For Paula

By Ted Crowley

The Great War had Paula’s great-grandparents marry in haste in 1916. Two weeks later, the trenches of Flanders parted them forever. Brief though their union had been, that great-grandmother gave birth to a daughter, who, in her turn, bore Paula’s mother. Paula was born after her father had vanished without trace. Over the intervening sixteen years, neither mother nor daughter heard of him again until he showed up at Paula’s funeral. As a solitary hearse, unaccompanied, bearing Paula’s mortal remains, left the churchyard on its way to the crematorium, that transient father, turning his back on the hearse and cupping his hands over his weak mouth, shouted, 

"Listen, everybody, Squires Hotel, tonight the gargle’s on me!" 

Though far in distance and time from the trenches of Flanders and without a reflective backwards glance to Paula’s tragic family history, on a recent disco night in Squires, Paula and her five best friends, all girls, attended. Even though they were hardened disco-goers, they dolled themselves up, as if it had been their first madly exciting night out or as if each of them had been held in solitary confinement for hundreds of years. From various homes, other than their own homes, the six of them, like a pack of female wolves on the prowl, emerged so scantily clad that even boys incapable of imagining girls without seeing them in the flesh, were at no disadvantage in harvesting the fruits of their lustful glances; through idle, lynx-like eyes. 

On thin white under-developed legs, under bare thighs, showing a feast of feminine flesh below high hems and above block-heeled boots, the girls staggered towards the disco queue, throwing come-hither smirks at the boys and the bouncers. Six further feasts of female flesh were offered, between the low tops of their denim skirts and the high bottoms of their meagre tops, so that no youth wishing to feast on female flesh went to bed hungry that night. Their facial makeups, their hair-dos and their general carry on left nobody, least of all the boys, doubting that the girls were out to enjoy themselves and given a modicum of luck, their usual luck, which was no luck at all, a good time could be had by all. As they joined the queue, Paula screamed in an near hysterical outburst, 

"Hello! Really? Who cares? Sooner or later it happens to everybody. A baby’s no big deal. Mummy will take care of it and isn’t Mandy so lucky to have her little Mandy to return to, after she’s found herself in Bangkok."

For Paula is published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast and was launched at a reading on March 14 in Poetry Ireland in the Damer Hall, St. Stephens’ Green, Dublin. The following is some background information from Crowley about his latest work:

"I was number seven to read from a list of eight others (at the Damer Hall reading). Mine was the only prose offering. It went down very well. I was in flying form after five weeks in sunny Spain. It was launched again in Bray on April 3. 

"It’s a hard, hard story, a commentary on how things have changed, socially, in Ireland over the past 15 years or so. A young lassie falls to her death due to drink and drugs. It shows the conflict between the old morality, the Church in particular, and the decadent paganism of our modern youth. There is a powerful old priest in it who gives a telling sermon during Paula’s funeral service. Later, her five best friends go far beyond the call of duty to become pregnant and to have babies to call Paul or Paula in remembrance of their dead leader, Paula. All but one of them gets pregnant. When she fails, it is much to her and to her mother’s bitter disappointment. For one thing, her mother loses a lot of money betting with the other mothers on their own daughters, as to which girl will be the first to give birth to a little Paul or Paula. Terrible stuff!

"The story is fictional, but based on countless observed incidents taken from all over Ireland and the UK. There are two reactions to For Paula. Younger people, including parents of the cool set, do not like it. Older people assure me that it was long overdue, but that it is unlikely to made one damn bit of difference." 

Lapwing Publications is headed up by Dennis Greig, located at 1 Ballysillan Dr., Belfast BT14 8HQ. Call: 048 90 713040. Copies of the 23-page For Paula are available from at £4.95 or 10 Euro. Or contact Ted Crowley, a regular Irish American Post contributor, at crowleyted@eircom.net.

Ted Crowley Biography for Lapwing Publications:

Ted was born in the freezing month of January of 1937 on a farm in East Cork. Between the ages of 3 and 13, he attended the local National School at a time when few farmer’s sons advanced to secondary school. From a very early age 8 or 9, Ted was a cattle drover, attending cattle fairs, collecting cattle from the trains, moving cattle from one grazing to another and, between times, on dirty wet days, picking spuds.

After four years of cycling 18 miles a day, Ted packed-in secondary school just prior to his Leaving Certificate examination and enrolled at Cork’s Radiotelegraphy Institute. From there, he became a Radio Officer in the British Mercantile Service

Ted applied for a technical post in the BBC and served for two years at Alexandra Palace, until Irish Television commenced at the close of 1961. 

Over a 20-year period, he occupied numerous posts in RTE, primarily in television program making, as a cameraman, videotape editor, staff trainer, assistant to the director of engineering, and the manager responsible for the introduction of new technology, until his wife died of chronic kidney failure, following her seven years sad decline. In the meantime, Ted had qualified as a Chartered Engineer and had become a full member of the Institutions of Engineers in Ireland and the UK.

During his latter years in RTE, Ted was seconded as an adviser/expert to the United Nations on missions to Egypt, Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria, Kuwait and Bangaldesh. He installed a television system in the Sudan. 

To date, he has had hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and photographs published in over 24 publications.

It has been a long journey from an unpaid boy drover to a badly paid writer.