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had documented and I knew from his letter that he could write a good article. The following summer he came back to Ireland and called to see me. He was a grand man and, after a short time in his company, I felt that the world was a better place. He had a lady wife now and two attractive daughters, but he talked about his time in the orphanage and how good they were to him, adding, “The food was bad but they had no better themselves.” He also told me about walking down to the village to see the travelling theatre groups known as the fit-ups.
    I gave him a copy of
Candlelight
, suggesting that he might like to write his story, and sure enough, we published it the following Christmas. Shortly afterwards he wrote to tell me that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and that his time would be short. In life he had got off to a tough startbut he had pulled himself up by his bootlaces and carved out a good quality of life for himself and his family. He was one of the most positive and well-rounded people that I had ever met and I was glad that he had written his story for
Candlelight
. Great people like him should not leave life without getting the opportunity to tell their story, and sometimes their story helps to keep others afloat.



C HAPTER 2
A Step in Time
    “H ave you thought about the millennium?” asked a tentative voice at the other end of the phone.
    “Well, not really,” I said, taken by surprise. “Sure, that’s months away.”
    “People are already planning what they’re going to do,” she told me.
    “Don’t I know it?” I assured her. “They seem to be flying in all directions for the occasion.”
    “Do you think that we should have something in the parish hall?” she asked
    “Will there be anyone left in the parish to go to it?” I wondered.
    “At the moment it looks doubtful, but the very young and the old won’t be going anywhere, and wouldn’t it be nice to have something for them?”
    “I suppose it would,” I agreed. “Did you have anything in mind?”
    “Well, nothing in particular,” she said vaguely, “but I thought that we might organise something. You’re good atthat kind of thing.” As alarm bells began to ring in my head, she continued: “That ‘Meet the Neighbours’ night was a great success and wouldn’t something like that be grand?”
    A few years previously a “Meet the Neighbours” night had been organised for the newcomers to the parish so that they could get to know each other and meet the home-grown residents. The night could hardly be described as having achieved the purpose for which it was intended because most of the newcomers never came, but for those who did, it had been a great night. Our village, like many other small villages, was expanding at such a rate that we could lose our sense of being a village, and nights that brought us together helped us to retain that sense.
    After the phone call I sat at the kitchen table and wondered where to begin or whether to begin at all. Diarmuid, who was in his twenties, breezed in and sized me up pretty quickly.
    “You look a bit bothered,” he declared, viewing me across the table.
    I filled him in on the phone call and he grinned, rubbing his hands together.
    “Mother,” he gleefully informed me, “you’ve got a jumping monkey.”
    “What’s that?” I demanded.
    “Well, in our business if you have a job that you want to get done but don’t want to do yourself, then you have a jumping monkey. So the trick is to meet up with a colleague and pass on the job. Then the jumping monkey jumps from your back on to their back. So, Mother, a jumping monkey has just landed on your back!”
    “If I decide to hold on to him, do you think that people would come to the parish hall on the night of the millennium?”I asked.
    “Not a hope in hell,” he told me. “Sure, wouldn’t it be full of screeching children and old fogies?”
    “Like me,” I said.
    During that day I ran the idea past some people in