The Poor Mouth_ A Bad Story About the Hard Life - Flann O'Brien [30]
About three weeks after the brother’s flight, I received a letter from him. It was in a costly long envelope, in the top left-hand corner of which were intertwined the letters L.U.A. (I was amused afterwards to notice in an Irish dictionary that lua means ‘a kick’.) The notepaper inside was very thick and expensive, indeed it was noisy to unfold. The heading, in black, shining crusted letters was LONDON UNIVERSITY ACADEMY, 120 Tooley Street, London, S.W.2. Down along the left margin was a list of the matters in which the Academy offered tuition—Boxing, Foreign Languages, Botany, Poultry Farming, Journalism, Fretwork, Archaeology, Swimming, Elocution, Dietetics, Treatment of High Blood Pressure, Ju-Jutsu, Political Science, Hypnotism, Astronomy, Medicine in the Home, Woodwork, Acrobatics and Wire-Walking, Public Speaking, Music, Care of the Teeth, Egyptology, Slimming, Psychiatry, Oil Prospecting, Railway Engineering, A Cure for Cancer, Treatment of Baldness, La Grande Cuisine, Bridge and Card Games, Field Athletics, Prevention and Treatment of Boils, Laundry Management, Chess, The Vegetable Garden, Sheep Farming, Etching and Drypoint, Sausage Manufacture in the Home, The Ancient Classics, Thaumaturgy Explained, and several other subjects the nature of which I did not understand properly from their names. What corpus of study was alluded to, for instance, in The Three Balls? Or Panpendarism? Or The Cultivation of Sours?
Here was the letter:
‘Sorry I could not write before now but I was terribly busy not only settling in at Tooley Street and organizing the office but also meeting people and making contacts. I suppose everybody got a bit of a shock when they found the bird had flown that morning but I could not face a formal farewell with Collopy puling and puking in the background with tears of whiskey rolling down his cheeks and gaunt Father Fahrt giving me his blessings in lordly Latin and maybe Annie quietly crying into her prashkeen. You know how I dislike that sort of thing. It makes me nervous. I’m sorry all the same that I had to be a bit secretive with yourself but the plans I have been working on made it essential that Collopy would know nothing because he has a wonderful gift for making trouble and poking his nose in where it will deluge everything with a dirty sneeze. Did you know that he has a brother in the police at Henley, not far from here? If he knew my exact address—which in no circumstances should you reveal to the bugger—I am sure I would have the other fellow peering around here, and for all I know he may be worse than Collopy himself. Needless to say I did not use any of the addresses the Rev. Fahrt gave me, for Jesuits can be a far closer police force than the men in blue. When I get things more advanced you must come over and give me a hand because I know this industry I’m entering on is only in its infancy, that there’s bags of money in it if the business is properly run, and plenty to go round for everybody. It’s a better life here, too. The pubs are better, food is good and cheap, and the streets aren’t crawling with touchers like Dublin. Information and help can be got on any subject or person under the sun for a quid, and often for only a few drinks.
‘Do not pay too much attention to the list of subjects in the margin, I don’t see why we shouldn’t deal with them and plenty more as well, e.g. Religious Vocations, but I am not yet publicly using this notepaper. You could regard the list in the margin as a manifesto, a statement of what we intend to do. We really aim at the mass-production of knowledge, human accomplishment and civilization. We plan the world of the future, a world of