THE VILLAGE - A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A SMALL SCOUNDREL

Your writing is excellent but your name is horrible.

You were'nt asked to comment on my name - but if it upsets you I'll change it

It doesn't upset me, friend. I'm in the Army. It's distasteful, and we have ladies here.

That's the Sally Army right? What EXACTLY is distasteful about the Name soldier boy?

With an 'S' would probably be more appropriate :-)

Then you should complain to the moderator

Oh, stop it already you two curmudgeons and just agree to disagree. What's in a name anyway? For all I know, this poster could be Tom Francis Tucker, although I doubt it.

Getting back on topic, it's a great piece of writing. When do we get Chapter Two? I sure hope it's not about a celebrity boxing match between you two fine writers.

Not my style. If it makes you feel good, go with it. I made my point. Free speech is the cornerstone of our civilization. Restraint sometimes speaks louder than the greatest of invectives.

Cav for president (err Prime Minister)!

I've always been a firm believer in diplomacy, and the occasional fart joke.

I admire your platform, Mr. Prime Minister. What are your views on Monty Python?

Love Monty Python. Also, Blackadder, the sorely missed Not The Nine O'Clock News, most pre-movie Rowan Atkinson, including Mr. Bean, the series, and The League of Gentlemen. "It's a local shop, for local people."

Based on these revalations, I endorse your candidacy. Ni!

We finally got The Office here, also a very funny show, and a welcome respite from the short-lived 'Merican version.

THE VILLAGE - A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A SMALL SCOUNDREL
CHAPTER TWO

The Village street ran east to west in a valley in mountains. It was rather grandly divided into three, Saint Patrick's Street at the east end, Main Street where the shops were and the originally named High Street on a hill. As if the three home-grown postmen would have difficulty delivering the mail. Social barriers existed even in that one-class village, with the affluent living at the west end and the effluent existing at the east end. Despite the contraceptive restraints imposed by the One True Faith, it was rather odd that the west-enders had small families and the east-enders were raising Gaelic Football Teams.

As a result of the friendly - some might say too friendly - 'invasion' of the village by members of the United States Armed Forces, the Royal Air Force and and an assortment of soldiers, mainly from Scottish Regiments during the Second World War, the villagers considered themselves to be quite cosmopolitan in their outlook. This influx of fresh minds into the villlage did nothing to dilute the ingrained opinions and inflexible attitudes of the inhabitants, and their blissful ignorance of peoples and events outside their in-bred little community did nothing to subtract from their superior knowledge of the wider world about them. Up until this friendly 'invasion' and after the military forces had left, the villagers had no contact with the world at large other than a three-times-a-day Ulster Transport Authority Omnibus, which could transport them to Magherafelt (10 miles away) or, if they were feeling adventurous, a day trip to Belfast or Londonderry, should they get up the nerve to venture that far.

The Jamisons McCreeveys, Hendersons, Murrays, Rennies, Downeys, Murphys, Crossleys and the McTaggarts, who made up the major part of the tribes of the Village and Parish, were probably not related, though it would take an expert genealogist to defend this assertion - and so, to differentiate between the various non-related sects of Jamisons, McCreeveys, Murphys and so on, each individual tribe was given a nickname to recognise their uniqueness from other tribes of the same name.. For instance, some non-related tribes were recognised by nicknames. An example might be to recognise one clan of Murphys they would have the nickname "Barney Mary Brian" Murphys, while other unrelated Murphys in the Parish might have the nickname "The Frank Phaidraighs". All very confusing to the casual visitor but child's play to the initiated.

