Dear father

I am sure you would have loved this poster:

NEWTOWN COMMUNITY FESTIVAL
celebrating the life and times of
Donncha Rua MacConmara

“a festival of music, songs and recital to celebrate the life of
an outstanding poet. Be part of it, explore your culture”

Donncha Rua MacConmara was born in Clare and died in Waterford. In between times, he had traveled all over Europe, even to Newfoundland. Dubbed a ‘spoilt priest’ (he never completed his vocation), he was a schoolteacher, a poet, a singer, a story-teller, a womanizer and a drunkard…and not necessarily in that order! A wild man…the Brendan Behan or Jack Doyle of his times.

Newtown has finally woken up to the fact that we have a poet of renown amongst us. Well, his remains anyway. You were the one that first told me that Maggie Bluett was a descendant of Donncha’s; and John Mullins, when he wasn’t digging graves - he was more inclined towards leaning on an adjacent gravestone and admiring his handiwork - expanded further. John liked to put it around that he was an expert on DM and was willing to regale anyone who had half an hour to waste, particularly if the story-telling could take place in Micky Kent’s bar across the road.

‘Donncha Rua MacConmara (Red Dennis MacNamara) was born in Cratloe, County Clare, in 1715. As a young man he was sent to Rome to study for the priesthood, but he never completed his studies, being expelled for drunkenness and other ‘inappropriate behavior’.
After that, he led a wandering life, and he seldom settled long anywhere. ‘Ban Chnoic Eireann O’ (The Fair Hills Of Eire), his classic lyric of exile, was written while in Hamburg.
Take a blessing from my heart to the land of my birth
And the fair hills of Eire O’
And all that yet survive of Eibhear’s tribe on earth…
When he did return to Ireland it was to Waterford he came, and he traveled around the countryside as a teacher, the fate of the ‘spoilt priest’, as his like were known in those days. In 1741 he was appointed assistant master at famous classical school at Seskinane, in west Waterford, where he remained for several years. Of course Ireland was still in the grip of the Penal Laws in those days, but the Cromwellian diktat that all native Irish had tails, and that no Catholic could own land or be a civil servant or teach, or own a horse worth more than five pounds wasn’t pursued as vigorously as previously, so Donncha survived.
As well as the drink, Donncha also liked the women, and in 1743 he had to make a hasty departure from Waterford to escape the wrath of a family whose daughter he had made pregnant. He traveled by fishing boat to Newfoundland, where he lay low until things quietened down.
A subsequent second trip to Newfoundland, where he was said to have written his famous long poem ‘Eachtra Giolla an Amarain’ (The adventures of an unfortunate man) now seems likely to have been a hoax. It appears he got no further than Waterford city, where, instead of boarding his ship he spent his time drinking and womanizing until all his money was gone. Afterwards, in an effort to convince people he really had been there, he wrote the long poem (360 verses) which tells how the emigrant ship was attacked and captured by French pirates, before eventually making it safely to Newfoundland.
Shortly after this he changed his religion and became the church clerk at the Church Of Ireland in Rossmire, just outside Newtown. However, his rakish way of life once again found him out and he was dismissed.
He was a happy-go-lucky individual whose poems and songs were part of the folklore in County Waterford . Unfortunately, a lot of them died with the Irish language
His last years were spent here in the Newton area, living on the Shanahan farm in Whitestown Cross. It is said that one of his favorite drinking haunts was this pub.
One of Donncha’s last pieces of writing was an inscription in Latin on the headstone of one of his contemporaries, the Irish poet Tadgh Gaeleach O’Sulleabhain, who is buried just a few miles away in Ballylaneen.
Tadgh is put here…
Who will sing the praises of the Irish,
who the deeds of men?…
With Gaelic Tadgh dead the Irish muses are silent….
The same could be written of Donncha Rua. He died in 1810, and is buried in an unmarked grave to the rear of the church.. He who had once been a temporary protestant in a church a few miles down the road is now very much a permanent catholic here in Newtown'.
John Mullins himself is now a permanent resident there now – along with yourself. I am sure you are aware of the similarities in John’s own life with Donncha’s; apart from being a born story-teller, he ‘emigrated’ to England once, returning home several weeks later when all the traveling expenses were drank. He, too, had got no further than Waterford city. Personally, He said he couldn’t bring himself to get on the boat-train, but I believe it was all part of a scheme to have a good drinking session away from prying eyes.
Mickey Kent has gone too, and his beloved Donncha Rua Bar, so carefully preserved as the shebeen in must have been in Donncha’s time, has been given a facelift. And a roof-lift, and very other kind of lift possible to ensure that it is now no different to fifty other bars in the region.
The festival was in two parts; Saturday night saw a religious ceremony in the church, though I don’t expect DM would have been too impressed by its long-windedness – he would have been across the road in his shebeen sinking a few jars! The most striking fact to emerge was the strong links evident between Kilmac and Newfoundland. That the fishing boats and whaling ships traveled long distances in those days was attested to by the large amount of local surnames still flourishing all over Newfoundland. The best part of the evening was the pre-celebration drinks at the parish priest’s house for the dignitaries and invited guests. Yours truly being one of the invitees because of my literary talents! Vince Power was also invited, but the occasion clearly wasn’t grand enough for him
Sunday morning saw DM’s grave being blessed after Mass. Of course the location was pure guesswork because nobody had a clue as to where that might be. ‘Somewhere around the back wall of the church’, was the nearest anybody could place it. Pity John wasn’t around; he would have shown them the exact spot. He would probably have found a few relics too. Well, he had been finding them for tourists for years!
The afternoon was reserved for the festivities; open-air dancing, marching girls, and live bands in the sports field. Then the heavens opened and all the open-air activities had to be cancelled. We all retired to the Donncha Rua Bar, and come closing time even the parish priest was legless. I am sure DM would have been suitably impressed
Your loving son
Tom.


