It couldn't have been anyone in the world fishing me out except Tom McNulty. It was always going to be him. Anyway, he was a famous swimmer, he already had a medal for saving a life given him by the mayor of Sligo himself, which was what got him into the politics, he always said. The other person he saved was an old crone that the tide plucked from the shoreline, like the joker it is – an old crone, but not as old as I am now. No.

'I know you,' he said, glistening on the sand, his nice square fat face smiling at me, and the world and its aunt gathered about us, and Jack also there now, in his sombre black bathing trunks, and his body that never really looked like flesh, but something stonier, the bones and muscles of a traveller. 'You're the lass from the Cafe Cairo.'

And I laughed, or tried to, the salt water spluttering in my throat.

'Oh mercy,' he said. 'You swallowed the ocean. Yes, you did. Jaysus,' he said, 'where's your blessed towel? Do you have one? You do? And your clothes? Yes, come on. Come on with me.'

So my towel was put around my shoulders and my clothes gathered for me by Jack, gingerly holding them, and the two walked me up across the burning hot road towards the Plaza, we kept to the grassy verge when we could, and across the desert of the carpark and into the ticket office with us, and Tom was laughing, very easy and relieved he probably was, to have rescued me. I can't remember if he got another medal for me, I hope he did, because he probably deserved it, all things considered.

Oh, dear, it is difficult to look back on the joy of those days, but on the other hand, it is something rare I know in a life to know such joy, and such luck.

I knew my luck, knew it as well as a sparrow when it finds a speck of bread all to itself.

It was pride too, my pride in him, with his fame and his confidence.

We'd go up the concrete steps to the pictures between those laurel hedges. We might have been a couple in Hollywood, I might have been Mary Pickford herself, though I suppose in all honesty Tom was too small to be Douglas Fairbanks.

The dark in our little world was the drinking habits of Sligo. Men like Tom and his brother would be so drunk in the small hours things would happen which not only could they not remember, but they wouldn't want to, which was no doubt a great blessing.

I would be standing down on the dancefloor, happy to be on my own, looking up at the stage where Tom's band were ranged, his little dapper father a dab hand on the clarinet, on any instrument you liked. Late in the evening Tom would play 'Remarkable Girl' with his hawk's eye peering down at me. When we were walking on the beach at Rosses Strand one time he teased me by singing 'When Lights are Low in Cairo', because I was the girl that worked in the Cafe Cairo. There was a singer called Cavan O'Connor that he modelled his voice on, he thought Cavan was the greatest singer that ever breathed. But Tom had grown up more or less on Jelly Roll Morton and he was cracked on Bubber Miley, like all the trumpeters were, even more than on Louis Armstrong himself. Tom said Bubber had put the jump into Duke Ellington, no question. These matters for Tom were nearly as important as the politics. But my brain left him there, once he started on that. It didn't seem as interesting at all as the music. Soon he had me sitting in with the band playing piano when the piano player proper was unwell. He was a big lad from the back of Knocknarea with TB. 'Black Bottom Stomp' was his party piece as one might say. Jack was never on stage but he liked to sing in the early part of his cups, when he was cheerful, very cheerful. Then it would be 'Roses of Picardy', 'Long Way to Tipperary', because he had been in the British Merchant Navy when he was only a boy, but I think I wrote this before. Saw every port from Cove to Cairo, but I think I wrote this. Maybe it's worth saying twice.

Jack was always about and then he'd be gone for a while. He used to go out to Africa on contracts. Oh, Tom was very proud of Jack, Jack had done two degrees at Galway at the same time, Geology and Engineering. He was just a brilliant man. I have to confess he was about three times better-looking than his brother, but that is neither here nor there. But he was, he had those smalltown filmstar looks, you'd be in the cinema watching Broadway Melody or some such, and when the lights would go up at the end, yes, you'd be back in bloody Sligo – except for Jack. Jack still had some halo of Hollywood about him.

But Jack kept a few feet between us, what sort of feet I don't know. He was too ironical to be friendly, he'd be jesting and joking the while, and sometimes I caught him looking at me with the wrong sort of look. I don't mean coveting me, but maybe disapproving. Long looks when he thought I couldn't see him. Sizing me up.

Jack kept a Ford car though, to go with the leather collar on his coat. We were always in that car, we saw a thousand Irish landscapes through the front screen, we washed a million tons of rain off it with that little wiper back and forth, back and forth, and gallons of whiskey they drank in it, as we went along. The big thing was to get out onto the strand by Coney island at low tide, and surge along through the shallow inch of water, roaring and at our infinite ease. There were always friends with us, the prettiest of the girls that hung after the band, and other likely lads of Sligo and Galway. The funny thing was, Jack had a girlfriend that he was actually going to marry, Mai her name was, but we never saw her, she lived in Galway with her parents, very well-to-do they were. Her father was an insurance salesman, a very impressive fact to Jack, and they lived in a house in Galway that was Something House, and that was a big fact for a man whose father was the tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum. He had met her at the university, she was one of the first girls there, oh, and I'd say one of the first girls at a lot of things, looking down her nose at me being one of them. No, that isn't fair, I don't think I ever met her but the one time.

But actually I do Tom a disservice talking like this. Because his own first cousin owned the Sligo Champion and was a TD in what they used to call the real first Dail, that is to say the Dail after the Treaty. And Jack always said – I used to hear him telling a new acquaintance – that he was a cousin of that dark-hearted person Edward Carson, who opted out of the Free State like a rat leaving a sinking ship, or what he hoped and prayed was a sinking ship. Tom told me his own people had been butter importers in Sligo, or was it exporters, and had had ships, just like the Jacksons and the Pollexfens. And that the Oliver in his name, Thomas Oliver McNulty, was there because they had lost their lands in the time of Cromwell when an Oliver McNulty had refused to become a Protestant. He said this with a wary eye on me, to see how I would take it, being a Protestant myself I suppose. I was a Protestant, but maybe not the right kind of Protestant. Jack liked the big-house Protestants and he had it in his head that he was sort of Catholic gentry. I don't think he thought much of the great Presbyterian tradition in Ireland. Working-class. That was the dread phrase.

'That fella is working-class through and through,' was one of Jack's put downs. Because he had been in Africa he also had strange phrases like 'Act the white man.' And 'hamma-hamma'. Because he had seen a thousand drunken nights, another phrase was 'Keep the party clean.' If he thought someone was untrustworthy, that person was 'a casual pack of buggers'.

Red hair, auburn really, combed back. Quite severe features, very serious about the eyes. Oh yes, Clark Gable or better still Gary Cooper. Gorgeous.

I am looking for my mother in these memories, and I cannot find her. She has simply disappeared.