Part Twenty-Six of the Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: John is very Deere.

Last time, we left James Churchill Proudfoot, a.k.a. Threefeet of the Yard and Chief Operating Officer of Shrimpleton Town AFC facing disaster as the Summer Gala he had been tasked with organising went from bad to worse.

Now we travel in space and back in time to County Tipperary in the Republic of Ireland.

Maybe three hundred and fifty miles away from Cumberside Island to the south-west, Cormack McMullen had risen early – as farmers tend to do.

It was Market Day in nearby Galbally and today, Cormack had hitched-up the cattle truck behind his Pride & Joy – the simply enormous John Deere tractor he owned – and loaded four of his biggest pigs into it. First, though, he had to fill the truck with lots of Turnips and Swedes to ensure the greedy creatures spent the journey getting even fatter – for these were four Boars and they might fight if there was nothing to occupy them otherwise.

Then he stood back to admire the machine that was going to take them all to Market.

This massive mechanical marvel had been paid for by EU Grants and other subsidies which, if things like this were not available, would be well out of the price range of most Irish farmers. Right in front of his eyes was over a zillion Euros’ worth of engineering – automatic gearbox; air conditioned; heated seat; stereo – you name it. (I may have exaggerated the cost a little – but it was very expensive, anyway.)

So why had he bought it? Efficiency? Versatilty? Reliabilty?

No – Cormack had bought it because it was the most expensive machine on the list of options he was presented with by the Department of Agriculture in Dublin.

But even more important than that – it was green!

For Cormack was a patriot. Nothing could be more patriotic for an Irishman than driving a huge green tractor designed and built in the United States of America, could it? Well – not in Cormack’s head anyway. Besides which, he would describe the eighteen-litre machine like this:

“Powerful! Indestructible! Will never let you down! What more do you want?”

You might argue that surely, getting your hands on a Massey-Ferguson instead would be far more patriotic, wouldn’t it? Harry Ferguson was the fellow Irishman, after all, who basically invented tractors back in the day, didn’t he?

But Cormack would not only not have a Massey-Ferguson machine given, he would not allow such an abomination anywhere near his farm.

He ignored or even boycotted any of his neighbours who purchased these devilish contraptions.

Even the thought of machines of this stamp was horrifying to him – and he’d probably deny Ferguson’s place in history too.

Because Harry Ferguson was a Protestant – and nothing good had ever come from anything those anti-Christs had ever done! Cormack McMullen would rather deal with Lucifer himself!

Besides which, his preferred monster – according to the local salesman – had an `18-litre engine, 913hp max power, and up to 4,234Nm of torque’.

Cormack didn’t actually know what this meant other than an eighteen litre engine needed a hell of a lot of Red Diesel. But the John Deere was the sort of Boy’s Toy which country folk such as farmers like himself would always want to have, in exactly the same way the Kelly Gang had always aspired to drive supercars.

The big, red-faced Irish patriot – perhaps shamefully known behind his back to his neighbours as the “Jolly Green Giant” despite his well-known `ferocious’ temper – was just about to set off to market when his mobile phone rang.

It was one of what he called `the Shades’: a policeman. But this one was his brother, Pat. He pressed the green key to answer and said:

“Well boi – supwatch der?”

(What’s up?)

“This new jalopy of mine, Cormack – it’s pure fried me head!”

“The electric yokiebus?”

(`Yokiebus’ – nothing to do with public transport in reality.)

“The very one! Nawfull thing! Any chance you could give it a gander? It’s feckarsing about and I think it needs a top-up of the old electricity! Call me thick as a ditch if you must but I’m a hundred miles nowhere:  I haven’t got a handle on all this new-fangled technothummery yet.”

“I thought that these electric car hoojas was supposed to be fair pure right class, Pat!”

“Ga!’ Mine’s guff for starters! The Polis bought them on a figary! Pig Iron is what they are, as sure as God made apples! Can ye have a wee gawk at it, Cormack – before it becomes the Wreck of Hespers?”

Cormack agreed – he would stop by on his way to market.

“Good Man Yourself” said Pat – and waited with his dead patrol car by the side of the road for his (much) bigger brother to arrive.

As we noted earlier, the only thing Tipperary farmer Cormack McMullen had really taken on board about his monster of a John Deere tractor -18-litre engine, 913hp max power, and up to 4,234Nm of torque, remember – was the copious amounts of red diesel this thing devoured.

Maybe he should have taken a bit more notice of the fact that it had an eighteen litre engine. To give some sort of comparison, this was the same size as the US’s famous World War II Sherman tank. In other words, it wasn’t exactly small.

Think about this – if you own a car, how big is your engine?

A massive lump of the sort Cormack owned needed several high-performance batteries connected in parallel just to provide the current for it to start.

But Cormack McMullen wasn’t troubled by technicalities such as these. All he knew is that if his brother was having trouble with his new electric gizmo, he had enough batteries in his tractor to not only stock your average Dunne’s Store but to actually light the place up as well. 

