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| DEFYING ALL THE ODDS SALLY LEFT HER HOSPITAL BED TO HELP PUSH-START THE ROMNEY HYTHE AND DYMCHURCH STEAM LOCOMOTIVE! |
With Sally safely in hospital and likely to need a lot of nursing in the future, some of my brothers set to and stripped the house of the worst of the clutter.
In all some five hundred black sacks filled with stuff were thrown into a series of large skips and carted off to Beckton Dump.
The mouse-wrecked furniture went too and the the house was returned to a semblance of normality.
But before this happened each brother and their children were allowed to take what they wanted with the more valuable items listed and subtracted from any future inheritance.
For myself, I took a cloth tape-measure, value zero and a mis-matched cup and saucer for each of my three children!
And that's it! And here's why!
When I was about twenty and my ninety year old grandma was taken iller than usual, I watched a relative sweep into her lounge and point at a sideboard and announce," I'll have THAT when the time comes!"
It sickened me and I vowed that I would never behave like that and that action added greatly to my ever-growing cynicism of adult behaviour which began as early as twelve, increased as I passed through my early teens and has continued to grow all my life.
You see, when I was a child I thought all adults were good and I soon had to learn that few were.
At a school reunion when I was in my late thirties someone passed round a newspaper cutting about one of our male teachers who had managed to abuse boys for at least twenty years without sufficient proof preventing his appalling practices being presented to the authorities, even though we as boys heard rumours and reported them.
Even my father, a local Doctor, warned me to keep my mouth shut and would not take any action in case his, my father's, reputation was damaged!
" Hearsay David is a dangerous thing! You must have proof !"
A different hearsay episode that I put down in writing and sent to a neighbouring Headmaster eventually got me suspended from school and you'd think that that would have cured me from ever trying to spread unwitnessed gossip again but wouldn't life be just unbearable without some completely unfounded libel reaching your ears with a warning not to pass it on as your informant had been told only on the promise that they'd keep it to themselves, that you could then pass on in secret with it eventually reaching the whole world?
I know what I'm trying to say even if you don't!
Ooh! Come to think of it isn't that called journalism ?
So not only did the teacher wreck the lives of boys in my school but blow me, he was then set up as Head of his own boys school, in cahoots with a prominent Member Of Parliament who financed him and both their wickedness in their successful endeavours to abuse the sons of the rich and famous!
The teacher went to prison but I don't know what happened to the MP.
I was talking to one of my former classmates at that school reunion about twenty years after leaving school when a male teacher walked up, hand extended in greeting and said," Hello you two, did you know that I was bisexual?" Just like that! We made our excuses and left.
The only teachers either of us hoped to meet again were the art master's wife who also taught at the school and who featured on his own very very intimate, close-up studies of her most private place which he happily showed us sixth form art 'A level' pupils and the sexiest English teacher in the world who wearing marvellously short skirts would perch on a desk reading poetry to a silent class of groaning adolescents but sadly neither were there.
If I'm honest I suppose one of the reasons for going was to prove to the people who had forecast that I would accomplish nothing in life how hard work and determination had paid off. But not one showed the slightest interest in asking me a single question about myself, my life or my family!
Perhaps their forecasts were right after all.
Oddly enough, now aged sixty three, I've still yet to meet anyone who is in the slightest bit interested in me, my life or my family!
SALLY GOT BETTER !
But not before she had turned her hospital bed surroundings into a carbon copy of her home and I am not over-egging the pudding by describing what I saw when I paid a visit.
Her bed and over-bed table were piled high with photos, magazines, bottles of lemon-barley water, tissues, undrunk cups of tea, uneaten fruit and her ancient address book.
A chair acted as a TV table. Another chair, her radio table. Her bedside table was piled high with women's magazines and chocolate bars and her headboard filled with post- it notes!
She had managed to hog the ward's public phone which now stood plugged in permanently where a doctor or nurse might have chosen to stand to examine her!
But above and beyond all else was the note my sister-in -law Jackie saw on her headboard on the day she visited.
It said and I am not lying,
" DOCTOR! IF I AM ASLEEP WHEN YOU DO YOUR ROUNDS WOULD YOU HAVE A LOOK AT MY BOTTOM" !
Even that is as nothing compared to what was heard later when Sally was back at home having a leg ulcer dressed by a Jamaican District Nurse.
" Nurse darling, where are you from ?"
" Jarmaicar Madame "
" And do you speak Swahili in Jarmaicar nurse ?" She really did emphasize the pronounciation!
"No Madame weez iz speekin Hinglish ! "
" Oh! What a shame! You see my husband was a Doctor in Kenya in the war and he taught me a medical question in Swahili! "
" Oh reearlly madame! And wot iz dat hexpression? "
" Oom goony dee opoppleopple been juney !"
" And wot doz dat mean Madame ?"
" It means, 'would you drop your trousers and milk your penis'. You see they had a lot of syphillis over there then and that was the way a doctor could tell if a man had it!"
The District Nurse did not finish the dressing and rapidly left! She had improbably turned white before she passed us on her way out, mumbling something incomprehensible and staring wildly in her determination to find the front door!
On the weekend I went down to help with the house cleaning, four of the five brothers gathered together with a very gay friend who quickly reduced us all to tears of joy and helplessness as each time he came upon a particularly harrowing sight he'd blurt out with an impossibly effeminate lisp, "Oh! For fuck's sake!"
That brief sentence rapidly became everyone's battle cry as we each made our own discoveries.
Mice are brilliantly adept at invading and exploring an entire environment, leaving not only a nearly continuous stream of urine behind them but supplementing the urine with piles of poo as they eat their way through everything!
Someone would open a drawer, previously shut for years and discover mountains of poo! You'd take the lid off a heavy earthenware pot and there again would be piles of poo! We'd pull out the freezer and there would be ten nests made of chewed newspaper with dead mice bodies lying stinking all around covered in poo!
Each discovery yielded terrible sights. Each terrible sight was greeted with ,"Oh! For fuck's sake!" Each crisis brought everyone together to stare and gasp and cry with laughter as we 'straights' rapidly turned into screaming Queens!
This continued all day until the battle cries blended into one long stream of foulness and gasps of disgust and hilarity!
I don't think any of us were aware of the miasma of viruses that surrounded each pellet of poo and there were tens of thousands of them and we took no precautions to avoid cross-infection apart from wearing rubber gloves to apply bleach everywhere.
With the house done to a reasonable standard we turned to the garden or rather the overgrown cat toilet and graveyard that it had become and tackled that as best as we could wearing wellies to protect us from the unburied piles of cat poo and dead cats lying camouflaged in the foot high grass.
One of my brothers and you'll notice that I don't use names at all to protect the innocent and guilty alike, using another's hedge trimmer to blast through the undergrowth managed to cut through the cable and then rewired it incorrectly using a shop-bought connector before slipping it back into it's box.
When the owner went to use it in his own garden some months later he sent the now useless instrument back to the manufacturer complaining about his frustration at having bought the best product on the market only for it not to last a year! It was replaced free of charge, obviously without being examined!
O.K ! Martin! It was Andy ! HAHAHAHAHA! Gotcha!!!!
