THE Sunday World had a fascinating, super, soaraway exclusive on recently deceased Portadown loyalist Muriel Gibson. Which meant that the Belfast Telegraph had a fascinating, super, soaraway exclusive on her too, because the BelTel website on Monday is a parking space for the most click-friendly content from its Sunday tabloid sisters, the Sunday World and Sunday Life.
It seems Muriel wasn’t actually called Muriel by her chums in the fashionable loyalist literary salons of north Armagh. It seems her pals called her ‘Madame Defarge’, the revenge-crazed anti-hero of the Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities.
Squinter’s going to be honest here and say that he didn’t know that in the citadel of Loyal Ulster they are in the habit of giving each other nicknames taken from the literary classics. But every day’s a school day and the knowledge that when the LVF in Portadown, Lurgan, Craigavon and Tandragee weren’t killing Catholics they spent their down time immersed in the pursuit of intellectual insight only increases his admiration for that fine loyal yeomanry.
So Squinter called a few friends in the Markethill area and asked, “Can this be true?” And came the answer, “Yes.”
It appears the quartermaster of the LVF in the early 90s was called ‘Moby-Dick’, and while that made him popular with the ladies in the Flag and Flute, it was in fact unconnected to the dimensions of his loyal lanyard.
“He was a man who had been guilty of many heinous crimes,” a pal told Squinter. “And the knowledge of those horrors led him to question the nature of fate and free will, just like the author of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. It so happens that he was indeed hung like a donkey, but that was just a coincidence.”
Meanwhile, LVF leader Billy Wright may have been known by the media as ‘King Rat’, but away from the public glare his paramilitary colleagues called him ‘Jay Gatsby’.
Squinter was told by a loyalist source: “Like Gatsby, Billy earned a fortune from shady activities and he also loved to throw wild parties. Okay, nobody at Gatsby’s parties ended up with one behind the ear in a lime pit, but the similarities remain. LVF members were all massive fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald, of course, so it was kind of inevitable that Billy would get the Gatsby nickname. As with Gatsby, Billy was beset by class anxiety and crowd isolation. Gatsby exorcised his demons by frantic social climbing. Billy just killed Catholics.”
Meanwhile, a cymbal-player in the Richhill Rising Sons of Swinger Fulton’s Mad Mate has been telling Squinter of the fascinating nickname given to his former commander in the LVF/UDR.
“They guy never went anywhere without a copy of Homer’s ‘Iliad’ in his back pocket. We’d be taking a break from digging a hole for a dead Taig and while the rest of us would be sitting around smoking and talking about Albert Camus and irrationality or Cormac McCarthy’s debt to Hemingway, he’d have his head in the Iliad. He once told me he was fascinated by the poem’s epic themes of conflict, fate, honour and whacking people. All of us in the mid-Ulster LVF and 2 UDR had read the Iliad, of course, and so while his friends and family called him Ratface, we started calling him Agamemnon. There was something about the contradiction of his selfishness and raw courage that reminded everybody in the Mahon Barracks mess of the Mycenaean warrior-king. Incredibly, while Agamemnon was famously murdered by his wife and her lover, he got bumped off by his fancy woman and her dealer.”
Next week in the Sunday World/BelTel:
• Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair on studying the Classics as a mature student.
• How will the UVF’s Ballysillan Book Club survive without Winkie Irvine?
How the DUP joined the Ballymena rubber chicken circuit
Gather ye round and a story I’ll tell
Of how the brave DUP rang the race warning bell.
How they saved Ballymena from the outsider threat
And how Loyal Ulster is e’er in their debt.
In the Year of Our Lord Twenty and twenty five
The once-proud wee town had become a grim dive.
Once packed with flute bands and Protestant kirks,
It was now full of Romas and barber-shop Turks.
And the newcomers didn’t know how to behave,
No ‘Great mornin’, hi’, no warm, cheery wave.
And in no time at all the place was a mess
And where it would stop was anyone’s guess.
Robbers and rapists and criminals various,
Milking the state with schemes most nefarious.
Taking our jobs while lazing at home,
Worshipping voodoo, Islam and Rome.
And thoughts of the past saddened ordinary folk,
The days of cheap heroin and talcum-free coke.
Good times when community brightened the day,
With weed on the slate from the bold UDA.
So the DUP hollered ‘Enough is enough!’
It’s time to get serious, time to get tough.
No more Romanians destroying the town,
No more Filipinos dragging us down.
It’s the end of the influx of military-aged blokes
And we don’t care how much libtard anger it stokes.
But though we’re about to step up to the mark.
Can we just say a word on our mates in Moy Park?
They need lots of people to do things with chicken,
But some of those jobs tend to gross out and sicken.
And we see when it’s smoke break time at Moy Park,
Those jobs are best done by folk who are dark.
So we’ll say no to migrants while welcoming guests
Handy at cutting up wings, legs and breasts.
We’ll keep out the Bulgarian, Indian and Turk,
Except for the ones game for slaughterhouse
work.
And if our position remains somewhat murky,
At Christmas the factory will send us a turkey.
And they’ll pluck it and dress it and gut out the gore
From an XXL bird that won’t fit through the door.
And while we continue to keep out foreign vermin,
We’ll ring up the Moy Park HR to determine
How many brown workers they need for their shifts,
And then we’ll be smothered with chicken-based gifts.
As the tired workers yawn and head home to their billets,
We’ll fill up our freezers with southern fried fillets.
And for every 10 Roma our lobbying brings,
We’ll get chilli goujons and barbecue wings.
And of course we’ll keep saying we’re doing our best,
To keep out the thugs who have shit on our nest,
But we’ll keep making space for the brown factory guys,
So we can keep on enjoying the garlic-herb thighs.
