Episode Thirty-Seven of the Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: The Deere Departed.

Last time, we looked at the rules for writing a classic Soap Opera and decided if this Saga fulfils them all.

We had already left Lady Lynne Shrimpleton in her love-nest aboard a yacht in Morecambe Bay with her crew; Soldier Jay and James Churchill Proudfoot.

They had plans as far as future developments concerning the Khalistan Warriors were concerned.

But in the Emerald Isle, at least one character in this ongoing saga had never heard of the Khallie Scallies – and wouldn’t have wasted even a moment thinking about them if he had…

Earlier, across the sea in County Tipperary, Cormack McMullen had clambered aboard his huge tractor after the disastrous attempt by the Kelly Clan to give their former leader the sort of dignified send-off they had all hoped-for; planned – and expected.

He looked at his now empty Cattle Trailer with a mixture of regret – and anger. He slammed the warped rear ramp from which his prized Hogs had escaped together and jammed it in place by sheer brute force. Then he went to the other end of the trailer and vented his considerable fury and frustration by dragging it savagely around by one hundred and eighty degrees.

Nobody took any notice. Those people who weren’t already caught-up in the drama with the hearse outside the main entrance to Christ the King were more concerned with trying to extinguish the flames of numerous small fires which were threatening to spread into a general conflagration. Or they were desperately trying to back their cars away from the spreading flames.

And failing.

Panic fuelled by bad tempers; drugs and alcohol made a bad situation – no space to manoeuvre – even worse.

Cars were being shunted into each other – a panel beater’s wet dream when you consider how much just one dent would cost to be repaired in cars of this sort.

Men – and some women – were coming to blows.

Children were crying. And the situation was getting worse minute by minute as flames spread and more fuel tanks exploded.

A change in mood came about as a result of this in the onlookers. Sullen people had so far been dutifully lining the Main Street, the blinds and curtains of their houses and shops drawn in reluctant respect to a gang that provoked widespread fear and loathing throughout Tipperary and far beyond. But the sight of the Kellys panicking – and the fear of the conflagration these people were causing spreading to their own properties – encouraged some of the braver residents to take matters into their own hands. They went onto the street with buckets of water; jugs – even hoses – and started to tackle the fires which were already producing a pall of thick, oily smoke above the town. One of the Kelly gang who saw this as disrespectful got a bucket of water thrown over him. Another received an even worse fate after challenging an old crone who was standing outside her thatched croft armed with a chamber pot with which to fight the flames. First of all, he received a typical Irish greeting when he ordered her to go back into her house.

“Shit on yer!” she yelled – and then threw the contents of the pot straight at the man who had shouted at her. It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise because the contents of the potty included, shall we say, solid as well as liquid matter and scored a direct hit on a gangster wearing a hand-made ten thousand Euro Brioni suit.

Cormack was oblivious to this and if he hadn’t been, he would not have been sympathetic to people he saw as a blight on Irish society in the first place. These scumbags had caused him – a hard working, honest farmer – to lose four of his prized Hogs. He had sweated blood to rear these superb examples of the breed.

But the Kelly Gang had never done an honest day’s work between them in their entire lives, had they?

The God he had always believed in had done precisely nothing to punish these parasites; the misery that had caused and the obscene fortunes they had generated.

So if God wasn’t going to intervene – he was left with no choice, was he?

Cormack was so furious as these thoughts ran through his head that he ground his enormous green machine forwards and backwards several times with even more force than was actually needed to turn it around. He did so in such a way as to deliberately cause even more widespread damage to the cars he had already basically destroyed.

Finally – actually revelling in the further mass carnage he was creating – he managed to completely turn the John Deere back towards where it had come from in a welter of sparks and the sound of tortured metal.

Job finally done, he leapt from the cab and re-attached his broken trailer to his green monster, using sheer physical strength fuelled by naked, unadulterated anger to force the bent coupling head attached to the front of the trailer to the tow-bar at the rear of the tractor.

Then Cormack swung himself back into the cab, revved-up the enormous engine and slammed the monster machine into gear.  In a fury, he allowed the John Deere to lurch forward and begin the long journey back towards his own place high in the hills. The outsized tractor crunched over the wreckage of several more mind-bogglingly expensive supercars once more before accelerating back the way it had come and up the hill away from Arracrowe.

God help anyone coming the other way in the first place. Fortunately, nobody did. Cormack was so angry, he could have used his feet to stop the monster if he really had to – or so he felt.  

Besides which, it was uphill almost all the way – so who needed brakes anyway?

He passed a burnt-out police car after a while. And if there had been any sign of that Gombeen of a brother of his close to it, he would probably have run Policeman Pat over too. For Cormack’s fury was such that he saw brother Pat as the cause of the whole shebang that had gone wrong today – him and his stupid banjaxed electric Garda jalopy!  

