Lady of the Dance

by Duffy, Marie; Rowley, Eddie;

  The main theory is that the name came from the road through the district, where it is divided into three separate stretches or ‘legs’.

  Whatever the reason, my dear friend Brendan O’Brien, who is a good joker, said that it was a fitting name for a choreographer’s place of residence. But he would always refer to it as Three Crossed Legs!

  Three Legged Cross was a very quiet area, but I did strike up an instant friendship with one of my immediate neighbours, Jane Born.

  Jane had some horses and ran a horse riding school. We started off socialising over coffee and, of course, it was lovely to have somebody to talk to as I was still coming to terms with the loss of Ian, although the grief had greatly subsided.

  One evening over a glass or two of wine we were discussing everything and anything when Jane suggested: ‘We’ll have to get you up on a horse.’

  Now, at that point, I had never been near a horse in my life. But Jane insisted that it would be good for my head. I was more concerned about what it would do to my backside!

  By the third glass of wine it began to seem more appealing and with gentle nudging from Jane I agreed to give it a go.

  Of course, being a woman, my first thought was ‘the look’. I would have to get kitted out in all the proper fashion. So that was a bit of fun, going off with Jane to buy all the gear.

  Jane had a lovely old horse called Jonty, who was slow and gentle and reliable. Jonty and I got on very well from the start, even though my backside ached and my body creaked after the first few outings. But I soon got the hang of it and felt comfortable enough to be able to fully enjoy the experience as we sauntered up and down country lanes and quiet rural roads, chatting and admiring nature from our lofty positions on horseback.

  Sadly, within the year Jonty took ill and I was devastated when Jane told me there was no option but to have him put down. That was the end of my short but very enjoyable horse riding experience, as Jane’s other horses were too young and too frisky for me. I just couldn’t take the risk of a fall.

  At this point, I didn’t have any contact with my other neighbour, a gentleman who lived in a lovely cottage next door. I caught a glimpse of him a couple of times on the rare occasions that he was at home while I was back in the area, but we never bumped into each other in person.

  Little did I suspect what would transpire between the neighbour in question, Mike Pask, and me.

  The Next-Door Neighbour

  I moved to my Three Legged Cross home in March 1999. It was at the start of a very busy year working with Michael Flatley, so I didn’t get around to organising a house-warming for family and friends until the following December.

  One of the people I decided to invite to the party was the man next door, even though I still hadn’t met Mike Pask in person at this point.

  The evening before the event I slipped into a warm coat and walked briskly to his cottage during a break in the deluge of rain that had come tumbling out of the heavens over the previous few days.

  It seemed like an eternity before the door was opened by a very tall man who appeared to be distressed and didn’t seem at all pleased to see me standing on his doorstep.

  I took a deep breath, forced a smile and introduced myself. My neighbour seemed really distracted as I spilled out my invitation to the house-warming.

  He muttered something about the weather, and then he declined my invitation, saying he would be away visiting his daughters the following evening.

  So, I said ‘that’s fine’ and off I went with my tail between my legs, thinking that my next-door neighbour, Mr Pask, was a very grumpy man indeed.

  What I didn’t know then, but would learn later, is that Mike had just returned home from a business trip in France to find that there had been a major leak and there was a flood in his cottage.

  It’s all about timing in life, and my timing certainly wasn’t very good that evening.

  * * *

  The next couple of years passed in a whirl due to my work with Lord of the Dance. It was a full-on job keeping the shows running smoothly around Europe and in other parts of the world. There was always some little incident throwing a spanner in the works.

  I remember one time turning up for a show in Germany only to discover that a box containing all the shoes for the dancers had been stolen. Alarm bells started ringing all over the place as we battled against the clock to avert a disaster. There would be no show that night without shoes. In the end, our manager Martin Flitton saved the day. I don’t know where he found the magic wand, but Martin produced dancing shoes before the curtain went up that night.

  There was another bizarre incident during a show in Germany when a naked guy ran across the stage behind a line of dancers. It transpired that the streaker had been one of the local riggers working on the show. He was fired on the spot. But it gave us a laugh.

  On my short trips home to Three Legged Cross, I noticed that Mike was rarely at his cottage. Then there was a period when I’d see him building something in his garden whenever he was around. It turned out that he was constructing a yacht. Mike’s passion was sailing, I later discovered, and he’d be out on the sea every chance he got when he wasn’t working.

  In May 2003 I was having some repair work done on my garden pond, which was my pride and joy. It had lots of fish, including three or four really big ones. There was a problem with water escaping, and a couple of guys from the local garden centre had been sorting it out for me to save the fish. Even though it was the start of summer, it was a windy morning and, to my horror, as they drove away my front door slammed shut behind me with the keys inside. Because it was early morning I hadn’t opened up any of the side or back doors, so now I was locked out of my house.

  My niece Cathy and her husband, Len, who lived just five miles away in the village of West Moors, had a spare set of keys to my home. However, I couldn’t phone them because my mobile was inside, as were the keys to my car.

