This story was conceived in a beach restaurant in the Algarve. I was there for dinner with a friend and her two daughters, delightful children, though even the charm of young Misses can weigh heavily on middle age so, over the soup, I launched out on a story to concentrate their minds, and to give my own a bit of flexing.

Olivia was forever pointing so I called our protagonist Dedo, "finger" in Portuguese, trusting to ingenuity (unsuccessfully as it happens) to draw some moral from the name along the way.

Towards the end of the soup I had the girls' attention, but the attention of children is a tenuous thing. It was time to introduce magic so I arranged for Dedo to be given a wallet, an enchanted wallet which always had money in it, notes of the currency of whatever country he happened to be in. Magic. And money. Lots and lots of money. It's a formula guaranteed to ease children gently into a main course.

One of the girls was my godchild so I took the opportunity to weave the Faith into the story. Dedo had a sense of prayer and an appreciation of the Mass. In spite of all manner of vicissitudes this got him to the tomb of the Blessed Virgin near Ephesus in Turkey where he finds a letter written, or at least dictated, by the Mother of Christ herself.

During the ice cream our hero was wrecked off Mt Athos and found himself in a monastery there. By the coffee, he had had a private conversation with the Holy Father and was lying buried in a coffin beneath another coffin in a Rome cemetery. As my mind was panicking to find a way out of this, the ultimate in dead-end predicaments, I looked up to find the entire restaurant frozen in deep and attentive silence.

My, just look at your watches, girls - it's way past bedtime. We'll finish this story tomorrow...

I never did finish it because I couldn't think of a way to get Dedo back into the picture. A story teller has to pull some pretty suspect stunts to free a hero from an ordinary coffin that is buried under six feet of earth. But with another coffin on top, all rites witnessed by a grieving Italians in their own family plot? That's tough!

Long after the childen had returned to London, and their schools, I recalled the story and started to write it down. It took some weeks scribbling away at my kitchen table remembering and embellishing, all the while knowing that I would eventually have to engineer the great escape. I owed it to the girls, to the patient diners in that seaside restaurant whom I'd short-changed. I owed it to W.E. Johns and Raphael Sabatini and Pinocchio.

Dedo did eventually get out of that grave - without the help of miracles, magic or a third party - and managed to round off his adventures and confound his evil pursuers. And the tale was eventually published. It was even scripted in Hollywood by a screen-writer there, Ron Johnstone.

I don't know what became of those eavesdroppers at the restaurant. To date no producer among them has surfaced. I doubt if they even bought a copy of the book. Very few people did. The few comments I got found it either too simple, or too Catholic, which is fair enough. I'd notched it up as a failure until, a short while back, I received a letter from a stranger, the mother of a reader, who told me that her 12 year old kept a copy under her pillow. She'd read it all except for the last few pages. She couldn't bear to finish it, the parent wrote, she was at that age where she couldn't bear for things she cared about to come to an end.

That letter means more to me than the most lucrative of best sellers.

Leo Madigan, Fatima, Portugal.

November 2000.

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