Free Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott Page B

workers scheme had paid off, and what he saw as their loyalty and gratitude.
    Not much gratitude with the younger ones, Tim said to me. Damned sullen and surly, most of them. And of course I realised he must have felt himself treated as a stranger in his own home town. Expected to be recognised, even after all these years. Expected to be hailed and greeted and made much of. But we all nurture a little niggle in our hearts over those who flee the sinking ship. Those who are not prepared to stick it out. Nessie sided with him. And her mother, oh yes, Mary too.
    And I’ve got to confess I am out of it all a bit myself, these days. I know my own crowd and having the shops keeps me up to date on some things.
    But I was a bit taken aback when I heard the other week how the secondary school has just introduced a course on the Koran, and they even passed a majority resolution in the primary school against singing Christmas carols because it was cultural imperialism or something. That’s going to extremes.
    None of the ones I knew went as far as that. Though I do hear with the very young generation there is a growing fashion for the girls to keep their heads covered, even their faces and I did see a group of three schoolgirls, just last week, who looked more like an old Arabic photograph than anything I have ever seen right here in Pristina.
    I think we have avoided some of the siller fashions, that is the good thing about a small country town. True, the boys in the garage down on the main road wore their hair long and ratty years after long hair went out of date, Tim tells me. And there was young Donnie Doolan who worked in the barbershop for a while, he startled us all with his Mohawk. But that soon grew out and he was, you know, a bit of a pansy anyway so it was trying to upgrade his image, to use the modern jargon, and besides, Donnie’s old man threw him out as soon as he shaved his head. I let him sleep in the room above the barber’s for a while but it was clear he was a lost cause and I think we were all relieved when he cleared off. Kings Cross I suppose, somewhere like that. If you don’t stick out like a sore thumb, in this town you get on all right I’m saying.
    I don’t know what will happen with this oriental fashion, but it really did get me a bit unnerved. Especially as old Mrs Gleeson told me just this morning that at the secondary school ninety percent of the girls are all registered as Albanian Muslims – even though the lot of them were born right here, in this country. Well, Mrs Gleeson says the pressure is really on among the peer groups for them all to go what she calls Fundamentalist. And Mrs O’Dwyer is sending her next girl over to Saddleback, to the nuns. It hurts, you know, hearing about that.
    Nobody tells me anything these days, you know that. Part of the price you pay for being old, don’t think I don’t know that. And I would never have believed that selling the rest of the Weatherhead inheritance would have made such a difference in the way people treated you. Or, for that matter, how much that land meant in asserting the status of certain other newcomers in the place. Not that they haven’t worked for it. But there’s no attention paid, these days, to the pioneers and the people who did all the hard yakka of settling the district, making it what it is, giving it its name and its character. That’s all gone.
    No, is that so? A Law and Order squad? And who’s behind all this? Wouldn’t you know, but the pub’s a good centre, course it is. Bet they have suffered too at this upsurge of ­religious puritanism among our Albanian friends. They don’t really believe in alcohol, in the Koran, isn’t that the case? Ernie’s a bit of a hothead, always was. And what does he think can be done about it? No, I hadn’t heard that story, sounds more like a mob of Irish ruffians, you ask me; more like the days when those louts, all