“Straightaway, Father, if it’s all the same to you. There’ll be a lot of men putting in for a job like this, and I wouldn’t want to be behindhand.”

Christ, what a job I have, thought Father Conroy and, raging, he cleared a space on his desk and began to write. All the time, Joe kept talking about an article he had read in the News of the World about an attempt to force open a tomb to prove that some writer was really someone else, or that someone else’s tomb was really the writer’s – he could not remember which.

“Whisht, man,” Father Conroy called in exasperation. “Will ye let me write the bloody thing!”

It wasn’t too bad, as references went. Father Conroy watched Joe perusing it, chanting the words under his breath in the manner of the national school spelling class. “‘Sober, industrious, Mr. Halpin is a young man who has never been known to start trouble. He comes of decent, respectable stock...’” Father Conroy flinched as he listened. “‘A man of parts, Mr. Halpin has still to find the proper outlet for his talents. I have no doubt that when he finds it, he will make his mark...’”

God forgive me, thought Father Conroy, in despair. The leavings of our educational system, fit for nothing at fourteen but to chant his tables and spellings! What opportunities could he make anything of? No farmer called on Joe, except as a last resort; there was no man in the parish quicker to disable a tractor or put a milking machine out of action.

Joe looked up, eyes shining. “This is the best yet, Father.” Carefully he folded it into the wad of literary clippings. “D’ye know, Father, I think I’ll keep this, it’s so good, and not waste it on that crowd in Nottingham.”

And, as he went out the door, he called, “God bless you, Father. You can handle a pen with the best of them.” He hitched his duffle bag full of cornflakes up on his shoulder and went off down the drive, content for another week or two.

He was hardly out of sight when the Sergeant arrived to ask Father Conroy to come and settle a dispute. Father Conroy had no trouble in guessing who had started the dispute – another of his oddballs, Mrs. O’Flynn. They all come to me, he thought, the oddballs. They’re all I ever get. Young Farrell gets the cream, the decent citizenry, the sane and the sober. About time I did something about it, gave myself an agonizing reappraisal, as Farrell would say. Maybe I need a new image.