Are you there Darth? It’s me, Paul

No one who was there will ever forget the night Darth Vader came to Ballybrack Shopping Centre, even if some of us differ on the details. In my child’s mind, I could have sworn he landed in the car park in front of Tesco Home and Wear in an Imperial Shuttle, flanked by a company of Stormtroopers and Royal Guards, but a photograph surfaced recently that suggested he arrived alone in the back of a bread truck with a roller shutter door.

Darth Vader loomed over my childhood like a shadow on the lung of my imagination. He was the movie villain of all movie villains, our generation’s Liberty Valance. He was the heavy-breathing cyborg who cut Obi-Wan Kenobi down when the man wasn’t looking and who turned Han Solo into a Han Solo-shaped ice-pop. It was December 1983, and he was coming to Ballybrack.

Like any council-built, densely populated urban area with a young population, the area I grew up in had a lot of hard kids. There were kids with whom you didn’t make eye contact lest it be the pretext for a puck in the head. Then there were kids whose hardness never had to be tested; they owed it to some fight they won in the long-ago past that “made” them as men. But no one was harder than Darth Vader. That was just a fact.

There couldn’t have been a single kid at home in Ballybrack that night; I was sure I saw everyone I knew in the shopping centre car park, shoaled together in nervous little huddles, some straddling Raleigh Burners, our breaths fogging in front of us in the cold, December air, which smelled of real coal burning. The tension was almost too much to bear. This wasn’t Santa Claus arriving at Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt. This was Darth Vader. And he was half an hour late (although, as a Dark Lord of the Sith, who could choke a man to death without laying a finger on him, I didn’t imagine too many people pulled him up on his timekeeping).

The mighty Pooch

At that point in our lives, the most famous man any of us had ever met was Eugene Davis, a footballer who scored a lot of goals for Athlone Town and was a member of the team of butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers who earned a scoreless draw with the mighty AC Milan in 1975.

Pooch, as Eugene Davis was more popularly known, lived in Ballybrack. And as the area’s only real celebrity of note, he tended to get pressed into doing any local prize-givings that were happening: football, karate, majorettes, cubs, talent contests. He performed official openings and official closings. Pooch was a legend in our young lives. But Darth Vader was, frankly, on a whole other level of celebrity.

I was six years old in 1977, when Star Wars first appeared, just the right age to form a lifelong love affair with George Lucas's epoch-making space opera. I saw the first film with my father and brothers in a cinema in Luton, where we lived at the time, and it blew my mind.

Lightsabers. Strange creatures. Droids. Landspeeders. A chess game with holographic pieces that actually killed each other. A bar with a hilariously trigger-happy clientele and the ugliest house band in the galaxy. Luke Skywalker swinging across a 1,000ft drop, using what appeared to be bailing twine, in the course of rescuing Princess Leia. Han Solo proving in the final act that he was more hero than mercenary after all. And, of course, Darth Vader, who commanded an army known as Stormtroopers, just in case anyone missed the historical allegory. These were the things that would colour my daydreams as a child.

For Christmas that year I got a Death Star play set that was made out of thick cardboard and featured, among other things, a garbage chute and a working trash compactor. With it, wrapped up under the tree, were five action figures: Luke, Leia, R2D2, C3PO – and the heinous Vader. A couple of weeks later – the day of my seventh birthday, in fact – my mother took me to a market in Dunstable, where she added Han, Chewbacca and a Stormtrooper to my collection.

It’s odd, I know, that I can remember such details, but those 3¾in figures became such an obsession to me that, when I look at them today, I can still remember how I came by each and every one. I bought Bib Fortuna, a Gamorrean guard; and Lando Calrissian (in skiff guard disguise) with my Confirmation money in 1983. I bought Lobot and Wicket with the £5 I earned for delivering, door to door, several hundred leaflets advertising a Gaeltacht summer course.

I got the Millennium Falcon for Christmas in 1981. What made that the greatest Christmas ever for me was that my parents had said that, at £39.99, it was a bit out of their price range. And yet there it was under the tree; I knew it from the size of the box as my trembling hands tore at the wrapping. I think, at least unconsciously, I measure all happiness in my life against that moment.

