Did they remember the far world, or the terrible pity of war, when they played their marching tunes, he wondered?

Of course they did! His father and others were warriors who had seen Armageddon and the valley of death a thousand times, and they had marched into it over and over again, playing polkas and carrying their mascots high and proud. Their flags and banners. That’s how they could infuse such wild fury into the music of County Roscommon.

‘Nothing like that in Kerry,’ he asserted.

Well, the barwoman didn’t know Hughie’s father, and she didn’t seem so animated by the idea that the British army had contributed so much to the development of Irish music, or that Kerry slides might be inferior to the bellicose flutes of Roscommon, but she did know that Hughie had suddenly lathered himself into a cantankerous sweat, so she took the empty Babycham glass and the empty pint glass from the small table and returned to her work.

‘Same again,’ says Hughie, defiantly to her back.

‘And yourself, Mrs Delaney?’ says the barwoman. ‘Will you be having another Babycham while you’re waiting for your husband?’

Birdie said she would. And Hughie leaned over and whispered something terribly crude about the lady behind the bar, but Birdie had to admit that there were times Hughie’s crudities made her laugh. Then he got up suddenly and went out the back with the stride of a general. He left the door open after him, and Birdie could hear the powerful flow of his piss sinking with a ferocious splash in the open toilet in the yard outside.

‘You’re as healthy as a trout,’ says she, when he returned.

On the last day of the honeymoon there was a change in the weather and an altered mood in the car as they motored up the countryside in slanting rain and wind blowing dead branches across their path. The Vet was quiet. He said he was tired. And Hughie, smoking in the rear of the station wagon, kept talking in riddles. As if he was hurt.

‘They say me father lit a cigarette one night in a pub in Camden Town,’ says he, ‘and then vanished forever into a puff of smoke. Wasn’t he the lucky man!’

Silence for five miles.

‘Beware of the man who can’t sing. He’s like the blacksmith’s bellows. He breathes but he’s not alive.’

Another ten miles of silence. Then he told the story of the tinker woman. He started it in Gort, and kept it going all the way to Athenry.

‘Did ye hear tell of the tinker woman who fell in love with the man from Skehana?’ he inquired. ‘Oh, very respectable man he was. Came from people that would have no truck with her kind. But anyway, he went off with her. Shacked up with her in the caravan, he did. And they got on well. Slept in the day. Loved good porter. Butter on their porridge. And the silver caravan was a cradle in the night.