Dear father

Do you recognize this picture? You should do. You were sitting in the back of the car, as it rolled uphill, shouting; ‘There you are then doubting Thomas. I told you all along I was right’. In all the time I had known about the phenomena I had never really believed it – another phisog as mother would say – but seeing was believing.


(insert picture of The fairy tree)



I had forgotten all about the story until last year when I was having a chat with someone in Limerick, who, when he discovered where I came from suddenly said:
‘Oh, you must know all about The Magic Road, then’.
I had never heard of the magic road, and it was only when he began to describe an area in the locality, where cars apparently rolled uphill, that I realized he was talking about Mahon Falls. Nevertheless, it was the first time I had ever heard it described as the Magic Road.
‘Cars have been rolling uphill there for a long time’, I replied. ‘Even before they were invented’.
He insisted the story was true. That he had been there and tested it for himself.
I must admit I was still skeptical but when I mentioned the story to you, you verified it and insisted on driving up here to confirm it. You even knew the best spot to stop; by the Fairy Tree. It’s a hawthorn bush really, but the road is long and straight at this point, and there does seem to be a noticeable slope down to the Falls themselves. The car, however, rolled the other way!
The reason I remember it so well is because it was one of our last trips together. After our experiment we all sat there on the rocks enjoying a picnic, watching the water cascading down the slopes. And I recalled a similar picnic many years ago when a group of us from the Tech in Portlaw had clambered up those same slopes to the plateau high above and marveled at the two lakes up there, Crottys Lake and Lake Coumshingaun. Coumshingaun was so dark and so still that it frightened you just to look at it. Crottys Lakewas much less intimidating, and nearby was Crotty’s Eye, a needle-like projection where Crotty, the highwayman, used to lie in wait for his victims to come by in the pass down below. Not that it did him much good in the long run; he was hanged for his troubles in Waterford later on.
That afternoon you spotted a fox skulking in the heather near us, and motioning us to be quiet you held out a piece of chicken to him. After about five minutes of gradually edging nearer, the fox suddenly darted forward, grabbed the chicken and vanished in to the heather again. You never said how you knew he would take the food, and on subsequent visits I never again caught sight of him.
It might interest you to know that a few years after our visit, RTE turned up here to test the theory out – and their reporter came away convinced it was true. He must have convinced a lot of his listeners too because there has been a steady stream of visitors ever since then. Oh yes, the ‘Comeragh Drvie’ is now promoted in a big way.
So what causes the phenomena?
One theory is that there is lodestone under the hill, creating a magnetic field that pulls objects towards it, and a local legend is that it is the pull of angry fairies whose fort lies in the path of the road. However, recent studies by a bunch graduates say it is nothing more than an optical illusion.
I now know it is not a unique experience; I have since read of a similar road outside the village of Carlingford, near Dundalk, and another one near Dhofar, in Oman. Perhaps there are hundreds world-wide.

