***Chapter 19***

***Slugger's Story***

Folk often remarked that Slugger Jones, with his gift of the gab, must have kissed the Blarney Stone and Slugger Jones confirmed it was indeed so. Which was an amazing achievement considering that he had never once set foot on the Emerald Isle.

He did, however, have some half dozen explanations as to how it came to be so, ranging from the wild tale that his maternal grandfather, when lowered to the Stone, had secretly chipped off and pocketed a piece as a keepsake for his baby grandson, to the even wilder tale that a mild earth tremor in the 1800s sent a chunk of Blarney Stone flying five miles away over county Cork, where a distant ancestor, being an athletic and resourceful Corkman, leapt up to catch it, and which had been passed down through generations ever since. Oh, and I should add much depended on the questioner: both children and drunks, for instance, would be regaled with an account of the Blarney Leprechaun, which would leave children enchanted and drunks even more baffled than they were before.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Slugger could hold listeners spellbound with his rambling stories. (Many years later repetition gave him the power to bore his listeners too but that's a power given to all of us in the fullness of time and another matter altogether.)

At any rate, as Jimmy entered the kitchen, Slugger had persuaded the Follyfoot kitchen staff to open bottles of wine and beer and was holding their undivided attention with amusing tales of travelling folk, life in the Army and the silliness of protocol.

There was, at best, a tenuous connection to Slugger's claims to an Irish ancestry. Back in the 1900s, his grandmother Mary Ann Jones, finding herself widowed with four small children to provide for, had married smooth-taking Irishman Pat O'Hara, in the hope he would provide for them, while Pat O'Hara, finding himself wishing to be provided for in an idle lifestyle, had married Mary Ann Jones in the hope of being provided for in one. Both parties being disappointed in their aspirations, it was inevitably a stormy marriage: Pat drank and Mary Ann swore as she hurled pots and pans at him when he staggered home drunk; Mary Ann refused to consummate the marriage and insisted he slept by night on the threadbare couch, Pat snored drunkenly as he slept on the threadbare couch by night and whiled away the days propping up bars, telling the children tall stories about his supposed heroic exploits and being another mouth to feed. Worn out by her daily toils, poor Mary Ann died of Spanish flu almost as soon as the outbreak hit the shores of England. The children, by now in their teens and alarmed at the prospect of being expected to care for their lazy, drunken stepfather, began to quickly fly the nest.

Fifteen-year-old Alice Jones ran off with her boyfriend sixteen-year-old Tom Bennett and they never stopped running afterwards. They moved from place to place, obtaining only casual work and dodging rent collectors, debt collectors, policemen, judges and irate shop owners foolish enough to agree to "tick" along the way. Tom was good with his fists while Alice, perhaps from listening to her stepfather, was good at talking her way out of difficult situations. Runner, scam, rat droppings, coppers, bedbugs and moonlight flit were all words their little son, born eighteen months and two miscarriages after they set off from their original starting block, was familiar with from a tender age.

Cocky young devil was an adjective often heard in reference to Colonel Geoffrey Maddocks' batman. Slugger was a thick-set, ruddy-faced, talkative man in his mid-twenties who seemed well able to look after himself. As indeed Slugger Jones could. He had had to be.

Many years before, Eddie Shaw of Eddie Shaw's Travelling Fair had been startled from his bed and his wife's plump arms and voluptuous breast by a thud-thud-thudding on his caravan door one foggy night, opening it to the icy air and a small boy, no more than two or three years old, face red and fierce, hands curled into thick fists, who was about to land another knock and instead catching Eddie, who had stooped down to him, square on the nose.

"Bleedin' hell that hurt, you little bu…slugger!" He hastily corrected himself, moved by the tear stains shining on the young visitor's grubby face. Hs wife, who had followed him to the door and was still fastening her dressing gown over her naked body, suddenly screamed over his shoulder.

Barbara had espied what looked like the corpse of a woman crumpled nearby in the miserable mish-mash of January slush…