Rule Number 1: When asked about your parentage, give suitably vague answers. It was Jimmy Doogan, a boorish kid with freckles spread like flak across his face, who had been the first to inquire as to my father's whereabouts. I knew I couldn't claim the pub, or the off-track, because those fathers were just absent, not apparitions."He died," I told him. "In the war.""Horse shite," he replied. And it most certainly was. Ireland hadn't fought in all that many wars, save those against ourselves, which we usually managed to lose. I later amended my story to say that my father had been lost to "The