Your loving son
Tom

Dear Mother
You never cared much for Vince Power, did you? I remember you once telling me he could buy me and sell me. Well, maybe he could - and maybe he did.
The last time I saw Vince it was on TV. It was a couple of years ago and he was being interviewed at the glastonbury festival. In the background were some noisy festival-goers; one was sporting a tee shirt which had the words F--- VINCE POWER printed large across his chest. (trust the TV not to miss that!) I don't suppose Vince noticed, and indeed if had he wouldn't have cared. He didn't get where he is by worrying too much about what other people thought of him.
But then, the music industry boasts more bastards per square mile than any other, apart from the media industry, so it was no surprise that he had acquired the hard-nosed, almost thuggish image. He had to in order to survive. Not that it endeared him to the people he depended on for his survival- the festival-goers themselves. Many of them hated his guts, but because of the ability of MF to deliver the goods (ie. the best bands) they put aside this hatred. It was the manner of the delivery that alienated many of his customers; barbed wire fencing, high-handed, often brutal security, and sky-high prices. But it was a captive audience; where else could they go to see and listen to their heroes? The choices were limited because MF controlled most of the venues, so it was a question of like it or leave it.
There won't be many tears now that Vince has left the Mean Fiddler, but there may be some who will wonder what he was like as a man, as a friend, as a schoolmate, as a partner. I was all those things as you know, but what you don't know far outweighs those few skimpy facts.
It was a damp, depressing morning in Cricklewood Lane in the late autumn of 1977. My bones were aching; another night spent sleeping rough in an empty house in the Kensal Green area, and a three-mile early-morning trudge to the rendezvous, had left their mark..
I didn't have a penny in my pocket and I hadn't eaten for more than a day. All I wanted was to get to hell out of London, and Vince, I hoped, was my ticket out.
When he emerged from the cafe where he had been breakfasting in, he listened to my tale of woe, a two-week gambling spree which had left me £500 poorer, and without the wherewithal to get back to Limerick. Well acquainted with my gambling habits (as I was with his) he showed little sympathy.
However, he removed £40 from a bulging wallet and handed it to me, saying he hoped never to see me again. As I watched him pad across the road to his furniture shop nearby (one of three or four he had by then acquired), I didn't realize that Vince Power had arrived. The only direction he was headed was upwards.
I had thanked him for the money and said I would repay it - something I hadn't the slightest intention of doing. He owed me a lot more than forty bloody quid!
The following account of growing up with Vince is from a journal I used to keep. I know you know it all because you were there, but for the benefit of any strangers who may read these letters here is what it said;

It had all began in a sleepy rural Waterford village called Newtown, a mile or so from the small town of Kilmacthomas. In two cottages, almost identical, and less than half a mile apart, surrounded by rich farmland and overlooked by the hump-backed Comeragh mountains. Poverty was a way of life in Ireland in the 1950's, and our respective families were no exception. Both our fathers were labourers, mine in the local Tannery, Vince's with the County Council. The Power family was large, much larger than ours, but that was nothing unusual in Ireland at the time.
Bread and jam and leaky bottles of milk at school, spuds and cabbage when you came home, were our usual diet. Most houses kept hens though, so there plenty of eggs to eat, and the occasional chicken dinner. Meat was rarely seen except on weekends, unless you were lucky enough to own a pig which could be fattened and killed. Raw turnips were often on the menu as we made our way home across the Mass-path after school. Young turnips tastes lovely and sweet and we would 'skin' them first with our teeth before devouring them.
Vince and I attended Newtown National School, where we had the pleasure of being taught by Mr Walsh, a one-eyed sadist who arrived by bus every morning from the outlying town of Dungarvan.. Each morning he would stride across the intervening fields, (the school was off the beaten track as far as the bus was concerned) like some sort of avenging angel, and strike terror into all of us until it was time for him to depart again.
Education, according to him, was not acquired in any mysterious, scholarly way. Fear was the key to opening our minds, widening our store of knowledge. The cane, his fists, ear-tugging, throat-pulling, pinching, they were all tools to be used in the task of educating us. You could say he beat the learning into us.
Eventually, it all ended, and I in my wisdom took a job in the local mill. Soon, I was part of a team processing and packing porridge. Flahavans Progress Porridge Oatlets! I was fourteen. Vince's parents showed more foresight and put him on the bus to Dungarvan and into secondary education. During the next few years our paths crossed regularly, mostly in the big field next door to the Power cottage, where teams of local youths knocked the stuffing out of each other in games of football and hurling during the long summer evenings.
For the winter there was television. This new form of entertainment had begun to appear in a few houses in the locality, and Power's, surprisingly, was one of those houses. Our house still had no electricity or running water, so several times a week we would gather in the Power's cramped kitchen and be entertained.

