, her passion to please her audiences. For instance—and I later saw this myself—when playing a new venue, she’d walk through the town and pick out some detail about the place to include in the show that night. It could be a statue, a notice of an auction, a local band. Blarney might then have a reference in his act, or one of the others would mention it in a jokey exchange.

I’ve assembled their impressions, and fed off them for years; here’s a sample. First, the men in the company. Now they were, in any language, misfitting and rough. None of them had gifts of hygiene or stability; they all stank to a greater or lesser degree, and they all had weeping fits or drinking jags or some other kind of outburst.

If they had anything in common with Venetia, it must have been a deep love of performance, and a relish of fine language. I stood with them many a night in the wings, and watched the starry beginnings of tears in their eyes at a wonderful Shakespeare line. I heard them murmur phrases from “Lochinvar” or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or “The Passing of Arthur” or whatever poem Venetia was using at the time to hold the show together—which is how she saw the function of that particular reading. It always came near the middle of the evening—this was a show without an interval—and it always proved a kind of emotional rallying point for both cast and audience.

And these men, these rough men, outcasts from their previous lives—they always stood up when Venetia walked in. They deferred to her; they fetched a chair for her; they poured her some of their truly awful tea—they themselves called it “the urine”—they’d say after some exertion or other, “A dose of the urine is needed.” And then, as she sat and sipped the tea, they stood around her like a ramshackle household guard, listening to every word she said as though she were their empress, which she was.

Many, many years after it all came to an end, with the show long folded, I found Peter, the temperamental one. He lived in a convent home run for indigents outside Waterford; when I met him he’d become immobile, but his personality remained intact.

He recognized me the moment I walked in—and he began to cry. Which took me aback, until he said: “I’d always hoped to hear from darling Venetia. Is she with you?”

I tried to explain, saw that he couldn’t cope with such a difficult burden, and instead asked him for his impressions of her.

“She took me in as though I were the brightest star in the theatrical firmament. I was on the heap, old boy. Rubbish. Useless. Over. On the skids. Every opportunity I had—and I knew the greats—I pissed away. I offended every manager who hired me, I was too grand, they were beneath me, I was too temperamental to act. I was an Actor.”

As I recalled it, he hadn’t done much acting for Venetia’s company either, and I put that to him gently. By now I was maturer and better able to couch things.

“No, old boy. And she knew why. She knew I was afraid, too worthless. So she gave me the job of being her Shakespeare coach. And I often chose the repertoire with her. I would never have had a life without her.”

Now the women. Mrs. Haas adored her, no need to remind you of that. Sarah, as you know, considered her daughter mythical. From the company, Martha, when I met her, told me that she herself had had two miscarriages on the road. All the medical arrangements—made by Venetia. The doctors—paid by Venetia. The emotional aftercare—Venetia.

“Before the house that you knew in Charleville, she had another house. She sent me to that house to recover, and she gave me a housekeeper to look after me. D’you remember her? That Mrs. Hiss? Terrible bitch, she treated me like I was a fool or a convict or both. And then Venetia’d come over to see me and everything’d be fine again. Did you know that the mother was dead jealous of her? She was an actress too, the mother.”

For a woman who never spoke when in the company of the show, Martha made up for lost time. I asked her whether, as a woman, she had liked Venetia. Martha thought, frowned, took her time, spoke slowly.

“She was two people, like. There was the warm side to her, that we all saw, I mean, friendly-like. And there was another side, distant-like, I don’t mean cold, no, she wasn’t cold. But she was away out of things, like. Yeh, distant-like. Yeh, cold, maybe. But we’d’a done anything for her.” She paused. “That distant thing. I think she was lonely-like.”