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Klaus Bung: Drama at Quaggy Moor
Length: 1402 words = 7392 characters
E-mail: klaus.bung@rtc-idyll.com
Written in 2005

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).