As you know, by the time I had turned 18 I had enough of this glass-case existence, and shortly after I departed for London. Vince was to follow within a few months, to his relations in Hemel Hempstead, where his first job was as a floorwalker in the local Woolworths.
That didn't last long; before long we were rooming together in bed-sits around Kilburn and Cricklewood. Sometimes we worked, sometimes we didn't; it seemed we were forever departing rooms in the middle of the night with the rent unpaid and the gas meter empty.
We had come to London with good intentions but a couple of years in the Capital opened our eyes. Most of the people we knew didn't get out of bed in the morning with any great regularity, and after a while neither did we. Work was an unpleasant word, and anyway it interfered with the more important things in life. Like meeting your friends, having a laugh, getting girls back to the flat and hopefully into bed.
For money there was always the Labour Exchange. Very few questions were asked in those days, and signing on at two different exchanges wasn't a difficult task. If we were really desperate there was always the subby. For this, The Crown pub in Cricklewood acted as both employment bureau and cheque-changing agency. It didn't make anything from the first service, but by God it made a fortune from the latter. When we were really down on our luck, there were always the early-morning deliveries of bread and milk to the nearby industrial estate to ease our hunger pangs.
By now gambling played a big part in our lives, and paid on Friday skint on Saturday was a regular occurrence. Vince liked to play the dogs and we visited the tracks at Park Royal and Hendon regularly. Hendon, with its casino underneath the main stand, always attracted him, the lure of the roulette wheel something he could seldom resist. Winning nights invariably ended with a visit to the tables, where his hunches often paid off. One night he staked £5 on his lucky number and walked away with enough to pay for a couple of weeks holiday in Ireland.
Park Royal's afternoon meetings were noisy affairs, crammed with workers from the nearby industrial estate especially on the Friday afternoon. When we couldn't afford to go there we sometimes watched the race from the roof of a nearby empty factory. Eventually it dawned on us that that a lot of races were being won by the fast-starting dogs, ie, those leading by a couple of lengths at the first bend. Transmission of information from the track to the betting shops wasn't instantaneous in those days; there was often a time lag of half a minute, which meant that many of the races were more than half over before the 'off' was announced. How to utilize this advantage, we wondered? The answer of course was walkie-talkies. Soon we had acquired a pair and were carrying out trial runs. One of us on the roof of the building relaying the information, the other close to the nearby betting shop in Acton Lane. It worked!
Of course not every race was suitable, and not all dogs won, but it did provide a steady income for some time. Then Park Royal was sold for development and we were back on the dole again!
All this time we were drifting along with the tide, letting it carry us where it would, our main concern to get enough money to gamble and to support our other activity - dancing. The Galtymore, The 32 Club, the Buffalo; our weekends just weren’t the same if we failed to make an appearance at one or more of them. Vince wasn’t a great dancer- his actions on the floor often resembled a bear with a bad attack of fleas, but his love of music was undisputable. Wherever we went his record player and his collection of records were never far behind. Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash were as much a part of our dingy rooms as we were.
By now Vince had met his wife, Theresa, ironically through me. I had walked her home from a dance but when she met Vince it was soon clear where her interests lay. Raven-haired, with dark, smouldering eyes, she was a looker and she knew it. Pretty soon she had Vince wrapped around her little finger. She began working on him; getting him to smarten up, buying him clothes, (of all of us Vince was the least concerned about his appearance) urging him to get a regular job. She was working on him in other way too, trying to distance him from us his brothers and his friends whom she clearly regarded as layabouts. There was an element of snobbery about her which was difficult to understand because her background was working class, and she herself was employed at Mc Vities, a local biscuit factory. Still, her sights were aimed -and Vince was the target.
It was inevitable that she would succeed because Vince was crazy about her. Eventually she gave him an ultimatum; he finished with us or she finished with him. He moved out, got a place of his own, and began to work regularly. Every so often he tried to slip the traces, but when he did she was never far behind.
Most of the rest of the gang were by now embroiled in a life of crime. Shoplifting, breaking and entering, pick pocketing - you name it we tried it. Some of our efforts owed more to the crazy gang than anything else: a lock-up garage broken into providing no money but vast amounts of Green Shield stamps. We spent hours licking and sticking the following day and managed to get some cash by redeeming the books at the local Green Shield centre in Wembley. Another abortive attempt occurred when we broke into a lock-up newsagents in Wembley. I had neutralized the alarm by sticking a piece of cardboard behind the gong, but it fell out half way through the job. The ensuing racket woke most of the neighbourhood, and we took off pursued by a posse of dogs and half-dressed people and, inevitably, a police Panda car. We were forced to abandon the car somewhere outside Neasden and seek safety in the nearby park.