A childhood in figures

Every penny that passed through my hands as a child was spent on Star Wars figures. Pocket money. Birthday money. Communion money. Money I earned for delivering Southside newspaper and for mowing the neighbours' grass with my brother, who drove me insane, because he liked to take his time, going over each alternate line two or three times with the push mower, to create what he liked to call the Wembley Stadium effect. I just wanted to grab the money and head for Let's Pretend, a toy shop on the top floor of Dún Laoghaire Shopping Centre that had two entrances – a small arch for children and a larger one for adults – and the greatest range of Star Wars toys anywhere.

My feet always took the escalator steps two at a time. And how I remember my anguish when I discovered that Palitoy, the company that made them, had brought out 10 or 12 new figures and I was no closer to completing the collection than I had been a year before.

I joined the Official Star Wars Fan Club and was assigned the membership number E0569726. These days, I can't remember my PPS number, but more than 30 years on I can still rattle off my "Force number" without having to pull out my membership card. It cost £5.50 to join. For that you got a poster, six colour photographs, a sew-on patch, a sticker and four copies of a quarterly newsletter, Bantha Tracks.

It also entitled you to avail of special offers, such as the one described in a letter that arrived for me in April 1983. “As a loyal Fan Club Member,” it said, “you have the opportunity to attend, participate in, and thoroughly enjoy, the very first showing in the world of the entire STAR WARS TRILOGY in one programme . . . Lift-off is 6.15pm, Wednesday, June 1st, 1983, at the Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road, and the Leicester Square Theatre. This is the big one, The STAR WARS TRIPLE BILL, exploding across the silver screen in over six hours of total enjoyment.”

As the letter's caps lock-happy author went to great lengths to point out, this was a very big deal. Back then, it usually took about three years for a film to go from cinema to video, and four or five before you saw it on TV. So when The Empire Strikes Back closed in 1980, no one had seen it again until this Triple Bill was announced.

One night I heard my mother and father downstairs, discussing whether or not they could bring me to London for it. They were actually doing the sums. It was the 1980s and there wasn’t a lot of money about. They must have decided they couldn’t afford it because it didn’t get mentioned the following day. But I didn’t care, because I saw how desperately they wanted to take me, and that was even better than going, because I knew what it was to be loved.

And now I was going to meet Darth Vader at Ballybrack Shopping Centre. The big question in my mind was the same one that was no doubt taxing the children awaiting Santa's arrival up the road in Cornelscourt: was it the real one? More specifically, were we going to be meeting actor Dave Prowse or just a man in an officially licensed Darth Vader costume? The answer was of crucial importance to me, as I had one of my Official Star Wars Fan Club photographs to get autographed, and I didn't want it defaced by some Tesco hireling in a suit.

A shudder through the shop

But then, crammed into the shop along with hundreds of other kids, there was suddenly no time to think about it, because the overhead lights were switched off, the Imperial March struck up and a dark figure was suddenly filling the doorway between the power tools and the potting compost. It was Vader. Just the outline of him sent a shudder through the shop.

Out he walked, on to the shop floor, black helmet shining, cape flowing, shaking a leather-gloved fist in a way that seemed to say, “Anyone who wants a piece of this can have it – right now”.

The man exuded pure menace. I didn’t ask him if he was Dave Prowse underneath that suit. I was too frightened of him. I pushed the photograph in his direction and said, “Can you put it ‘To Paul’ and then sign your real name on it?”

He wrote, “To Paul. Darth Vader.”

Which, of course, wasn’t conclusive proof of anything. But then I didn’t need proof. The way he carried himself, the fear he struck into us all, convinced me that the Vader who came to Ballybrack Shopping Centre that night was the real deal.

But, like Dorothy in Oz, my brother decided that he had to look behind the curtain. He stuck his head around the door of the manager's office where Vader went to change after he had sent us all home terrified. And he told me something that night that I didn't want to be true and I still don't want to be true. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, I want to scream out in the manner of Luke in that iconic scene from The Empire Strikes Back, when Vader filled in one or two blanks on the Skywalker family tree for him: "No! That's not true! That's impossible!"

When Vader removed his helmet, my brother swore to me, it wasn’t Dave Prowse he saw sitting there in the manager’s office.

It was Eugene Davis.