Days of Heaven Read Online Free Page B

the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

B ob Geldof was my landlord at the time. That would be Bob Senior, father of famous Bob, who owned a large Edwardian house on Crosthwaite Park in
Dun Laoghaire divided into flats. Liam Mackey, my friend from Hot Press , lived in the basement flat and when he moved upstairs to a slightly larger premises, I moved in to the basement along
with Jane — our baby Roseanne would soon be born.
    He was a lovely man, old Geldof, still kicking around the world in a camper van which young Bob had bought for him. We were paying him more than we’d been paying for the olde worlde flat
in Leinster Road in Rathmines where we had been living, but Dun Laoghaire had distinct advantages such as the nearby DART , which, it was increasingly felt, might not be such
a bad idea after all. And there was Dun Laoghaire itself, where we now had characters such as Barry Devlin, formerly of Horslips, in the neighbourhood, as well as Sonny Condell, who played at the
first rock gig I ever attended, wearing the first pair of leather trousers I had ever seen, in the Dean Crowe Hall in Athlone. He’d been supporting Peggy’s Leg. In Rathmines, we had had
Father Michael Cleary living across the road.
    I was now working for a national newspaper — soon I would be working for two national newspapers and a national magazine. Yet it seemed quite normal to be renting not just the flat, but
the television in the flat.
    ‘Confidence’, in Ireland at that time, was such a fragile thing.
    Eoghan Corry, then Features Editor of the Irish Press , had asked me to write a TV column for the paper, making use of the rented TV (I
think I bought the pen and paper outright). I would soon start contributing to the Sunday Independent and there was still Hot Press — in fact, I had interviewed Jack for that
paper, early in the campaign for Euro 88.
    I had been writing a sports column called ‘Foul Play’ in which we were placing football in a rock ’n’ roll context long before Nick Hornby and Fever Pitch . So an
interview with Jack or with any football man would be a normal procedure, if indeed the word ‘normal’ could ever be used in relation to a Hot Press interview — for example,
we used to actually print most of things that people said, rather than observing the ancient journalistic conventions of tidying up the bad language and the digressions and the loose talk in
general. We did not feel that the people needed to be protected from such things.
    The interview was done in the lounge of an airport hotel, with physio and batman Mick Byrne scurrying around organising room-keys and generally coming across like the PA to a busy executive. Indeed Jack laughed about the male-ness of the world in which he moved, expressing disappointment that I wasn’t a woman — Colette from Hot Press had
organised the interview and he had been expecting her.
    He seemed younger that day than we generally remember him. When he became a sort of Father of the Nation a few years later, he assumed an aura of seniority which obscured the fact that when he
took the Ireland job in 1986, he was just 50.
    For the first time, I noted that he kept getting names wrong: names of players, names of countries; he referred to Bulgaria as Romania and instinctively I was about to correct him, but stopped
myself. If he didn’t know the difference by now, it didn’t matter. And while he was being factually inaccurate, he was not too far from the truth — for what difference was there
really between Bulgaria and Romania? As Con Houlihan put it, these guys from behind the Iron Curtain who would come over to play football, were ultimately doing it for ‘the bit of freedom and
some decent food’.
    In fact, I don’t know what Colette had said to him, but Jack was ready to talk about environmental issues, too, which I felt at the time was surprisingly generous to a magazine that
he’d probably never heard of, and about which