The Village proper had a population of about 700 souls, while the Parish population totalled about 1,500 bodies. THey were mainly of the same religious denomination (The One True Faith - (TOTF)), whose souls were saved or damned every Sunday at Mass, depending on the availability of sin during the previous week. The damning or the saving was the discretion of the Parish Priest, an awsome figure dressed in black, wearing a Homburg Hat and carrying a large blackthorn stick, whose word in the village was Law, despite the presence of a Sergeant and three Constables of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. His Reverence judges and meted out penances, depending on the pecking order of the sinner within the Parish. The better off sinner received a lesser penance than the bacon, cabbage and spuds variety, despite both being guilty of the same sin. There wasn't much scope for originality of sin in the village, so it is possible that Father Confessor yawned his way through most Confessions, awarding penances to sinners according to a league table he had written out and pinned up inside the Confessional. I remember those old Confession Boxes like it was yesterday. They were a sort of three-dimensional Tryptique. The Confessor sat in the middle box and on either side of his were boxes for the penitents to enter and kneel at a grill in preparation for the confessing of their sins. A sliding door covered the door of the right had confession box while the Confessor was hearing the confession of the penitent in the left hand box. This worked well when the Parish Priest and Father Kelly were hearing confessions, but not so well when Father McNally was doing the business. The problems were that when Father McNally heard Confessions, there was a sense of desperation among penitents in that there was no way, unlike today where Confessors names are displayed outside the confessional, that a penitent could identify who was hearing confessions - you took your chances. It wasn't long before us rascals caught on that:

a. Father McNally was eighty per cent deaf and consequently had a
a very loud voice.

AND

b. He was very absentminded and often forgot where he was.

So where we could we all queued up to enter Father McNally's Confessional. On one occasion I was in the left hand box awaiting to say my confession while the the good Father was hearing the confession of one of our teachers - nicknamed with some accuracy - the Gorgon, but he had forgotten to close the sliding door between he and I so there were two of hearing the Gorgon's Confession. Well, I won't divulge what the Gorgon confessed to, but fifty-fives years on I still wonder "How did she do that".

TO BE CONTINUED

He really is a decent writer...

THE VILLAGE - A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A SMALL SCOUNDREL
CHAPTER THREE

The departure of the military at the end of the War left a couple of extra unplanned inhabitants who would qualify for the soon to introduced Family Allowance. It was all terribly mysterious, two girls left the village on an extended holiday with an 'aunt' to another county and returned a year later with little cousins - come to visit.

The Americans were very generous with the produce of the Post Exchange, things that we couldn't get because of rationing. My big brother used to come home every evening from the 'Big House' at Derrynoid a few miles outside the Village, with all kinds of exotic fruit such as grapefruit, melons, oranges and bananas and tins of stuff that defied description. When I was given a banana I tried to eat skin as well! One little chap, about my age at the time, nearly choked to death trying to eat a can of Peanut Butter. Before the friendly 'invasion' of the Military and the requisition of the 'Big House', it belonged to the O'Neills. One of the last Prime Ministers of Northern Ireland was a grandson of the Dowager Lady O'Neill, whom my parents worked for before the War - my father in London as a Chef and my mother in Derrynoid as Parlour Maid, Lady O'Neill used to move her entire household from London to Ireland at the end of the London 'Season'.

[/U]CHAPTER FOUR

Like any small community, the village had its share of characters who played out their necessary role in enriching village life, despite the sniffy disapproval of the more strait-laced. One of the most mysterious of the characters, was a Displaced Person from a ghetto in Vilna, a Red Sea Pedestrian who, had he known where he was being displaced to, would have taken his chances in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Nevertheless, he adopted his Irish Shtetl, married a Colleen and raised a family. He was a strange little man of whom the village children were always slightly fearful, dressed as he did, winter and summer, in a long black overcoat, black suit, white collarless shirt and a wide brimmed black hat, with a lock of black hair hanging down on each side of his face, forward of his ears. He was still a stranger in the Village when he died ten years later and his corpse was spirited away by two of his co-religionists. But we'll come to the other characters later on.

I'm printing out this thread so I can read it on the subway on my way home from work tonight. (One should always have something sensational to read in the train, as another Irishman wrote.)

By the way, I believe I'm the only person of the female persuasion to post on this thread so far, and I'm not offended in the least by Mr. Tucker's A2K name. But then, my mind works in such a way that, when I found out Dan Quayle has a son named Tucker, my first thought was to wonder how he could have have been so cruel as to subject the poor kid to the kind of name-calling he was sure to get on the playground.

I am impressed, and looking forward to more.