In The Village!

    A pretty spot, a mixture of architecture, Italianate it certainly has a Mediterranean flavour, what do you think Thorpe? I think I wouldn’t mind a fortnight’s leave there, isn’t it the life eh…a far cry from Sing Sing. This is not a joking matter! You could be a little sceptical, that’s what made you such a good man. Why they were sorry to lose you!
    Photographs taken at ground level of a holiday resort! The Tally Ho, a daily issue, morning or evening? Daily at noon. What are facts behind Town Hall…Town Hall? That’s right. Town Council? Correct. Were you a member? I could have been, it’s democratically elected once a year. Democratically? That’s what they claim. And they’re all numbers, no names, no names at all? Just numbers. Numbers in a Village that is a complete unit of our own society, a place to put people who can’t be left around. People who know too much or too little, a place with many means of breaking a man. Intriguing. They have their own cinema, their own newspaper, their own television station, a credit card system, and if you’re a good boy and cough up the secrets you are gracefully retired into the Old People’s Home. But no escape? They also have a very impressive graveyard, which you avoided. The Village was deserted! Perhaps they were on the annual democratic outing! The Town Hall, Number 2’s residence my house, the Old People’s Home……my dear fellow you really mustn’t get excited. You must forgive us, we have a problem, tell him our problem Thorpe. You resign, you disappear, you return. You spin a yarn that Hans Christian Andersen would reject for a fairytale. And we must be sure, people defect an unhappy thought, but a fact of life. They defect from one side to the other. I also have a problem, I’m not sure which side runs this Village! A mutual problem!

   Number 6 might have a problem about which side runs The Village, but he’s quick enough to go running back to his old colleagues! He briefed a former Colonel once about The Village, and here he was doing it all again, but with the addition of photographic evidence. Photographs taken at ground level of a holiday resort. Thorpe hit the nail on the head there, but how many people at the time realized how factually right he was? And Sing Sing, its name changed to Ossining Correctional Facility in 1970, a maximum security prison operated by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision in the village of Ossining, in the U.S. state of New York. It is located about 30 miles north of New York City on the east bank of the Hudson River. Since 2002 there has been talk about turning part of Sing Sing into a museum.
   As for The Tally Ho being issued daily at noon, that’s not always the case. Sometimes there are more than one issue each day. One time the same edition is on sale two days running! And as for names not being used in The Village, that’s not correct either, as peoples names are used on occasions. I can understand why someone knowing too much would be put in The Village in order to have that information protected or extracted. But why someone who knows too little? Does that mean that the merest piece of information might have some value? Finally, Number 6 had already been betrayed by the Colonel and Thorpe, or was he? It’s difficult to say one way or the other. Mind you, what I find interesting is, that when Number 6 went running back to his ex-colleagues again, how did he know he wouldn’t encounter the Colonel and Fotheringay a second time around?

Be seeing you