`A car bomb was placed outside the theatre and the car went up in flames. Fortunately no one was injured and the theatre wasn't damaged. I thought: criticism was one thing but this was going too bloody far altogether ."
Patrick Galvin gives a wry smile as he recalls the night his play, Night Fall to Belfast, opened in that city's Lyric Theatre and then expresses the hope that his latest literary venture won't have quite the same explosive birth.
Entitled Song for a Fly Boy, it's the third volume of his memoirs and will be published early next year together with its two predecessors, Song for a Poor Boy and Song for a Raggy Boy in one volume by Cork University Press.
Although best known as a poet - his Mad Woman of Cork has evoked comparisons with Yeats's Crazy Jane sequence - Galvin has won considerable popular and critical acclaim for the first two volumes of his recollections of a Cork childhood.
First seeing the light of day as a newspaper series, Rainbows over Evergreen, the book Song for a Poor Boy traced Galvin's early years up to the age of eight in tenement Cork of the late 1920s and 1930s.
But amidst the poverty - two parents and seven children living in a two-roomed attic flat in Margaret Street - was a cast of marvellous characters who provided more than a few dollops of leavening humour - usually black.
Thus we have young Patrick's visit to man of letters, supporter of the Spanish Republic and cranky but generous Jew, Mannie Goldman, who told him to sit on a pile of books. "I sat on Jane Austen. My first contact with creative literature."
After literature, he discovered films and secured a job as an assistant projectionist at the Lee cinema where at the age of eleven, he fell in love with Hollywood starlet, redhead Ann Sheridan.
From the romance of the cinema and some poignant portraits of his republican mother and ex-British army Free State father, Galvin graduated to St Jude's Reformatory School. Here Galvin survived beatings, cut turf in the bog in March, learned more about the Spanish Civil War from a Republican veteran and walked barefoot to catch the train home to Cork upon his release at the age of 16.
Now Song for a Raggy Boy is going to be made into a film by Red Titian Films. In the meanwhile, we can look forward to Song for a Fly Boy which takes up where Song for a Raggy Boy left off. But whence the title?
"It's a play on words - `fly' being a Cork word for `smart' and also because I joined the RAF. I went up to Belfast intending to join the American Air Force but ended up enlisting in the RAF. I was 16 - totally under-age - so I joined under my brother's name.
"I was sent to West Africa and I wrote to my mother from there. She didn't know where I was gone."
But readers expecting a tale of daring dog fights and terrifying bombing missions may well be disappointed as Galvin's experiences of the closing years of the second World War were far from epic and heroic. "The only thing I remember about the war is the sheer absolute boredom."
Song for a Fly Boy will bring the Galvin saga up to the ripe old age of 18. After the war, there was a variety of odd jobs in London in between writing poems and songs and visits to the BBC to record material for Seamus Ennis's programme, As I Roved Out.
Encounters too with Dylan Thomas - "half drunk at the time" - Louis MacNeice, Brendan Behan - "completely drunk at the time" - as well as penning James Connolly, later to be recorded by Christy Moore and Planxty.
Afterwards, a return to Ireland and 12 years in Belfast through the worst of the Troubles as he wrote plays for the Lyric and the Eblana in Dublin before returning to Cork. Plus regular visits to his spiritual homeland - Spain.
In spite of all this colourful material Galvin is adamant that his memoirs will end with Song for a Fly Boy. "I remember reading where some English author wrote 27 volumes of an autobiography. Well, there's no way I'm going to do that. I'm stopping when I reached 18 because . . ." - he flashes that wry smile again - "at least in terms of autobiographical material, it's been all downhill since then."