—

Pat McMullen was relieved beyond words to finally hear – and then see – the unmistakable shape of his brother’s Juggernaut of a tractor and the cattle trailer bumping along behind it as it bore down upon him – sorry – as it and the four Boars in the back did that – on the side road heading towards Arracrowe in the distance. The huge contraption shuddered to a halt, dwarfing Pat’s relatively pathetic little police-issue vehicle `yokiebus’ and Cormack leant out of the cab.

“Owzit hangin’?” he asked his younger brother. “I was thinkin’ – me life is run by pigs when you come to think of it! Four in the back and now one by the roadside!” 

He climbed out of the cab to find Pat anxiously clutching the Handbook for the Hyundai Kona. But – once Cormack had descended from his heated seat high above the roof of the police car – the older man dismissed it with a wave of his huge, hairy hand.

“We don’t need that Bolloxology!” he said. “Leave this to me! I’ve done this sort of thing before! Hold these!”

He pulled two starter leads with crocodile clips on each end out of the cab of the John Deere.

“Now, we just have to link these Wee Crateurs to your flat battery and Bob’s your Auntie’s Husband!”

He unlatched the bonnet of the police car and started to lift the lid until Pat stopped him. Pointing at the handbook, he said:

“It says here that the High Voltage Battery is located under the chassis.”

“Under the chassis? Be-Jay-Zeus! – that’s what happens when you buy a car built by heathens! If God had meant us to put batteries under the car, He wouldn’t have given us engine bays to put them in would He?”

With a sigh, he tried to squeeze his huge bulk under the Hyundai – and failed.

“Right, Pat! Listen up!” he commanded, handing his brother the jump leads. “You take these and attach them to the battery: I’ll hold the car! You’ll see two thick orange cables on the side of the battery itself. One of these doofers had a cross on it: attach the red lead to that one and then twist the crocodile clippies until you can see the shiny wiring under the orange sheathy stuff. Then attach the other lead – the black fellah – to the yoke that doesn’t have a cross on it. Scratch that one up good and proper too and we’re set to burn!”

So saying, Cormack reached down, put his enormous hand under the wheel arch of the car and lifted one side of it right off the ground as his brother crawled under it and did what he was told. 

It took a while. Even though Cormack had deliberately translated tricky terminology like `the minus sign’ to `the one without a cross on it’ so that Pat wouldn’t get confused, it was a struggle. But finally, it was done; Pat had scrambled out from under the car and Cormack had dropped it back onto its wheels once more.

Now, he was ready to do the clever bit.

As he had said, he had done this before.

Well – to be strictly accurate, one of his neighbours (`Fitzy’ for Fitzgerald) had done this before- but told him about it.

Taking a tip from Fitzy, Cormack hadn’t bothered scrabbling around removing battery covers and whatnot in his own tractor: he had invested in a clever bit of kit – an adaptor – which plugged directly into the cab’s cigarette lighter socket. This thing made a direct connection to the batteries. Then – if he remembered what Fitzy had told him correctly – you just connected the red jump lead to the positive terminal on the adaptor; the black one to the negative lead – and threw a switch.

“Right!” he shouted to his brother. “Get in the car, turn the ignition on and get ready to start her as soon as the dials light-up!”

Cormack waited until Pat was in the patrol car and giving him a thumbs-up. Then he sat in the driver’s seat of his monster of a machine, re-started the engine and then flicked the switch.

There was an immediate explosion off to his right as the dials in Pat’s car shattered with such force that the windscreen was actually blown-out. Under the vehicle, the High Voltage Battery had gone off like a bomb and blasted a hole in the floor near the back of the Kona around which small blue flames were licking from the melted metal clips which still attached themselves to the scorched orange cables they had been forced into.

Things were even worse in the cab of the John Deere. A huge blue arc of electricity had blown a hole in the side of it and sent a seventeen thousand volt bolt of electricity straight into the giant sitting at the controls of the machine. But – as even Heathens, Millwall supporters and Kerrymen know – it’s amps, not volts that kill you and Cormack was only knocked-out.

His prone body slipped out of the driver’s seat and as it did so, gradually pushed against the handbrake, harder and harder as he lost consciousness and his huge bulk overcame the resistance of the safety mechanism itself.  And as it did, the enormous wheels of the massive green machine started to move – slowly at first but then with increasing speed as it gathered momentum – and, pushed along by the sheer weight of the cargo in the attached cattle truck and with its automatic gearbox taking charge – began to accelerate. Down the hill towards Arracrowe.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, there was a further complication…

Sadly, despite Cormack McMullen’s earlier airy assurance to his brother that he know what he was doing because he’d done something similar in the past, this wasn’t strictly true.

Later, Cormack would recount this disaster to Fitzy, the neighbour who it had happened to, personally.

“Sure, dat’s what happened to me too!” Fitzy said in that slow, irritatingly thick Kerry accent of his.

“De car was ruined! An’ Oi had me fizzog half burnt-off too!:  dat’s de measure of de matter!”

Cormack cursed himself. He should have listened to `d’ould lad’ after all: “Never trust a Kerryman!”

But Cormack had used the John Deere to re-charge an electric vehicle before. It was a quad bike he had bought for his oldest grandson, Barney, which had a flat battery. He’d used the same jump-leads; the same adaptor; the same cigarette lighter socket in the cab. But nothing had blown-up: and the bike actually started at the end of it all.

