Ireland
Victor O'Reilly - younger
Oddly enough I was younger once and at the age of 20 suppressed the creative bug - for a time - and worked as a management trainee in one of Dublin's leading department stores, Switzers, now merged with Brown Thomas. Jobs were very scarce in Ireland in those days. It was a good job by the standards of the time - I had a key to the executive rest room - but I left without regret. Still, there were some good times.
Back to Friends, Heroes, Lovers, Memories
Please click here to send us your opinions!
To Top
Wadi Slinsby
Wadi was a Polish count who had ended up in Ireland for some reason - probably a war or two or maybe just a linguistic mistake - and who I was first introduced to as a family friend. It later transpired that he was my mother's lover and eventually, after my step-father, Alfred Lyons' tragic and early death, became my mother's third husband. So she became a countess. I never really got to know Wadi. His accent was practically indecipherable and he seemed rarely sober. But my mother was happy with him. His name was not really Slingsby but no one could pronounce the original.
Back to Friends, Heroes, Lovers, Memories
Please click here to send us your opinions!
To Top
Dinner At Home
Ireland, when I was growing up, was a land of a few with big houses - and an awful lot with nothing. And then there were the farmers who often had rather more than they cared to admit though many of them had close to nothing too. To be perceived as rich in those days merely meant you had rather more than the rest. I grew up in a big house environment complete with the statutory trimmings of oil paintings, fine furniture, family silver, servants and a pervasive smell of mould and dry rot. My mother actually removed the central heating from our house on the grounds that the storage heaters were ugly and coal fires were prettier. The rooms she passed between were heated with open or electric fires. The rest of us froze. This photograph shows my step-father, Alfred at the head of the dining room table with my mother and Wadi Slinsby, her lover, to the left. Family portraits line the walls. Many were sold by my mother when she moved to Spain, an action that upset me greatly. The big house era in Ireland is now substantially past.
Back to Friends, Heroes, Lovers, Memories
Please click here to send us your opinions!
To Top
The very talented Tom Chance
Tom, who always reminded me of a young Robert Mitchum, went to the same English public school as me (Public = Private in England) and was a good friend in my teenage years though we have lost touch since. An extremely talented photographer, he taught me how to use a camera to the limited extent I can and took the photographs shown here of our trip to the Aran Islands. Something else I remember about Tom is that he had the most charming parents who, along with the Davis's, demonstrated to me what a reasonably normal home could be like. My home was a little (maybe, more than a little) on the Bohemian side.
Back to Friends, Heroes, Lovers, Memories
Please click here to send us your opinions!
To Top
True statement: I am the eldest of 12 children
Our family history is truly complex with something like 5 fathers being involved to produce 12 children. I was the eldest. Suffice to say that my mother was an unusual woman. Typically her social class had small families but Mother loved nothing more than to fly in the face of convention. And that she did. As far as I know, this is the only photograph of the entire clan - and, sad to say, it is not a particularly good shot. I think we were still getting ready at the time. But it is a little bit of family history all the same. The names of us all in order of birth: Victor, Maxine, Rex, Desirée, Guy, Vida, Martin, Hermione, Christian, Leslie, Lucy and Rupert. Boy-girl-boy-girl the whole way through. As I write this, 11 of us are still alive.
Back to Friends, Heroes, Lovers, Memories
Please click here to send us your opinions!
To Top
One of life's great loopy posters!
You will gather by now that Ali and I had great affection for the West of Ireland. Getting there from the UK - where I lived at the time - was not merely a matter of boarding an aircraft and flying a few hundred miles. That would have been nice but the IRA were in full shooting mode in those days and, as luck would have it, we were picked up at the airport to be interrogated. Given my antipathy to terrorism, I was the last person who should have been stopped but the system tends not to be selective. But at least I was used to it. Ali was not and it shook her though not for long. Counter terrorism, crudely done, has a real bad habit of recruiting terrorists. No matter how innocent you may be, if you have been held and questioned for a while, 'Stretching your feet' seems an attractive option. But hey - I'm a good guy.
Back to Friends, Heroes, Lovers, Memories
Please click here to send us your opinions!
To Top
