Chapter 3 of 14 · 4'55"
A family watches TV after a night of rioting, and the talk turns to the Catholic neighbours down the street. Granny jokes that they're friends who just "kick with the left foot," but Buddy keeps asking who did the attacking. "There is no our side and their side in our street," his father says.
Too Much God for One Day
The Family Argues About Religion
❝ Monologue · 14 lines The preacher's hellfire sermon
It opens with a flat threat, piles on imagery, and closes with a question the listener cannot answer.
At home after a night of sectarian violence, the family watches TV while Granny talks about the neighbours. Her light jokes — Catholics are friends who "kick with the left foot" — sit beside Buddy's serious questions about who burned the Catholic houses. His father says the street has no sides, blames religion itself, then everyone settles in for a fire-and-brimstone sermon on television.
The scene looks like family banter, but every joke is doing political work. When Granny says the Catholic neighbours "just kick with the left foot," she is naming the one thing that divides the street while insisting it doesn't matter. Buddy, still a child, keeps pressing the adults to say who attacked the Catholic houses, and his father's answer — "There is no our side and their side in our street" — is both a value he wants to keep and an admission that it is slipping away. "It's all bloody religion. That's the problem," he says, yet he still sends the children to church because "your granny'd kill me if I didn't." The TV sermon that follows, all hellfire and collection plates, makes his point for him.
A1–C2 is the CEFR scale. Cards above the level you pick fade, and playback will not auto-pause on them.
“There is no our side and their side in our street.”
He refuses the mob's logic in one plain sentence: on this street there is no side but ours together.
Neutral
“It's all bloody religion. That's the problem.”
Two blunt sentences and one mild curse put the whole trouble down to religion itself.
Informal
“I wouldn't be too sure about that.”
A polite way to disagree: he doubts the optimism without ever saying the other man is wrong.
Neutral
“I've had too much God for one day.”
He treats God like a dish he has had enough of, turning exhaustion into a joke.
Informal
Protestants, you will die! Agonizingly! And where will you go when you shuffle off this pestilential mortal coil? Where?! Well, I will tell you where. Picture the scene. A fork in the road. In one direction, a straight and narrow highway. In the other, a long and winding road which stretches down and away into an unknowable distance. One will take you to the bosom of the Lord's grace, forever and a day caress you with beatific love. And the other will spew you into an eternal pit of sulfurous suffering, pustulating pain, from which you will never, ever, through the seven circles of hell escape! And I ask you here and now... ...which road will you take?!
Up next · 04double-bluffThe scene: Billy Clanton Threatens the FamilyHe is trying to hold on to the life he grew up with, where Catholic and Protestant neighbours looked after each other. Saying it out loud is also a rebuke to Buddy's question about who attacked the houses.
It is Belfast slang: saying someone kicks with the left foot means they are Catholic. Granny uses it half-jokingly to insist the neighbours are still friends.
Will says he sends them because "your granny'd kill me if I didn't." Faith here is tied to family and habit, not only belief, so criticising religion doesn't mean breaking with it.
Paddy Kavanagh is a neighbour whose family is blamed for stirring things, and who told Buddy his own version of confession. Will warns that the Kavanaghs will soon be moving off the street.
He delivers a hellfire sermon about a fork in the road leading either to heaven or an eternal pit, then asks for money. He is a reminder of the religious fear the family lives with.
