Peter McNiff's Page

Let it be said dear friend, 6s is where I exercise by brain, limber up on brevity, clear my smoke-filled thoughts and open doors to breathe in fresh ideas I believed had long since deserted me.

But now my river is in spate again I must answer its calling.

Time for me to roll up the straw mat and slip away to hunt and fill my store, besides on my list of secret fears are life-forming habits such as planting beans, cabbages, and potatoes in the same patch each year.

But believe this of me, in e… Continue

It may have been the tea and hot buttered scones that put me to sleep but when I woke she was still there, sitting at the foot of my bed filing her nails and painting them cheerfully all the fiery colours of hell.

Her arms were barely blue and her bitter black dress exposed from her hip the whole way down to her toes, a sliver of flesh that was whiter than milk.

It was three in the morning and the air in the room was icing the rail on my bed.

“What are you doing at this hour,” I said, “that c… Continue

In my fourth year night and day, the rumble of locomotives rattled the windows of the back room my mother rented in a crumbling Victorian terrace that had fifteen steep steps to climb from the street.

The building was owned by a couple who drank stuff from bottles that looked like water or vinegar and in the night they moved furniture about and broke things made of glass and shouted at each other loud enough, Ma said, for people in the next street to hear.

My mother said they lived on their pe… Continue

Such was the fame of her physical stature that male customers young and old travelled from as far away as twenty miles just to have the new barkeeper serve them ale by the pint or a glass of whiskey or two, at the Ballymagavel, a grubby and miserable hostelry that took its name from a flood-ridden parish on the edge of the Bog of Allen.

“’Tis her innocent smile,” said some in an effort to define the very ideal they saw in her, while others contradicted: “No, ’tis the way she looks at you with s… Continue