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Home / ASL Schools materials / Videos / Tally’s Blood

Tally’s Blood

The play tells the compelling story of an Italian immigrant family’s often challenging experiences in Scotland before, during and after the Second World War. It explores prejudice, love and family loyalty with humour and warmth, centred on the Pedreschi family and their café/ginger store.

Rosinella and Massimo become guardians to their niece, Lucia, after her mother dies in Italy. As Lucia grows up, a friendship grows between her and a local Scot, Hughie. When Italy declares war with Britain, the Pedreschis’ shop is attacked and Massimo is arrested as an enemy alien. After the war, Lucia is called back to Italy to live with her father. To save Lucia from an arranged marriage, Rosinella takes Hughie to Italy and helps them elope together.

Between Acts 1 & 2 there is a reading of Palma McKeown’s poem, “How to be Scots-Italian” – first published in Talking About Lobsters: New Writing Scotland 34 (ASLS, 2016).

Click here to watch Ian Brown’s talk on Tally’s Blood, plus other videos from the 2013 Schools Conference, and here for the National 5 Teaching Note on Tally’s Blood.

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Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

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