The Ace Cafe, on the North Circular near Stonebridge Park, was our unofficial headquarters. An all-night place, it wasn't just a cafe, it was a way of life. Biker, drifters, and a mixture of lonely night people whiled away the hours drinking coffee and playing sad songs on the juke box. Others, like ourselves, dreamed and schemed. Vince came, listened and laughed with us, then went home to Theresa while we went about our nefarious business.
After a while I decided I had enough of this 'hole-in-the-wall-existence' that there must be an easier way of making a living. There was. Bar work. I had already worked part-time in a couple of local pubs, where fiddling the till provided a steady income. I found a fulltime job in a pub on Dagenham Heathway where, after a few weeks, the manager trusted me enough to give me the weekend's takings to take to the bank. I got on a bus and just kept going, £8000 richer. I used this scheme a number of times and gambled away thousands of pounds before eventually being caught and sentenced to eighteen months. (as you know)
I was also deported, but I am not sure you were ever aware of that fact. I don't ever recall telling you about it; I just turned up on the doorstep one day after two years absence and said 'I'm back'. Or words to that effect. I don't know what was worst; the time in goal or being put on that plane at Heathrow and told 'don't come back, Paddy'. I'd been kicked out of a few pubs in my time, but a country!
I don't know what you told father about the whole business, or if you told him anything at all. Even if he knew he wouldn't have said anything. That was his nature. Stoical, is the word I am looking for.
I knew I couldn't stay around for too long; Sergeant Cahill in Kilmac had already spoken to me; 'we don't want your sort around here'. How many more knew for Gods sake!
Anyway, I took myself off to Clonmel where I got myself a job welding roof trusses for a few firm that were roofing all the new ANCO premises that were being built at the time. Clonmel had a dog track, more pubs than was healthy, and was overrun with soldiers from the nearby Army Barracks who seemed to do little except cycle around the town all day and drink themselves into a stupor at night.
I tried to stay out of the pubs and away from the dog track, but I was fighting a losing battle. Within a few months I had robbed my employers, gone on holiday to Tramore and asked a girl I had met the night before to marry me, (wisely, she declined) before heading back to London and renewing all my old acquaintances.
Vince was married by now and living in a two-roomed flat at the back of Harlesden High Street, with Theresa and his new son, Maurice. They were barely surviving; Theresa was pregnant again so could not work, and what jobs Vince managed to get were both badly paid and menial. The novelty of young love had already begun to pall and there were constant argument over money. I could see that Theresa resented my visits, but our friendship never diminished, and when I was flush I made sure Vince never went short.
I was soon back into my old routine; breaking into shops, stripping lead and fitting from empty factories and houses, etc. Then one evening one of Vince's brothers arrived with some office equipment and asked me if I could sell it for him. The following day I took it to a shop in Praed St in Paddington, which I knew bought this type of gear. The eventual outcome of this was six months in Pentonville for receiving stolen goods.
Cooped up in the 'Ville, I began to re-assess my life. I was twenty three years old and the last three had been a blur - almost half that time spent in prison. If I wasn't to become an old lag I would have to change. I had learned a trade - welding - during my previous spell behind bars so I decided to give honest living a go. When I next saw Vince I had a proper job and I'd met Margaret.
It was looking like settling-down time.
Vince's circumstances had changed for the better too; a flat more in keeping with his status as a married man with two children, and a decent-paying job. Large areas of Willesden were being demolished, whole streets being flattened to make way for more modern housing, and he was employed on the demolition of these houses. These premises yielded up a lot of unwanted possession; furniture, TV's radios, radiograms etc, and he was making a nice spare-time income repairing and selling them.
However, his relationship with Theresa was deteriorating all the time. She had always liked the good life, and didn't think he was capable of providing it. Now, after a few years of marriage, he began to suspect other men. He seemed to spend half his time chasing after her, trying to find out what she was up to, who she was with. Sometimes I was roped in to shadow her when he couldn't himself. All his chasing would prove to be in vain, because a few years later she left him for someone she thought could provide her with the good things in life. Little did she know what she was leaving behind!
The next year passed with me struggling to stay an honest man and Vince struggling to keep his wife happy. Then came the event that changed both our lives. I was saving hard as I was due to be married in a few months, but I still liked to gamble on the horses, and every Saturday would invest a few bob on the ITV Seven. Well, this Saturday they all won and I was suddenly over £2000 richer!