  After my initial panic subsided, I decided to go next door and ask Mike if I could use his phone to call Cathy. I had to summon up all my courage because I hadn’t met him since that December night a couple of years previously, when I got what I considered to be a frosty reception on his doorstep. There was no answer when I knocked on his door, and then I noticed that there was no car at the house so I turned to leave. As I was walking away, he drove in from a back entrance.

  This time Mike Pask was a lot friendlier than the man I had first met. I explained my predicament and asked if I could use his telephone to call my niece.

  ‘Of course, no problem, come on in,’ he said. ‘Have you tried all the doors of the house?’ I told him there had been no point as I hadn’t unlocked any of them that morning.

  When I phoned Cathy she told me that Len had possession of the keys, but he was now in America on business.

  ‘I don’t know where he’s put them, but I’ll have a good search,’ she said.

  In the meantime, Mike kindly offered to drive me to West Moors to pick them up. When we got to Cathy’s home there was more bad news. Cathy had searched high up and low down for the keys without success. Finally, she had phoned Len in America. I’m sure that poor Len must have thought there was an awful disaster back home when he received a call at that time.

  Len told Cathy that the keys to my house were in his car, which was parked at Heathrow Airport!

  I was really embarrassed going back out to Mike and informing him that our trip had been in vain. He could see that I was now in a bit of a state. I told him that I was due to fly out to Russia the following morning with Lord of the Dance.

  ‘Oh don’t worry,’ Mike assured me. ‘We’ll see if there’s a window we can break and we’ll get it sorted.’

  Back at the house, Mike started trying the various doors at the side and rear.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any point in doing that as I didn’t have a chance to open them this morning,’ I told him again.

  But he went around checking the doors and finding each on
e locked as I expected. Then there was one last door next to the garage and, lo and behold, to my embarrassment it opened when he turned the handle.

  I was mortified and instantly apologised to Mike for all the inconvenience I’d put him through. But he just laughed and insisted that it had been no trouble.

  Of course, to this day Mike tells people that the whole saga that morning was just a ploy to reel him in.

  * * *

  My trip to Russia the following day was no ordinary one. I was off to the 300th anniversary celebration of the founding of St Petersburg, where Lord of the Dance had been invited by President Vladimir Putin to perform at the opening ceremony. Michael had chosen the ‘Warlords’ number from the show, featuring the boys.

  That was a very memorable trip for me. Our troupe performed in front of the most powerful people in the world at that time: including Putin, President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Chirac of France, Germany’s Chancellor Schroeder, and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

  We felt immensely proud that our taoiseach was there.

  As well as Lord of the Dance, the entertainers included Nana Mouskouri, Demis Russos and the great Pavarotti.

  After the event, Michael Flatley, dancers Damien O’Kane and Jimmy Murrihy, and I had a pre-planned trip to Moscow to do a workshop for a Russian Irish dance school called Iridian. It was the only Irish dancing school in Russia at that time and had been founded by a guy called Igor Denisov, who told us that he set it up after being inspired by a video of Lord of the Dance. He had even learned Michael’s steps. Igor had a hundred dance students at that time.

  What happened next is like something from a movie: President Putin then offered us a lift to Moscow on his private jet. And so Michael, Damien, Jimmy and I found ourselves travelling VIP-style on the Russian president’s private plane with a small group of passengers that also included Luciano Pavarotti and his wife!

  * * *

  Mike was on my mind when I was returning from Russia. I felt the urge to buy him a gift as a token of my gratitude for his help the day before I had left, so I decided on a bottle of Russian vodka.

  When I settled in back home I organised a little get-together over a barbeque with Cathy and Len, their children, and my friends Maggie and Pierce.

  That same afternoon I noticed that Mike was in his garden working on his boat, so I called him over and gave him the little gift of vodka.

  ‘We’re having a barbeque at the moment – would you like to come and join us?’ I added.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much, but I’ve just eaten,’ Mike responded in a tone that wasn’t dismissive. I then suggested that he drop in for a drink whenever suited him, and he was happy to accept.

  Mike came around later and he was very sociable and engaging. We all enjoyed his company and the evening went by all too quickly, as good times do.

  Today, Mike says he crawled home that night after we’d had several bottles of wine, followed by Irish coffees which I had insisted on making for him.

  ‘My friends say I make a mean Irish coffee,’ I told him that night.

  ‘Okay, well I’ll have to try one then,’ he laughed.

  Three Irish coffees later, Mike went home in a very happy mood. And so our relationship went on from there.

  Mike later told me that he felt an attraction to me during that evening at the barbeque, assuring me that it had nothing to do with the bottles of wine that were consumed.

  I was out in my garden a couple of weeks later when he called me over.

  ‘Would you like to go out for a meal some evening?’ Mike asked.

  I didn’t have to think twice about it.

  ‘Would tomorrow evening suit you?’ Mike then enquired.

  So the following evening Mr Pask arrived through my gate, all scrubbed up and looking very smart indeed for our date. Mind you, it wasn’t easy to spot him through the jungle of colourful flowers cradled in his arms.

