Billy Gallagher

Meals in boarding school are basic and some of the delicacies were shepherds’ pie (known as shepherds shit); kippers and parsnips on a Friday (the smell pervaded all the buildings for the day); and rhubarb, morning, noon and night in season (they had own vast rhubarb patch).  There was a chap Brendan from Killenaule in Tipperary, he loved the shepherds shit because it “repeated” on him for several days (the modern term is heartburn).  He used take as much as he could garner from the rest of us and keep it hot under the huge heavy teapot with the convex bottom.  Remarkably Brendan is still alive today as those huge teapots had been in the school in the 1930s when my “uncle” Oliver (Butler) was at school there.  Tapioca was another stodgy favourite, stiff, solid with a lump of rhubarb jam on top.