As I contemplated my new-found wealth Vince suggested opening a second-hand furniture shop. My money and his expertise, he said. His expertise amounted to selling the bits and pieces he'd salvaged from the demolition site. I realized he was serious though and eventually I agreed.
But first there was my wedding to be taken care of. When I got married on the 6th Feb 1971 Vince was my best man, wearing a suit borrowed from his brother-in-law because he didn't have one of his own. You should have been there of course; and you would have been if it hadn't been for that bloody postal strike. There was no way of contacting you for nearly three months and when it was over I was already wed.
A few weeks later Vince and I found a suitable shop along the Harrow Road in Kensal Green and shortly afterwardsThe Bargain Shop opened for business. We were both equal partners, all the money having been put up by me. A clapped-out Morris van was our sole form of transport and very soon we were embroiled in this new world of commerce.
As with most things in life, there was a honeymoon period everything seemed to run smoothly. We bought old furniture cheap and sold it dear. It didn't seem like work at all. There were busy periods of course, collecting and delivering, but in between there was plenty of time for sitting around and basking in the novelty of being entrepreneurs.
Somewhere along the way we made the mistake of thinking it was too easy, and before the year was out we were in trouble. The initial rush of customers had died away and we were finding it hard to meet our overheads, and to find two lots of wages at the end of each week. Our problem was under-capitalization: we couldn't afford bad weeks, nor could we afford to buy large quantities of stock without first selling what we had. It soon became a hand-to-mouth existence.
By now I was also a father, and with finances the way they were we agreed that we should both go back to work. We managed to secure some more demolition work and installed someone in the shop to run it for us. It worked only moderately well. There was never enough time after work to give the business the attention it needed. After a few months we realized it needed full-time commitment from one of us. We agreed that Vince should run it and I would return to my trade as a welder, taking no share of the profits until things picked up.
Over the next few months there was no discernable improvement. The shop was always under-stocked and the quality of the furniture was poor. We had blazing rows about it; I felt Vince was making no effort to improve it, but he reminded me of our agreement to let him run it, resulting in us almost coming to blows on several occasions. I had had previous experience of his nasty temper, and the force of his fists, so I thought it better to let it ride.
Then I learned that he had been deliberately running the shop down. He was diverting the better pieces to a garage he had rented nearby and was selling them to dealers or placing them in auctions. It all came to a head when I found out he had picked up a painting in a house clearance which turned out to be valuable. He placed it in one of the bigger auction houses where it fetched many thousands of pounds. After that he froze me out; the picture was his, he insisted, not the shop's. By now he had brought his brothers into the business, and though I tried hard to get to see him and reason with him, they made sure I was kept well away. In the end I gave up.
The shop, which had served its purpose, continued to stutter along, but I was so sickened by what had happened that I hardly gave it a glance as I passed by. Thus the partnership ended,though never officially, and I have never received one penny back on my investment. Within a short time Vince had several more shops on the go in Kilburn and Cricklewood, and a few years after that he had sold them and bought the old Terry Downes club on Harlesden High Street. He renamed it the Mean Fiddler; the Vince Power empire was on its way.
We renewed our acquaintance some years back. As I stood at the back of the crowded church in Newtown, paying my respects to Maurice Foran, who was being buried, Vince came in.
We looked at each other for a moment in surprise, then he spoke.
'It's a small world', he said.
',Not that small', I replied, 'I haven’t seen you for twenty years'.
Afterwards, in the graveyard, we exchanged a few words. Little of my friend of my youth was in evidence, and when he spoke he was very deliberate in his choice of words. I could have been a stranger, not someone who had pulled him to safety when the roof we were working on collapsed onto a pile of jagged metal fifty feet below us, not someone who had paid his share of the rent when an irate landlord climbed through our bed-sitter window one Sunday morning and threatened to throw us out the same window, nor someone who had sunk all his money into a venture that had ultimately seen him end up with millions of pounds and myself with nothing.
Am I bitter? Not really. Life's too short to dance with ugly men, as someone once said. Besides, I know what I was like in those days, and perhaps it is poetic justice that the proceeds of crime should make somebody else a wealthy man AND NOT ME.
Perhaps you were right all those years ago, mother, when you said to me;'that Vince Power could buy and sell you, boy'.

Your loving son
Tom