A master storyteller who had a wonderful way with words

The gift of bilocation - the ability to be in two places at once - would be great, but I’ve not yet acquired it!

Usually, I get a diary around Christmas each year to have near the phone on the wall - yes, we still have one of these, and very handy it is too!

Well, early in the New Year the ‘hardy annual’ dates are pencilled in to that ‘page a day’ diary - dates like the Point to Point Races, pilgrimage to Lourdes, birthdays, anniversaries and weddings coming up.

The September Sundays in Dublin for All-Ireland Finals were always as solid as a rock in terms of never changing. But alas, even those great certainties have been shook at the foundations - even after a few years the hurling final in July still seems like a form of sporting sacrilege.

Still, the diary fills up quickly enough and the last Saturday night in September was marked off with a social engagement way back in March.

How sorry I was then, a few weeks back, when I was told of a night with RTÉ’s Pakie O’Callaghan, telling the stories of Eamon Kelly - taking place on that very date. Ah yes, the bilocation would indeed be very handy, but so much for wishful thinking!

So, as the seats fill up in Ballyduff in west Waterford on Saturday, I’ll be far away - not from a madding crowd but from a super night’s entertainment.

Strange, isn’t it, that in many of my own storytelling escapades, I start with Eamon’s stock sentence ‘In my father’s time…’, and though I never knew my father, I still have come to learn what life was like in his time.

I wrote a few lines many years ago about my father and grandfather, beginning with

Who was your father and his father too?

Death decreed I never knew…

My grandfather Batt died in 1951 and his son Dan, my father, died just a decade later in September, 1961. Gone, but not forgotten - sure, there’s not a day I don’t think of them -maybe walking across the haggard or over in the Orchard Field, or just going up the old boreen where they walked long, long ago.

I dunno really, but the very first time I heard Kerryman Eamonn Kelly, on the wireless, and he begin his story with his famous opening line, I was bewitched. It’s not that I have a morbid or over-arching interest in the past, but I do truly have an appreciation of history, and the story of every person is what makes up history.

Eamon Kelly had that unique gift that great storytellers have - the ability to paint the most vivid picture with his voice and a wide array of words. 

He started his career on the radio before treading the boards on the stage. He was an actor in many plays but really came into his own with his one-man shows.

You know, as time goes by, t’will probably get harder and harder to hold people’s attention for a story that might take seven or eight minutes.

When we were very small at home, the television hadn’t arrived. When it did it was on a very limited basis - Murphy Agus A Cháirde’, Tolka Row, The Fugitive and The Virginian - I remember them, but the telly was just an extra little entertainment for us. It never dominated life or family conversation in the way it does today.

In that world, the storyteller still had a vital role to play. In olden times people were mad for ‘news’ - not salacious gossip but simple things like who has gone to England, what were prices like at the fair, and such mundane matters.

Eamon was a master craftsman. Though it’s 47 years since that night in 1977 when our Macra na Feirme branch brought him to Bartlemy hall, I can still picture him on the stage. Before a full house, he enthralled us. No fancy lighting and no amplification were available or needed. He was on the stage for nearly two hours.

There were no special effects and precious little props - a sugan chair, a white enamel bucket filled with water and a little ponny which he dipped in the bucket every so often to slake his thirst. Simplicity in itself.

Growing up, we were lucky to have ‘facilities’ in the house - when my parents wed in the early 1950s a bathroom, toilet and solid fuel cooker were all ‘installed’. The days of the vessel under the bed, drawing water from the well, and cooking over the open fire were no more, in our house anyway. Yet the tales told by the bould Eamon were from the era of a simpler lifestyle, a time of self-sufficiency, the days of the ‘meitheal’ and simplistic innocence.

He was truly one of a kind, and I always think how lucky we were to have him in ‘our place’. Back in 1977, the tickets to see him were the princely sum of £1.

One might imagine now, looking back through rose-tinted glasses, that tales of outside toilets, taking the cow to the bull, made matches, haggling over dowries, and the ‘you’ve made your bed, now lie in it’ attitude wouldn’t make great entertainment - believe me, they did!

Kelly was the master of his ancient craft. His use of the pause in the middle of a tale was amazing. He might be in full flow, at miles a minute, then nothing - you’d hear half a pin drop - and then he’d be off again to keep our expectations high, and boy, could he mould a crowd.

Nowadays, so many comedians and one-man shows - one woman shows too - rely hugely on visual aids from video clips, backing tracks and backdrops and stage furniture. 

The Kerry storyteller had a way with words.

He was fluent in Irish so his ability to speak English with an Irish accent was close to so many hearts. I do think also that, in my father’s time -and grandfather’s time - minds were more open, less cluttered than today with so much useless stuff that passes as information!

Pure entertainment, of course, has no truck with vile language or double-meaning innuendo and Eamon avoided these like the plague. Then again, he didn’t need to lower himself to toilet humour.

With so much multiplicity of media nowadays - social, anti-social and every other kind too - is there any role left for the likes of Eamon Kelly and his stories? That question is a bit like to forecast a decade ago that with the arrival of online books, Kindle and the like, that the days of the printed book were no more. It hasn’t happened yet anyway, and I think the good story will always survive.

Some say ‘it’s the way you tell ’em’ - true enough - but a good story mustn’t end in a whimper - the ‘punchline’ is vital.

I suppose many of Eamon’s stories were a bit like the Biblical parables with a kind of moral in them. Tales that emphasise giving a helping hand, kindness and generosity are the oldest yet newest stories and will forever be told. Of course, Eamon was well able to tell the story about caffling, trickery and deceit - all part of the great mix of life.

I’m sorry I won’t hear Pakie on Saturday night, and am slightly envious of those who will. Eamonn used to say, ‘I’m only saying what I heard, and I only heard what was said, and what was said was mainly lies’ - don’t believe a word of it!