The pipes are calling

Pat the Salt, BJB, has departed this Earth for further adventures elsewhere. Born in 1925, he grew up in Cardiff around the middle of thirteen sibs in the Hungry Thirties. He ran away to sea as soon as he left school at 14; and clocked up thousands of sea miles between Liverpool Halifax Fremantle Buenos Aires Oran. His ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic in August 1942, but he wasn't for drowning. He lost all his kit, though. A few months later, through a rambling series of unexpected encounters, he was given a set of new-to-him bagpipes in Australia. And these became his signature dish ashore and afloat. By the time he returned to Blighty in 1945, his last Cardiff home had been blitzed, both his parents were dead and one of his sisters was full of shrapnel. But he made sure his younger brothers and sisters were fed and presentable if The Social came to the front door looking for orphans.

Evidence from the Irish Press [R] shows that he came to Ireland in 1948 and went on the tramp from Dublin busking at least as far South as Laragh Co Wicklow. He was probably heading for Passage East where he knew his people were buried. No work in Ireland, so he started with Kellogg's in Manchester where the family had washed up. In another life, in other times, that would have been an unexpectedly comfortable billet but he'd seen things you people wouldn't believe. Soon enough he was working for Elder Dempster in colonial Lagos, Nigeria. He survived, thrived and shipped up country to Kano in the Sahel near the French border with Niger.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the city a young woman of startling elegance and exotic beauty was nightly praying to St Patrick to beam her up out of this khaki dusty backwater to somewhere greener. Seeing a personable young chap with pipes she thought "I'll have him" and she did. Pat was then doing well in the groundnut trade, his wife Souad was working for BOAC out at the airport and the two of them scrimped and saved and did without to buy a farm back home in Ireland. And it was so. But trying to wrest a living, in the 1950s, from sixty stony acres near Dunmore East was even harder graft than shipping before the mast in wartime in the 1940s. Opening the first chic Parisian boutique in Waterford City wasn't enough to ensure solvency.  But while the farm spiraled down into murrain, blight and debt, the children were growing up honest, literate and determined. 

It's not about me, except to say that I bumbled on stage in this up and down drama about a year after The Farm was sold and Pat was wearing a white coat behind the counter of his store in Freshford Co Kilkenny.The joke was that, while my lab coat indicated I was a mere student of biology, Pat's showed he was a nuclear physicist master of a cyclotron in the ball-alley behind the shop. {Despite | because of}my very expensive education, I had a lot to learn. Insofar as I have any manners (and I don't mean fish-forks) now, is largely due to my being accepted into the family in 1973. Blimey, that's 50+ years ago. It's been a journey: all of us have put in restless miles a long way from where we were born.

Somewhere along the way, Pat's Australian pipes went missing. So I never heard him play The Minstrel Boy. About ten years ago, Pat and Souad, well into their free travel years, washed up in the centre of Tramore. They picked up with old friends and made new ones. One of the latter was, inter much alia, a piper. Pipers are a community in the same way as Cosa Nostra is a community.  Shortly thereafter, in a way maybe not so very different from the return of The Boy's bicycle, Pat's pipes mysteriously re-appeared. That piper had a daughter, TL, who was to the manner born a piper in her own right. As well as being an accomplished musician, that child had the biggest heart and the most generous hand you could ever hope to meet. They're grown up now, soldiering though college in another part of the country.

But in May this year, just before Pat turned 99, just after his care went full palliative, TL returned home to Tramore to play the pipes for Pat. Everyone agreed that to play the pipes in his bedroom would smither Pat's dentures and have his hearing-aids blow a gasket. So TL stepped out into the garden and gave her old pal The Minstrel Boy at full blast through his open window. Ah bless! is it dusty in here, or is it dusty?