The going got tough as he reached the steep, twisty roads which ran along the side of the Glen of Aherlow, through which ran the River Ara. Here, the huge farmer realised that his enormous tractor’s near-side driving wheel – one of the massive ones – had a puncture in its man-sized tyre. So, try as he might – and despite his almost superhuman strength – Cormack finally couldn’t make the huge beast drive in a straight line anymore: it kept slewing to the left, dragging the trailer with it.

The crash outside the church earlier had not done it any favours and it looked – and was – more than slightly the worse for wear. As we have seen, the rear ramp which the four Hogs had demolished as they escaped was battered and dented so badly that only naked brute force had persuaded it to close at all. Sheer rage was the main thing that had persuaded the battered coupling to re-attach itself to the John Deere. But Cormack used even more to force them apart again as the huge farmer mocked his nickname as `The Jolly Green Giant’ and continued to do a very passable impression of the legendary Incredible Hulk himself.

But removing the cattle trailer made no difference: the tractor still wouldn‘t drive in a straight line. So he stopped it and strode back to the cattle trailer. He grabbed it by its coupler, dragged it round so the front was pointing downhill before giving it an enormous, fury-driven shove off the road.

It trundled slowly down the slope towards the river, picked up speed and turned onto its side, slid for a while and then rolled slowly upside-down, screeching to a stop as scree and larger rocks under it scraped and tore at the already tortured metal. In a moment, the weight of its spinning wheels and the over-stressed axle they were attached to caused the entire structure to collapse in on itself altogether in a cloud of dust and sparks.

Once it had finally settled – and Cormack tired of shaking his fists and swearing at it – our outraged Irish farmer turned his considerable ire on the John Deere itself.

He shouted at it. Swore at it. Kicked it. To no effect at all.  Finally, he abandoned it.

Looking towards the heavens, he shook a huge hairy fist skywards and then came out with curses aimed in the Almighty’s direction that a good Catholic Irishman really shouldn’t even know, let alone put words to. Then he turned back towards the John Deere, slewed as it was at the edge of a gentle slope which led directly down to the river and strode towards the stranded green monster. Next, he spat at it.

Then he pulled himself up into the cab; made sure the gearbox was in neutral, let the handbrake off and leapt out.

He stood impassively as the enormous tractor slowly began to inch forwards. There was no wall to stop it as its front end tipped onto the rough grass by the side of the road before gravity and momentum together conspired to drag it away from the tarmac. It basically slid in an arc which slewed gradually but steadily towards the river as the tractor gained speed until it finally came to a stop as it ploughed into the reeds growing by the side of the water and sank deep into the mud.

Cormack made an obscene gesture towards it, turned on his heel and headed back towards the hills – and home.

But before he did so, he had pointed a huge hairy hand at the John Deere and yelled:

“You’ve let me down, you big, useless green Devil! You’ve betrayed me, you hopeless pagan hussy! `Powerful!’ sez he; `Indestructible!’ sez he; `Will never let you down!’ sez he – and just look at-cha now; you great big heap of scrap metal! I’ve seen the error of me ways and I hate you! Them Proddies were right all along! I have no use for you anymore, you shameless American slut! I don’t need you anymore – I’ve found something much better! I’m buying meself a brand new Massive Ferguson!“ (I suspect the slip of the tongue was deliberate…)

John Deere?

Sounds more like a classic case of Deere John to me… 

—-

Cormack was oblivious to the damage he had left trailing in his wake. It wasn’t just the millions of Euros of Supercar wreckage he had left behind him on the main street of Arracrowe. Or the spreading inferno which emergency appliances sent from Tipperary Town couldn’t get to because of the press of other mind-bogglingly expensive vehicles blocking the way in their desperation to get away from the initial assault by a tank-like tractor and its seemingly insane driver.

The firemen stood by – powerless – as the flames spread ever closer. One car after another exploded even as the braver – or more desperate – members of the Kelly Gang tried to save them using puny fire extinguishers or bottles of water they had looted from McCluskie’s General Store.

Whether they had already been consumed by flames or were simply waiting for the inevitable to happen – cars worth an unimaginable fortune were completely blocking a street the Fire Brigade really needed to access before The Great Fire of Arracrowe got any worse.

Being burnt-alive in your trophy automobile or blown-up as adjacent vehicles’ petrol tanks exploded was not a Fate Worse Than Death as far as most of the Kelly Gang were concerned. As we noted earlier, they were concerned with something even more terrifying than that.

So we go Full-Circle to the soft-belly of the very thing so many Irish people fear more than famine, damnation – or even the Black & Tans.

That was the simple concept of Making a Show of Yourself.

Siobhán Aleksandovna Kelly had planned the most sumptuous funeral in history as far as the Irish Republic was concerned. It was an event that would write the name Kelly firmly into every history book ever to see the light of day in the future: a day of unparalleled pride for herself and the other wastes of space who made up her Gang of thugs, pimps, pornographers and the drug-dealing dregs of humanity.