  Shortly afterwards a taxi arrived and I was whisked off to a very nice restaurant out in the countryside that I’d never been to before. It was a lovely ‘getting to know you’ evening as we discussed our lives up to that point over good food and wine.

  Mike told me that he was an only child and had been born on the Isle of Wight. His father was an army man and they moved around when he was a child, at first living in Surrey and then in Kent, where he spent his schooldays. That experience of pulling up roots and moving on would shape the course of his own life. Mike said he never stayed in the same house for more than seven or eight years, even during his first marriage. He’d buy houses, do them up, and then move on.

  Mike, at this point, was divorced with two grown-up daughters, Caroline and Vicky. He had been married for over twenty-five years before his separation and divorce. Mike told me that he and his wife had drifted apart during their lives, as some couples do, and the split came after their children were reared.

  Their parting was obviously an emotionally draining experience, like any divorce. But Mike said it was an amicable separation, one that he and his then wife dealt with between them, rather than going down a legal route. Thankfully, they are still on good terms, and today they meet up whenever there is a family event that brings them together. Mike’s wife has since remarried.

  Mike was well travelled. He was a chemical engineer who worked abroad as well as in the UK. In the 1970s, he spent several months on an assignment in Brazil. He had bought his cottage at Three Legged Cross, about three or four miles from his family home, after the split with his wife. The reason I didn’t see a lot of him when I moved in next door is that he was working on a £20 million project for a big American company called Borden Chemicals.

  At that time Mike was overseeing the shutdown of their plant in Southampton and the installation of their new manufacturing facility in Barry Island in Wales. He also had responsibility for their operating plants in France, Holland and Spain. He was a busy man during those years.

  The pressure valve for Mike during his hectic working years was his love of the sea and sailing. The project I’d observed him building in the years after I moved in next door was his pride and joy: a 33ft yacht called Out of the Blue.

  That evening together just flew by and I recall thinking how Mike was such good company, very pleasant and with a great sense of humour. There was good chemistry between us, he made me laugh, and upon our return home we both agreed that we’d go out again.

  I was due to head off on another Lord of the Dance trip, so we promised to make arrangements when I returned.

  After I got back, Mike invited me for a day out on his beloved yacht, which was now in swinging moorings in Sandbanks at the mouth of Poole Harbour. That outing was arranged for a couple of days later, depending on the winds.

  I was very excited as this felt like a very glamorous adventure indeed, even though I knew nothing about boats.

  As luck would have it, weather conditions were perfect when the day arrived for our jaunt on the sea. Mike collected me in his car and chauffeured me to where the yacht was moored.

  It was all going very well at this point and I was really enthused about the sea trip that lay ahead, but then I noticed the look of horror on Mike’s face as I was about to step on to his boat.

  That was the moment he realised I was still in my stilettos. To a sailor, I would learn, strutting around in stiletto heels on a yacht is a major crime. I know now, of course, that it certainly wasn’t very practical.

  Mike must have thought I was very stupid, but fortunately I redeemed myself immediately by producing freshly made sandwiches and a couple of bottles of wine that I had taken with me for the trip.

  At that point I didn’t know Mike’s taste in vino, but I had chosen Chablis and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

  And I had obviously chosen well, because judging by the smile on Mike’s face my faux pas with the stilettos was quickly forgiven, although it would never be forgotten.

  I still get teased about it to this day.

 
; That lovely day together out on Mike’s yacht, Out of the Blue, put the wind in his sails, as they say, and then there was no stopping him.

  Two months after we got together, and literally out of the blue, Mike Pask popped the question!

  A Whirlwind Romance

  In mid August 2003, Mike took me out for a lovely afternoon exploring around the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, which is a picturesque peninsula and a very romantic area.

  One of the attractions is Old Harry Rocks, three famous chalk formations.

  There are various accounts about the naming of the rocks.

  One legend says they were called after Harry Paye, the infamous Poole pirate whose ships hid behind the rocks waiting to pounce on unsuspecting passing merchants.

  Another tale has it that a ninth-century Viking raid was foiled by a storm and that one of the drowned, Earl Harold, was turned into a pillar of chalk.

  Some say that the devil, known euphemistically as ‘Old Harry’, had slept on the rocks.

  It was a beautiful sunny Sunday when we took the chain ferry at Sandbanks, with neither a pirate ship nor a devil in sight. The walk up to Old Harry is really idyllic with breathtaking views, and that day the blue sea was shimmering under a glorious sunny sky.

  I felt really comfortable with this new man in my life. Somebody was looking out for me because I was so happy again. But I wasn’t prepared for the proposal from Mike when he sprung it on me that evening.

  I was speechless for a few moments. Even though we’d been seeing each other every day for two months, marriage hadn’t crossed my mind at that stage. I was just enjoying having a lovely relationship again.

  Mike was adamant that he wanted to marry me, explaining that he had no doubts about his commitment to me. And because he was aware of my strong Catholic beliefs, he said he felt that it would be unfair to ask me to move in with him outside of marriage.