Mike Gallagher The English Papers (I.M.O The News of the World, recently demised)
On Achill the post came twice each weekTuesday brought Queenshead fivers, postmarked Ormskirk, Tamworth, Kilburnshort letters from villages of men transplanted en masse to alien trenches. Thursday brought brownpaper rolls, neatly wrapped; Anthony Jack flung them from his bike cursed their weight, their wickedness, their Englishness with equal ferocities. The Achill mother unfurled the Sunday Post, plucked The News of the World from the entrails of The Sunday Mail; and, with a magician’s sleight of hand, made it disappear. The others were absorbed, devoured by her children, tales of dazzling sights and city lights grooming them, too, for the emigrant fate of their fathers. The mother bided her time, waited for the covert hour, then savoured the News of the World, revelled in stories of bedroom romps, relief from absence and abstinence, far-fingered foreplay, forbidden by church and state, twin conspirators who saw fit to make slaves of their sons, sinners of their saints. (Previously published in Revival and in Coming to the Well for Water, an Anthology)
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