I imagine Pat Ingoldsby sitting at the top of Westmoreland Street like a patient angler on the bank of a river, waiting for a tug on the invisible line he has cast out into the passing flow of Dubliners.
Occasionally, one of them would take the bait and buy a book of his poems.
On April 23rd, 2005, the day before her birthday, a woman visiting Dublin from Switzerland for the first time, stopped to check out Pat in his fancy hat and trench coat. She picked up one of his books and was surprised at how easy it was to read before putting it back down.
Spring was in the air and by the time Vivienne Baillie reached O’Connell Bridge she heard “a voice in my head saying go back and get that book, and that changed my life. So, I turned around and went back to get the book, and I hardly talked to Pat because he was very impressive. He radiated something that was far too strong for me to try and even enter.”
READ MORE
Vivienne read the book that night. Pat’s turn of phrase and subversive take on life led her to order all his other books through Kenny’s in Galway, and to write an admiring letter to Pat.
Jane Austen could not have orchestrated matters better. “You can actually fall in love by letter writing,” says Vivienne. “Send me a photo, not the size of a stamp,” Pat instructed.
Their voluminous correspondence commenced, and they became lovers not long after as Vivienne started to pay regular visits to Pat in his humble abode in Clontarf where he lived a frugal life with only his cats for company.
Neither party could afford the cost of their daily long-distance phone calls, so she came to an arrangement with the Swiss telecom provider that gave her access to Pat’s landline for little cost.
I met Vivienne in the old Casino building in Morges on the banks of Lake Geneva, to reminisce about Pat as the first anniversary of his death on March 1st approached. Her fondest memory of the man who designated her the keeper of his poetic flame is a tender one.
He could infuriate her at times. One evening Vivienne walked out and booked herself into Clontarf Castle where Pat came to fetch her the next morning. He stood beside her at the front desk, discreetly reaching out to stroke her hand with his little finger.
Another memory is of their first outing to a restaurant in Howth. “It was very moving. The first time I got him to sit in a restaurant, he didn’t like to be served. He didn’t like another human being to be put into that situation. He had to get used to that again.”
They shared a love of the sea. Pat grew up in Malahide and Vivienne, born in Edinburgh, lived in the Scottish seaside town of North Berwick until her family moved to Rome when she was 13 years old, before finally settling in Switzerland. As a science and short story writer herself, Vivienne shared his literary sensibility.
When Pat met Vivienne, he had trimmed his life down to the bare necessities existing on an income of about €100 a week from the sale of his books on Westmoreland Street. Thanks to the advice of Brush Shiels he had already bought a two-bedroom house in Clontarf with his earnings from his days as a children’s programme presenter on RTÉ before shrugging off the spoils of celebrity for the life of an impecunious bard on, and off, the street.
Nobody was closer to Pat than Vivienne in the last 20 years of his life. He shared with her his misery at being moved on from time to time by the Garda, his disdain for celebrity and his struggles with post-polio syndrome that eventually robbed him of the use of his legs.
In his final years, their love remained heartfelt if platonic. Ill health forced him to give up his pitch on Westmoreland Street, and it cheered him to see Vivienne bring his poetry to the world through social media and the collection, In Dublin They Really Tell You Things, the companion volume for Seamus Murphy’s wonderful 2022 documentary, The Peculiar Sensation of Being Pat Ingoldsby.
Vivienne is now working on his papers including poems, plays and letters. The National Library has expressed some interest in his archive, and screenwriter director Peter Sheridan is looking into the possibility of doing something with his plays.
It is thanks to Vivienne and friends that a Kickstarter campaign raised €20,000 to bring forth Out of the Blue ... Pink, a collection of Pat’s observations from almost 20 years of being inspired by Dublin’s passing parade in all its motley, the good, the bad and the funny.
“I started it before Pat died and he knew it was on the way and I’m sorry he didn’t see it. I was very lucky to have been loved by a man like Pat,” she said.