Once though – before Fitzy had told him about the cigarette lighter socket trick – Connor had tried to start Bridgey – `the wife’s’ – car. But, however he tried, he just couldn’t get the jump leads to stretch far enough to reach the terminals under the back seat of her ancient Volkswagen Beetle. So he took one of the heavy-duty batteries out of the tractor to do the deed instead.

Now, as we have seen, Connor McMullen is a big guy, The Jolly Green Giant as far as his neighbours were concerned.

But not, sadly – a gentle giant…

John Deere batteries are not designed to be removed by unqualified electricians – they need specialised tools to do the job properly. But it’s amazing what a bit of determination and brute force can do.

Cormack got the battery out of his enormous tractor with a struggle. Getting the thing back into the beast proved far trickier, though.

Once again, brute force and a large screwdriver had finally done the job and he managed to successfully re-connect it in series with the rest of them.

From that time on, though, a red light which always went off on the massive console in his cab once he started the engine stayed on. As we have seen, Cormack McMullen didn’t have much time for technical manuals and such-like `Bolloxology’. So he just ignored it.

He shouldn’t have. Because the huge screwdriver he had used to lever part of the battery back into place had cracked its casing. And ever since, concentrated sulphuric acid had been slowly but steadily dribbling out.

It ran harmlessly along a plastic fairing on the side of the tractor at first and then found its way by gravity down to the ground.

Unfortunately though, it met something that was not made of plastic on the way.

This thing was made out of metal. Sulphuric acid may not react with plastic but metal is another matter altogether. And since the day Cormack had forced the huge battery back into place, a steady stream of corrosive liquid had been slowly dissolving this particular piece of metal. It was just a matter of time before it would fail altogether.

And today – of all days – was the time it chose to do exactly that.

So – as a huge Irish farmer started to stir from unconsciousness behind the wheel of an enormous runaway tractor and a heavily-laden cattle truck, chemistry finally triumphed.

A metal pipe fractured and red liquid started to seep out of it.

This was a hydraulic brake pipe and the liquid inside it was designed to compress in order to activate the brakes to slow-down and then stop the countless tons that a John Deere and its trailer on the back represented.

As the run-away tractor and the cattle trailer started to trundle away from him and head towards Arracrowe with ever-gathering speed. Policeman Pat – his hair singed and his face blackened, staggered from his patrol car.

“Cormack!” he yelled. “Come Back! You can’t go down there!”

Then, recovering his dignity somewhat and remembering who he was, he added – at the top of his voice: “Stop! In the name of the Law!”

But that didn’t work either. The unconscious man in the tractor couldn’t hear him; the pigs in the back were oblivious and there was nobody – such as the authorities – around to stop what was going to happen next anyway.

“Where the hell are the police when you need them? What do we play the eedyits for?” thought Pat without even the slightest trace of irony.

He suddenly realised with a sinking heart that he’d just have to contact Sergeant McFuddleifan back at the Barrracks; come clean and take what was coming to him, however unpleasant or embarrassing that might be. He just fervently hoped that the vindictive Sergeant wouldn’t make a show of himself as a result.

Regrettably, the slow-witted Policeman Pat then also realised that the radio he used in the car had been wrecked by the huge surge of electricity which had just blasted through it – and his personal phone was in his previous patrol car along with his forgotten hi-viz gear. 

McFuddleifan would go ballistic when he finally learnt all this; he would assume that Pat didn’t even have the guts to admit to what was happening right here and now as even the Big Wigs in the Garda were invested in an expectation for the funeral of Joe-Boy Kelly to go off without a hitch.

But Sergeant McFuddleifan would soon have far more worrying things to bother himself about…

Pat’s heart sank further as he realised he’d also left his Warrant Card; baton; pepper-spray – and his gun – in the other car. All he had remembered to retrieve from it was his body-worn camera.

And – very sadly for him – it had recorded everything that had happened so far, from the scheduled arrival of his (very) big brother to his unscheduled departure towards a little town in the wilds of Tipperary where the biggest and most expensive funeral the Irish Republic had ever witnessed was taking place at that very moment.

And – despite the usual assurances that data gathered by large organisations is always  absolutely secure due to all sorts of legislation; built-in internal vetting procedures which are absolutely fire and foolproof: A.I. oversight and all sorts of other safeguards – these `classified’ images were being viewed all over the world on the internet in just a matter of hours…

Well, it looks as if there are going to be five uninvited guests at the funeral of Joe-Boy Kelly, doesn’t it?: the giant Cormack McMullen and four of his equally enormous prize porkers.

Oblivious to this, James Churchill Proudfoot was also fearing uninvited guests back at The Black Pool, Shrimpleton Town’s football ground far away to the east on Cumberside Island.

These were the seven people he vaguely recalled selling Executive tickets to in the local pub to celebrate the Summer Gala had had been tasked to organise – and failed.

If they turned-up unexpectedly to demand their money back, what was the Chief Operating Officer of the Shrimpies going to do?

Find out next time in the latest instalment of the scintillating

Sensational Shrimpleton Saga.