Instead, an unmitigated disaster of proportions so large that they could never be fully comprehended had been played-out live on the internet.

News channels all over the planet would soon be showing and endlessly repeating the most dramatic of these: the crash on the main street of Arracrowe as supercars were reduced to scrap by a huge green tractor surely driven by a relative of Finn McCool himself.

This was the story most news teams had initially latched onto: Finn McCool was one of the mythical giants who, along with an even bigger Scottish ogre, apparently is responsible for the iconic Causeway named after them in Antrim on the east coast of Ulster closest to Scotland. Cormack McMullen looked exactly like one of Finns’ long-lost relations.

The incident involving him, a gun-toting hoodlum and a swede also caught the public’s imagination from Belfast to Beijing, Bogota to Belgrade – particularly when a speeded-up, Black & White version of it set to the theme tune of Laurel & Hardy saw the light of day.

This was almost as popular as street scenes of burning cars and scurrying people which – caught on individuals’ mobile phone cameras as well as the official ones and also speeded up to be accompanied by Irish fiddle music of the worst diddly-dah variety – were viewed millions of times right across the globe to the great hilarity of everybody watching. The incident with the old woman, the slops and the hoodlum in an expensive suit was considered to be the pick of all the incidents recorded on the day.

But the escape of a Squadron of Hogs which involved the wreckage of a hearse which had been caught in real-time on countless cameras and would be played in slow motion, often to the strains of The Dambusters March or the theme from classic 633 Squadron proved to be an absolute classic which has accumulated more hits on the internet than virtually any other footage of any real event ever recorded. The highlight of this drama – the pigs running inside the church and then emerging from it before flying towards the side of the hearse and – one by one – smashing their way through it – had been caught from all angles by cameras sanctioned by the Kellys themselves and played-out live on their YouTube channels.

The pigs were visible from inside the church and even from inside the hearse as they approached and then wrecked it and from various other angles as they emerged from the other side and disappeared over the wall of the car park.

Nobody was spared this treatment – you could see Father Finbar O’Fooligan lying senseless on the ground and a big man with a huge beard and what seemed to be an enormous dress clinging onto flashing candles as he stood in a pool of some sort of liquid, the tinny voices of someone singing `Happy Birthday Dear Girlfriend” just about discernible in the closing frames of the coverage. Everyone involved hadn’t so much been made a show of as actually made a show that viewers seemingly just couldn’t get enough of all over the world. It was humiliation on a truly global scale.

So – for all the wrong reasons – the Kellys’ place in history had been assured for years to come. The Gang – and the Clan – were a laughing-stock from the Arctic to the Antarctic; from Australasia to Asia.

Siobhán Kelly realised all this even as it was happening. And resolved – long before the endless clips of the unmitigated disaster hit the World-Wide Web – that someone was going to pay for it.

The Mulligan Gang from Limerick were already going to be targeted with at least one bomb and some other examples being made of them even before the funeral. But some unsigned wreaths which had arrived at the funeral parlour in Tipperary Town had sealed an even worse fate:

You may think we don’t give a toss

About your top man’s tragic loss

You’re on your way out

There isn’t a doubt:

We’re going to bump-off your new boss!

Joe Kelly? A fool of a bloke

 His plans for his Clan all a joke

They trusted in him

Despite him being dim

And now: they have gone up in smoke!

“Siobhán Kelly” the heavenly choir sang

“A face like an Orang-utang”

She’s ugly; she’s hairy

Young kids find her scary

But soon she will go – with a BANG!

The last, particularly insulting wreath had a picture of a cartoon bomb attached to it – a round, black object with a fizzing fuse – to which someone had appended, in big letters:

JUST LIKE BROTHER JOE!

Siobhán was beside herself with a mixture of grief and sheer, unadulterated fury even before seeing these latest insults. Those Poltroons the Mulligans may not have signed these wreaths but the form of the verse – Limericks – was a perverse joke by these peasants which was not lost on her. They’d be sorry.

But her greatest fury was reserved for a wreath which was signed. It was a very sombre-looking, expensive work of art which simply said this:

SO SORRY TO HEAR OF YOUR LOSS. SINCERELY, THE KHALISTAN WARRIORS.

She was incandescent with rage when she first saw this. Siobhán only had the vaguest knowledge of who these people actually were. But she knew that Joe-Boy had brought-in two of the best men from her father’s contacts in Russia to deal with them – only to be beaten to the draw with an explosion that she knew in her guts they – and they alone – were responsible for.

And she swore to have vengeance on them, first and foremost…

But were the people known in Barnsley as “T’urban Guerrilas”even aware of the gathering storm of anger and antipathy which was gathering out there in the real world?

Where were the Khalistan Warriors at this moment in time?

What was `Chopper’ – Ranjit Singh Chopra – planning to do next in any case?

Find out next time in the next enthralling instalment of

The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga.