My song today is ‘Far Away Places’. This is an American song that was a big part of my childhood growing up in West Yorkshire in the late 1940s after my Irish parents emigrated from Ireland to England to secure a better life for themselves and their growing family. They had three children at the time, a number which did not yet take them past the halfway stage of the seven offspring who they would parent, and of whom I was the firstborn. The song was written by Joan Whitney and Alex Kramer. It was published in 1948.
The song has been recorded by many artists including Bing Crosby: Perry Como: Dinah Shore along with many others. It was a popular song that we would hear on the wireless (that is the radio for you young whippersnappers) and it became one of my dear mother’s favourite songs, especially when she heard it sung on the wireless by either Bing Crosby or Vera Lynn (her favourite singer of all time).
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Whenever Vera's voice came across the airwaves, mum would make us all shush until Vera had sung her last note, and woe betides anyone who dared to so much as cough while the Force’s Sweetheart sang her song. Mum sadly died at an early age of 64 years in April 1986. I can only hope that there is extraterrestrial communication up there because, within five years of mum’s death, her firstborn would start a thirty-year friendship with Vera Lynn.
Vera was just one of over eight hundred national and international celebrities and famous people who would read from my children’s books in ten years of special school assemblies held across the shires of Yorkshire, plus other parts of the country. Vera would help me on numerous occasions during our friendship with my charitable ventures, and I was ever so proud when she read from one of my children’s books to the children in her village school of Ditchling during the 1990s, about a Second World War Polish evacuee who lived in London during the Blitz.
During twenty years of charitable work carried out by me, the profits from the school sales of my books raised over two hundred thousand pounds for numerous charitable causes. I would frequently be given precious souvenirs by famous people for myself as a keepsake, and would always allow these special gifts to be auctioned off to raise further charitable funds for various causes. Indeed, I only made one exception to this practice, and Vera was that famous person whose personal gifts (two of them from the six or seven she gave me ) I never auctioned off but kept for myself. Two of her special gifts to me included her autograph on one of my Second World War books for children to whom she read in their Ditchling village school one summer, plus a personally inscribed CD of her most famous songs which was produced for her hundredth birthday, and which she kindly posted to me at home.
My mother was a dreamer all her life. Although she did not possess the musical talent to string together two notes of the same song in their proper order, nor was she ever able to remember the correct words for any song she sang, none of these melodic handicaps presented any significant obstacles to her which she was unable to musically surmount. Such were small matters of the mind; mere details that would never prevent her from singing all day long as she merrily went about her motherly duties for her seven children and mining husband within the family home. Any words to any song my mum sang (and did not know), she simply made up as she went about her day.
My mum was an Irish dreamer who never lost vision of her wonderful motherland. She constantly reminded me that Ireland was a country steeped in superstition, wedded to all romantic notions, and filled with irreligious gossip and mischievous ways. It was a land in which St. Patrick banished all snakes from its mountains and long grass, and had a history that had been greatly influenced and enhanced by the folklore of 'causeway giants' in the north and 'little people' who originated from crevices of shamrock in the Mountains of Mourne. Mum's memories of dear old Ireland involved tales of mystery and superstition which had been spun by weavers of words that had not yet entered the English language (and if the Irish ever had their way, never would!)
I am sure that had it not been for me hearing mum singing every day, all day long, or listening with bated breath about some Irish story that she would tell me on an evening as she ironed away at the end of the day, I may never have developed my love of singing and storytelling.
At the age of 11 years, I sustained life-threatening injuries after a wagon ran over me and wrapped my body around its main drive propellor shaft. Almost every bone in my body was broken, my lung was punctured and my chest collapsed. My spine was severely damaged, and all my limbs were broken and mangled in several places each. The medics told my parents that I would not live, and after three weeks as a patient on the critical list, because of my damaged spine, my parents and I were told that I would never walk again.
