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Can’t your Majesty understand how I feel without them?”In the years before her parents’ death, did Cecile try to make it easier, meet them halfway? “No.” Does she regret that? “I don’t regret that.” At their father’s funeral, the three Quints saw their mother for the first time in many years, and their mother told them they had killed their father. Elzire Dionne died in 1986.OVER THE last year and a half, as he prepared Secrets de Famille, Jean- Yves Soucy watched the surviving Quints “getting more and more relaxed When we started, Cecile was really, really down. She was still resentful towards her father.” He thinks they are beginning to “turn the page”. (He told me the Quints were keen to “start looking” for boyfriends.) A new life is forcing its way through But a legacy of estrangement survives. The quintuplets were media children, lottery children, and pyschological recovery seems hopelessly bound up with financial recovery. There was some unpleasantness last year over money received for Million-Dollar Babies. As a result, Cecile and the others now have no contact with Marie’s two daughters.

At the time I interviewed Cecile Dionne, the elder of these daughters had had a baby the week before: Cecile had only learnt of this second-hand – which is how she also hears news of the non-Quint brothers and sisters.It’s not quite over for the Dionnes, nor for Canada. Their new book is selling very well; and as ever, Canadians are sending fan letters and old cuttings and letters of solidarity to their post office box number in great bulk. “They’re still a freak show,” one Montreal journalist told me. Fertility drugs have made multiple births a relative commonplace, and Quintland has been pulled down, but the Dionne Quints story continues to resonate: like a particularly comprehensive fairy-tale, exaggerating every childhood longing, disappointment and fear. I asked Cecile Dionne: what should have happened to them? How should they have been brought up? She shrugged and said, “We should have been raised like normal children.” !. YOU WOULD expect a wrestling arena to smell of sweat.

But the overpowering aroma in the stadium at the Kirkpinar Festival in the town of Erdine in Turkey is not the sour smell of male perspiration, but something sweeter, fruitier: something you would normally associate with the kitchen rather than the ring The explanation is simple. The Kirkpinar Festival is the grand championship of Turkey’s oldest sport: olive oil wrestling. Erdine is a historic town in the far north of Turkey, hard by the border with Greece and Bulgaria It has several claims to fame. It was the capital of the Ottoman Empire for 91 years, and is celebrated both for the beauty of its ancient mosques, caravanserais and bridges, and for the 500-year- old Darulsifa hospital, which many years ago pioneered the use of music therapy. But for one week each June all this takes second place to the festival.
The wrestling is the highlight of the proceedings, which also include carnivals, concerts and feasts, so, for the final three days of the festival, thousands of spectators crowd into the grandstands around the arena, a field of soft, ankle-deep grass about 50 yards square.

The place of honour goes to the “Aga”, or tournament-master, currently a rotund businessman and former wrestler called Hussein Sulliyen. He is treated with the utmost respect: not surprisingly, for he provides all the prizes, not just money but horses, bulls, and rams.Before the tournament begins, the wrestlers line up in the centre of the stadium for a prayer. Then, while a clarinet band plays, the wrestlers, clad only in knee-length buffalo-hide shorts and a thick layer of olive oil, perform the “pesrev”: they walk three steps forward and three steps back; then they kneel, and with their right hand touch their knee, lips and forehead three times; finally, as one, they leap into the air, yelling: “Haydabre Pehlivain!” (“Come on, wrestler!”). The tournament is on.There are, according to Robin Tomlinson of the British Amateur Wrestling Federation, more than 200 different types of wrestling in the world Traditional Turkish wrestling is one of the very oldest It is also the only variety to use olive oil. “We have our own traditions of wrestling in this country,” Mr Tomlinson says “Cumberland & Westmorland, Cornish and so on. But there’s no tradition of using oil or anything like that.” At Kirkpinar, by contrast, there is oil everywhere.The oil is the same moon-flower olive oil that is used for cooking all over Turkey, and is applied by the wrestlers to make themselves difficult to grip. As an oil-wrestling match is won when one fighter picks up the other and carries him for three steps, it is obviously in the wrestlers’ interest to make themselves as slippery as possible.

They are allowed to call for more oil in mid-bout, and often do, and to that end it is stored in cauldrons around the arena and dispensed by old men with kettles.The origins of the festival are associated in local folklore with the Ottoman conqueror Suleyman Pasha, who campaigned in the Erdine area in the 14th century. While resting in a meadow between battles, the legend runs, Suleyman’s soldiers took to wrestling to pass the time. Two warriors proved particularly well-matched, and fought all day and all night. Neither would admit defeat, and as the sun came up both died from exhaustion. Their comrades buried them where they fell, and were astonished when, the next day, a spring of clear water emerged at the grave-site. The meadow was named “Kirkpinar”, which means “40 springs”; wrestling contests have been staged there ever since.Modern oil-wrestlers are not expected to fight to the death, but they still need tremendous stamina.