The Tay Is Wet Read Online Free PDF Page B

fixed now, at once, immediately,’ Mrs Deery interrupted.
    ‘Don’t worry, Mam, I won’t be a minute putting it up again,’ said Oilly.
    Oilly picked up the end of the wire and looked up at the tree. There was a lowish branch which he decided would do to hook the wire on to and as luck would have it a tar barrel stood underneath the branch. Oilly clambered onto the barrel and managed to attach the aerial to the tree.
    ‘Now, Mrs Deery, you can listen to all the Din-Joes you like,’ he muttered to himself. ‘There was none of these modern “Din-Joes” squawking out of radios in my day.’
    But as he was getting down, the barrel, which contained a couple of gallons of tar, slipped from underneath him and he rolled to the ground to find himself covered in slimy thick tar. His face escaped but his clothes and hair did not. With much cursing and swearing he picked himself up and surveyed the damage. His old clothes were ruined but that did not worry him. His hair was the only part of his body to be affected. His treasured tresses were stuck solid with this horrible black tacky substance. He quickly tidied up the haggard and headed for home.
    Andy met him at the gate and stared in amazement at the apparition before him.
    ‘What on earth happened, were you tarred and feathered?’ Andy said.
    ‘No, I was only tarred, have you the tay wet?’
    As they ate, Oilly related what happened. He told Andy to put on the kettle and boil some water for a bath.
    ‘You’re not due a bath until next week,’ Andy grumbled, ‘however, we’ll try it.’
    Despite much vigorous scrubbing with soap and hot water the tar remained. They used all the butter and grease they could find and rubbed it into the hair but there was little improvement.
    ‘There’s only one thing for it,’ said Andy, ‘the hair will have to be cut off. I’ll get the scissors.’
    Oilly sat meekly on a kitchen chair while Andy attempted to cut off his tar-filled locks. It was proving much more difficult than the two brothers imagined. Having got as much of the tar out as was possible with the scissors Andy stood back and stroked his chin as he gazed at the miserable vision that sat like Humpty Dumpty on the chair in front of him.
    ‘You look like a cross between a billiard ball and a dead blackbird,’ Andy observed, ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll have to shave the rest of it off with the old cut-throat, the hair should grow back again in time!’
    Andy went to work with gusto. He was beginning to actually enjoy the episode. He scraped away with the old razor, sharpening the blade every now and then by rubbing it along the strop. After a half hour of scratching and scraping and listening to Oilly moaning, groaning and swearing, Andy held up an old mirror into which Oilly gazed disbelievingly.
    ‘I’m ruined,’ he whined, ‘all me beautiful hair that I lavished such care and attention on for the past forty years, it’s gone, gone, gone!’
    ‘Hey, if you put music to that, you’d have a song!’ said Andy brightly. ‘I think that in six months time you will have a fine head of hair. In the meantime you’ll just have more face to wash, like I have, going right back to the nape of me neck.’
    Over the following couple of days Oilly felt like some kind of freak show. Word had spread that he had gone bald and in a rural backwater this news was on a par with Martians invading Earth. People went out of their way to see the phenomenon and Oilly, who had never worn a cap or a hat because he had been so proud of his fine head of hair, decided that he would have to invest in some class of headgear.
    ‘I was just wondering,’ he said to Andy, with a worried look on his face, ‘How much do you think would a fairly dacent hat cost?’
    Andy was always very wary when talking about money. He stroked his chin and looked extremely serious.
    ‘Well I would hazard a guess, give or take, all things considered, the time of the year and whether you want a top of the