Free Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) by Flann O’Brien

their infirmity, when blind pensioners came to draw their allowance, that we were able to carry on until the Great War put the business on its feet.
    Like many healthy striplings of my age, when I was fifteen I ran away to sea, but having greater intellectual powers than most lads in their ’teens, I soon saw the folly of my ways, and ran back again. There I remained until Dad passed on, leaving to me the post office in his will. The old place fetched a fancy price from the village gombeen man about whom I knew a few things he appeared to want to keep dark. Or maybe he saw possibilities for himself in the little game of “postman’s knock” as played by Dad and me. Who knows? At all events it was with a light heart and with pockets stuffed with blood money and postal orders that I turned my back on my native village never to return.
    All my life I had wanted to be a writer, so when a magazine advertisement caught my eye explaining how you can earn £10 a week in your spare time writing stories, I immediately sent off one of my postal orders and commenced the requisite correspondence course. This was my first step towards success. Of course, at first, publishing firms declined to pay me the £10 a week which I demanded for my work. But far from discouraging me, this had precisely the opposite effect. Course after course of tuition did I take with different schools, even going so far as to take out a two-term course in personality-development in case I should ever come up against some headstrong publisher face to face. I was very nearly down to my last money order when I paused to ask myself who was making £10 a week out of all this. As the answer came to me in a flash, I rushed off to rent a small room, gave myself a few honorary university degrees, and, on the same day, inaugurated the Royal Literary Correspondence College, the stately buildings of which can be seen in any large city to-day, eloquent testimony to the success which has crowned my youthful literary efforts.
    Coming to think of it, I suppose I have been fairly successful. Money no longer means very much to me. The self-conferred degrees of my earlier days have been replaced by doctorates and diplomas conferred by the most august universities and academies in Europe. I have been forced to give up living in exclusive hotels because of the hordes of playwrights, authors, and professors of literature who made my life unbearable with their endless toadying, touching of hats and touting for tutorships. I take very little part in the worldwide activities of the College nowadays, beyond an indulgent glance at the balance-sheet which my fellow-directors fake up for me once a year. My home is just wherever I care to drop the anchor of my favourite yacht. Where am I now, you will probably want to know? Well, in case there are any job-cadging littérateurs among my readers, the most I care to say is that I am, at the moment, about 4,000 miles from my native soil. From the shady verandah where I am sitting with a long, cool drink in my hand I can see the natives unloading the brightly coloured bales of cotton from the fussy little steamer, which every three months ties up to the rotten waterlogged old timbers of the jetty.
    Just beside the toe of my boot is one of the vivid green, white, and yellow grass lizards which the Krooboys make into tasteful handbags for their womenfolk. I do not raise my foot to crush it. Why, I wonder? Perhaps I am just too lazy to do so. Or perhaps it is because—and here, I believe, we are getting nearer to the truth—the colours of the creature have awakened in me a feeling that I had thought was long since dead. For, whenever I hear a few bars from an old Irish song or have a few glasses of an old Irish whiskey my thoughts go out across oceans and continents to the land where I was born. Through the swirling mists I can picture a little thatched, whitewashed crubeen on the side of a hill. Leaning over the half-door, a leather-faced