I did walk again after three years of being unable to do anything but stand up. Before my hospital discharge, (nine months after my accident), the spinal signals to my brain recommenced but my legs had been irreparably damaged to move in a coordinated manner. My left leg had been mangled badly and broken on the knee in several places. It would be operated on almost fifty times in a two-year period. Even then, the medics were still of the opinion that I would not walk again. It took me three years before I walked again, and during this time, I was unable to attend school because of the number of medical interventions, operations, and other regular medical procedures I periodically required.
Because of my 'no school attendance' for almost three years (of which I remained housebound for almost two years), I was permitted to stay up late on a night and talk with my mum when all my siblings and father were asleep upstairs. These were the most treasured moments of my childhood spent with my mum.
Mum was a born storyteller, and like the songs she sang, a substantial part of her tale would be fabricated and made on the hoof as she spoke. Over these couple of years, mum told me so many wonderful tales of Ireland, that the stories became an embedded part of my imagined memory. In later years, after I had become an accomplished author, I would use the kernel of my mother’s Irish stories to write fourteen of my own romantic novels, in addition to the previous fifty books I had written and had published since 1990. I never knew, if like mum’s singing and the words to her songs, whether her Irish stories were partly true, wholly true, or totally fabricated, but I did not care! I wanted them so much to be true, so I regarded them as being such as I embroidered them within my own writings and elaborated their mysterious meanings.
Before I married Sheila on my 70th birthday, although I had hung up my pen ten years earlier, she persuaded me to start writing again. So, from the bottom drawer of my deepest and fondest memories of those magic hours spent with mum alone while the rest of the household slept soundly in their beds, I recalled and recounted my mother’s stories she had told me during my childhood years. Aided by whatever writing craft I possessed, and the imagination and romantic inclinations of an Irish author, I sowed and transplanted the seeds of my mother's stories into my fertile mind, from which sprung fourteen romantic novels with an Irish background. These fourteen romantic novels are set in the village of my birth in Portlaw, County Waterford, and come under the umbrella title ‘Tales from Portlaw’ : Books 1-14.
All these stories can be freely accessed and read from my website in their entirety or can also be purchased in e-book format or hard copy from Amazon, Lulu, or Smashwords.com. All profit in perpetuity from the sales of all my books goes to provide free books to school children across the shire/country/world.
Anyone who cannot afford to purchase any of these fourteen Irish romantic novels of mine is able to read them free from my website (the access which I provide below). What is frequently done today, is that my readership and Facebook friends often read these stories for free off my website, and the ones they particularly like or know will appeal to a friend of theirs, they purchase for their birthday, or a Christmas present, or some other special occasion, in the knowledge that every penny of book sale profit will be used to provide free books given to today's schoolchildren,. That way, they can be better reassured that the book will please and suit the recipient of their choice. Many mothers do this for their children, aunts, and uncles for their nieces and nephews, grandparents for their grandchildren, husbands for wives and vice versa, and friends for friends. All my books (apart from two ‘Strictly for Adult Books’) can be read without offending the sensibilities of any ear in the land and are geared towards bringing pleasure to the reader.
Should you ever forget the link below, simply look up my website www.fordefables.co.uk and check out the section under ‘My Books’ and then go to the sub-section ‘Tales from Portlaw’, where you will be able to read freely any of the fourteen Irish romantic novels I have written. There are also over one dozen audio children’s stories that have been recorded by famous voices on my website. These audio stories can be freely listened to by any child who is too young to read but who loves listening to stories. I have tried to facilitate all manner of conditions experienced by children and their parents who may access my work more easily, at little or no cost to their purse. All the themes to children’s stories are wholesome in origin, Christian in content, and environmentally friendly in all respects. It matters not if the person who is wanting access to a story is deaf, blind, poor, invalided, bullied, feeling unloved, being too angry, being racially or sexually discriminated against, etc, they can find at least one story to read or listen to on my website.
Love and peace Bill xxx
http://www.fordefables.co.uk/tales-from-portlaw.html