Sally-Part 16. DOES THAT MEAN THAT YOU DON'T WANT ME ON YOUR PROGRAMME ?

Within two minutes Sally called back and timorously asked, "Does that mean you don't want me on your programme?".
" No mum, it's David, I was just winding you up!".
" But they've just phoned me back and said that they want to do a speacial programme on pernicious anaemia and they want me to ask my question again!".
"No mum, as I just said, that was me!"
"Oh! That is a pity! I was looking forward to that!"

By now, my lot, getting Sally's side from me , covering the phone and doing her voice, had to go upstairs and change their underwear!

"Pacemaker mum? You've never mentioned this before! What's up with you?"
"Oh! I meant getting my blood pressure tested but it just came out as "having a pacemaker fitted"

Well we can all make mistakes and say one thing when we mean another but Pacemaker?

Anyway mum's hide was as thick as a rhinoceros and she took it all in good spirit.

Hearing her on the radio did really happen, in about 1988 and if the BBC carry a recording, it can be proven. I doubt if any of the panel members could recollect it as they would be quite used to nutters phoning in. Try listening to modern-day phone-ins if you don't believe me, especially to what is known in the trade as "The Graveyard Shift"  between 3am and dawn! Not, as you might recall, possible for me to do as I never wake up but Shirley tells me about them as she tosses and turns, sleepless in the wee small hours.

As a child, if I wanted to find my mother, she would generally be in one of a few places. In the garden,in her familiar "television" pose wrecking my father's immaculate planting, dressed at any time of year in a bikini with tissues tucked in in half a dozen strategic places to prevent sweating and the unintentional escape of  waste products; in the kitchen crucifying something, or most likely in the "cloisters", a ground floor laundry alleyway; a place of terror to a sensitive boy like me, with it's dark insanitory Victorian water-closet at the end, with a door latch that stuck shut if you had to use the loo with some urgency when the upstairs one was occupied.
There, Sally, wearing one of her mother's old skirts tried unsuccessfully to wash our clothes using an old pulsating machine, a mangle and two large Belfast sinks with continuously running water to rinse out as much of the thickly sticky London grime that "Lux Flakes" hadn't removed. Needless to say neither worked and her method turned all our clothes grey. And, of course there were the bowls where the poor things were then bleached for hours before being improperly rinsed so that when I walked into class the kids would gag and shout, "Please sir, can you get Waterworks out, he stinks!" No one would ever sit next to me!

Whatever the logic to my mother's system was no one ever fathomed, What is certain is that our clothes were always ruined! (I have actually bowed to pressure and replaced my original word with "ruined"!)

And then some brilliant scientist invented nylon and we all became walking static electricity generators, cold and wet with unabsorbed sweat as nylon simply held in moisture which, having nowhere to go ran down your legs and filled your shoes! Of course this wonderful material needed no ironing and so mothers loved it and dressed their poor children in it and made them sleep in nylon sheets
 which, if you haven't tried it, don't!


I insisted on wearing cotton and at the age of eleven learned to iron my own clothes to prevent my turning up at school or scouts creased. No point asking Sally, she would have turned on the iron, put it face-down on your shirt, gone for a "wetty" and forgotten all about it!