Tales From Portlaw Volume Twelve: 'Fourteen Days‪'‬

I was born in Portlaw, County Waterford and came to West Yorkshire, England at the age of 4 years, where I have lived ever since. As I grew up, my mother used to tell me tales of Portlaw. Being a natural-born Irish person with a healthy imagination, she was also a natural-born storyteller. Consequently, I have no way of knowing how truthful the recall and re-telling these stories were and was pulled in opposing directions in how best to write them.

I eventually decided to use the medium of fiction. In my section entitled, ‘Tales from Portlaw’, I recount the stories that my mother told me all the years I was growing up in West Yorkshire about ‘the old country’ across the Irish Sea. I have taken the ‘germ of truth’ in her stories and have made that detail the central thread of my story, adding to her truth, my fiction, through the extended use of my writer’s imagination. Any resemblance to anyone who ever lived or came from Portlaw in either name, likeness or character description is purely co-incidental; and to the best of my knowledge, this story is purely fictional.

This love story is about a dying man and his personal assistant in his haulage firm. During the last fourteen days of his life, the dying man’s lover strikes up a new relationship in the hospital ward with a patient in an adjacent bed. After her lover’s death, she disappears and the new patient, who is infatuated with her, pursues his dream across the Irish Sea, only to discover that love is never smooth.