Listen up: Róisín Ingle on . . . a lioness on the loose

I’ve taken up slogging again. Slow jogging. I tend to only dabble in exercise as a rule. A bit of aerial yoga here, a spot of table tennis there, not forgetting the once-off unexpected marathon. These bouts are followed by long periods of barely moving at all if I can help it. And then something happens. It feels as though I’m just hanging off a cliff by my fingernails, and so I start slogging again: around Fairview, the North Strand, East Wall. My neighbourhood. A place I think I’ve got to know over the years. A place I don’t know at all.

How can I claim to know a place if I never had even a sniff of one of the most intriguing stories to come from there? A woman called Lorraine sent me a DVD of an award-winning documentary about this story from my 'hood I've never heard. The documentary is called Fortune's Wheel. It features original RTÉ radio reports of a night Fairview has never forgotten. You'll just have to imagine the gorgeously plummy voice of reporter John Ross and his riveting delivery of the drama that unfolded there early one Sunday evening in 1951:

“At 5.30 on the evening of November 11th, the peaceful Dublin suburb of Fairview was startled by a sound that might have come from the African jungle: a lioness had escaped from her trainer’s cage in the yard of a garage beside the local cinema. It was dark at the time. A solid line of cars was heading for home along the main coast road . . . A straggly queue was beginning to form outside the cinema.”

They don't make news reports like that any more. A lioness on the loose in Fairview? A lion tamer's cage in the garage behind the cinema? The story is pieced together through interviews with locals. A woman outside the site of the Fairview Grand cinema, now a Tesco Metro, tells of looking to her left and seeing the lioness in the middle of the road as she queued for the cinema. Jungle Stampede was on the bill that day. A movie about lions attacking hunters. You. Could. Not. Make. It. Up.

Plummy John Ross again: “In front of the garage an apprentice mechanic named Andy Massey rolled a spare wheel out on to the pathway and bent down to blow it up. That was the scene. A normal suburban moment. And then down to the garage came the big yellow cat. She saw Andy Massey . . .”

Andy Massey (15): “I put the wheel down on the path to pump it up. Something hit me in the back and I saw a big paw go over my shoulder . . . I thought it was a dog at first, but when I saw the big paw I knew it was a lion.”

John Ross: “A lion? I thought it was a lioness?”

Andy Massey: “Mister, if you were pumping up a wheel and something hit you, you wouldn’t worry if it was a lion or a lioness.”

Bill Stephens was the lion tamer from Fairview Green. Fortune's Wheel is his story really. And that of his exotic-looking wife, Mai, a beautiful woman rumoured to be a foreigner from "the East". (It turns out she was from "the East": East Wall.) They performed a circus act together. They were an amazing pair.

Anyway, after getting the lioness off poor Andy Massey, Bill Stephens cornered the lioness in a field, asking the Special Branch – who had come up from Dublin Castle and who were poised with .303 rifles – to hold fire while he tried to recapture the animal. But the lioness, half-blind with rage by now, didn’t recognise her owner. She sprung at Stephens and trailed him along the ground, his arm in her mouth.

“I can do no more, my arm’s crippled,” he told the waiting gardaí, who took aim at the animal.

John Ross: “That was the end. A moment later a powerful flashlight from the wall picked up the lioness. The .303 rang out and Fairview’s wild beast fell dead among the nettles and bicycle frames.”

“Thrilling Lion Hunt in Dublin Suburb: Two Mauled Before Beast was Shot” was the newspaper headline the next day.

It turns out that Lorraine, who sent me the movie, is Bill Stephens's niece, and she plays a big part in Fortune's Wheel. I should tell you that it doesn't end well, this story from my 'hood, not for daring, darling Bill Stephens at least. Eventually, we meet a terrible lion called Albert, from Antwerp, and the lion tamer from Fairview doesn't know when to quit.

So now I keep on slogging. I slog past the fire station by East Wall Road, where Bill once lived in a cottage with Mai from “the East” in those daring circus days. And suddenly these streets around me have a new story to tell. Everyone should hear it.

Fortune's Wheel is on at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin from June 5th to 12th, with two showings daily. See ifi.ie

roisin@irishtimes.com