Klaus Bung: Drama at Quaggy Moor
Length: 1402 words = 7392 characters
E-mail: ink@tudo.co.uk
Written in 2005
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Drama at Quaggy Moor
We have three drama productions every year. Two years ago we
put on a play about Peter Pan. This is about a boy who could never grow
old.
Last year we had a nativity play. Mary
and Joseph started fighting and swearing at each other and baby Jesus
fell out the manger. That was great fun for us, but Miss didn't like
it. I think our Mums and Dads enjoyed it. They would have liked to join
in the fight, but they weren't allowed to because they weren't in the
play. But we were. God liked the play. It was his idea.
Last July we put on an end-of-term play
about the Pied Piper of Hamelin. There were too many rats and mice in
the town, and the towns-people couldn't eat them all because too much
meat is bad for you. But the rats and mice ate all the food in the
town, there were no more chips, and no more beefburgers, and no more
nice junk food, and no more bangers, and no more nothing, only apples
and tomatoes, so the people of Hamelin had to make stews of the rats
and mice (disgusting, innit?) but it got a bit boring after a while and
they couldn't think of any new recipes or anything.
And then came this here ratcatcher. He was an illegal
immigrant, from Poland or Aunt Arctica or somewhere, and he said watch
me I have this magic flute, I bought it in a car boot sale from this
popstar called wotsisname Moses or something, and when I play it the
rats will follow me into the river Mersey and God will say let the
waters part and when they are all in the river bed God will say drown
the buggers and the water will come back and swallow them all up.
Thassa a good idea said the Mayor of Hamelin, you do that and
I will give you a sack of gold.
So the Pied Piper got out his magic flute and played the music
of Moses on it and all the rats and the mice of the town came marching
after im, left right, left right, left right, they did, like a bloody
army, and you have never seen so many rats in your life and they came
running after him in order not to miss the demonstration and that's why
it is called a rat race.
Some beatles also came but they are smaller and it is a
different sort of music. They thought they were going to a submarine,
but they weren't, they were just going to this river to meet their
maker, which is a fate worse than death. And there was no arc on the
river and no Noah and nothing and the submarine was under water and
they couldn't get to it, and so they all had to die an orrible death.
Served them right, dinnit?
And then when the rats and mice and beatles and everything
except the Church of England people of Hamelin had died, the Pied Piper
of Hamelin went to the Mayor and said, I have done what we agreed,
there is not a single mouse left alive in Hamelin, and no rat, and no
beatle, so now you give me my money.
But the Mayor said, a sack of gold is too much money for what
you did, anybody can play a flute, we can get a snake charmer from
India and he would have done it for ten-pence.
But the Pied Piper said: a promise is a promise, you promised
a sack of gold so that's what you will give me, or else, mate.
Are you threatening me, said the Mayor, do ya want me to slap
an ASBO on you, you young whipper snapper?
No, I ain't threatening you, I am only saying 'or else'.
So the Mayor tossed a handful of coins at the Pied Piper and
said now get out before I have you arrested. And there were these
hooddies and the Mayor winked at them and they grabbed the poor Pied
Piper and chucked him out of the town hall, and he fell down the town
hall steps and cut his knees and his shins, didn't he.
The Pied Piper turned livid but he didn't say anything, he
didn't even curse the fat Mayor. He took out his magic flute and
started playing it, and all the kids from Skelmersdale, from aged three
to aged twelve, came out of their houses and started dancing after the
Pied Piper and they marched through every street in Skelmersdale and
marched all the way to Liverpool and into the Mersey Tunnel and never
came out on the other side.
And all the Mums and Dads started howling and crying because
they loved their kids, even though some of them were real terrors and
this was a good way of getting rid of them. But now it was too late,
they couldn't have their children back, and the dishonest Mayor was
never re-elected. That taught him a lesson.
So we put on this play in the school hall. And for weeks
before the performance we were going through the fields around
Skelmersdale and catching every rat and mouse we could find. We put
them into a plastic bin so they couldn't get out and we fed them with
bird feed from the pet shop. And our Headteacher didn't know nothing
about it. But we did.
And when the show was over and we came on the stage to have
our mums and dads and our brothers and sisters clap and say "well done,
my darling", we brought this bucket full of rats and mice and poured it
into the audience. You should have seen how quickly they all got out of
the school. This is called Biology. There were even three old people
who were lame, and he was called Walter Wolfgang and was eighty, and
they learned to walk again - just like that. It was a miracle.
The local paper rote about it and said: "Outburst of
creativity in Quaggy Moor'. And now it is on our website.
Ritten by Janie
Documentation
and notes for translators and bloody foreigners
Quaggy Moor is a fictitious school in Skelmersdale, on the
outskirts of Liverpool. The Mersey Tunnel passes underneath the river
Mersey and connects Liverpool to Wirral.
Some of the children who never came out of the tunnel again
were later seen fighting in Iraq. But that surely is legend. Nobody
knows how they got there, what they were doing there, and who sent them
there.
Mozart wrote an opera called 'The Magic Flute' (Die
Zauberflöte), and Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to the promised
land.
The Israelites were persued by the Egyptian army under General
Sadam Hussein. But G*d threw dust into the eyes of the Egyptian army so
that they lost sight of the Israelites for a while. Meanwhile, with a
gigantic blower, he parted the waters of the Red Sea so that they stood
like two walls and all the Israelites could walk through without
getting their feet wet. The Red Army followed them but when they were
all nicely in the blower-corridor, whereas the Israelites had already
reached the other side, G*d gave an almighty cough, and the Egyptian
horses panicked, and the wheels of their chariots broke, and there was
a pile-up. That's when G*d spake the immortal words: 'Sic pereant omnes
Bulgari' (Let the buggers drown) (Exodus 14:26), and it was so.
The beetles were once human but underwent a Kafkaesqe
transformation after they had called Blackburn 'a shithole' ('A Day in
the Life'). They wanted to evade the Council Tax (formerly known as
Poll Tax) and therefore lived in a blue submarine. They taunted the
Council by crowing about it in a song ('We all live in a yellow
submarine'), naming the wrong colour so they couldn't be found.
Walter Wolfgang (wolf's
gait), who, on an earlier occasion, had been unable to get out of the
Labour Party conference fast enough (28 Sep 2005) after threatening a
straw man, came to Quaggy Moor to be cured of his lameness, and so he
was.
An ASBO is a legal instrument used to combat minor offences
(Anti-Social Behaviour Order, i.e. a Behaviour Order which is
Anti-Social, since it is directed against the proletariat).
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