Reality Bites

Most people adopt children. I had to be different. I adopted a grandfather. It seems like he will be here forever. Like Bella. I am standing on the beach and this wave is coming towards me. A great grey wall. Unstoppable. I have become complacent. I forgot, for a moment, that time marches on. I could sit in his living room, eating his toasted hot-cross buns, listening to him recount his war stories for the rest of my days. Those afternoons are precious to me. They are essential to me. The reality is, however, that Nobby (not Nobbie) is ninety one and that wave is inching ever closer. And I turn back to Nobby and we resume talking and I am wondering what I should do to blast that image out of my brain

I don't know whether I'll be able to survive this one.

Nobby is All...

cynical and sour. He believes that this is one great big fat propaganda exercise. Is he alone? Apparently not.

But then, it could be argued that they would say that, wouldn't they?

Meanwhile, over in the Observer Rachel Cooke asks how she can avoid 'seeming very stupid' when interviewing Stephen Hawking. I can answer that. It might have helped if she had not devoted the first few paragraphs of the resulting article to herself. Note to self-obsessed Laydee journalists: it's not about you, sweetheart, it's about the interviewee. That's the whole point of an interview.

Ooh, all this cynicism is contagious. Off to Sourpuss's Anonymous.

And finally this confirms what I've always suspected. I will elaborate later.

This Week I Be Mostly Reading...

'England is, above all, the country of the amateur, and the wireless operators, couriers and saboteurs who went to France, were therefore amateurs, officers working behind enemy lines. They had a fine contempt for the professional spy. They were ordinary men and women in that they sprang from ordinary walks of life. The don, the stock-broker, the bird-watcher, the doctor, the insurance agent, the shorthand typist, the widow, the anthropologist and the head-waiter...'

Odette
Jerrard Tickell. (p.44)

See Saboteurs.

No Real Job

Nocturnal bride
Wears black tonight
Grainy pictures
Of a faded wedding
I am naked, draped in leaves
My hand clasping my heart
All foliage suffocates

A fragment of my mirror (broken)
A shard of my heart
Books line the walls
Who lives in those leather-bound volumes
Even they are soon to be forgotten
So I devoured you
And I relished every morsel
Torn and bleeding
The grey sky in my head
From some ancient tale
Pale ghosts hovered over me.

Mismatched?

What are Doug (92 year old war veteran) and I to do on these long, dark nights when I pop across the expanse of lawn that separates his flat from mine? Doug was known as Nubby throughout his time in the RAF and then the army. Apparently, everyone with the name 'Clarke' in the army is automatically known as 'Nobby'. No one thinks to ask why,. Well, we sit, we watch TV, we talk, we reminisce. Sometimes I think that some supernatural force has pushed us together. Often I picture us as two helpless, stranded sailors cut adrift from our nation's territorial waters and everything we once knew. Because the alliance of two people as different as we are is unacceptable in conventional circles. And it is those circles that squeeze the world by the throat. So we delicately sidestep the demands made upon us by those who have never been where he has, who have never been where I have and, please God, with a cherry on top, see to it that they never do.

And, yes, another Remembrance Sunday has passed without a remark from Doug. He is more than a war veteran is his constant refrain but nothing can change the fact that when he closes his eyes at night, he sees things that most of us could never even conceive of.

Code

Deciphering the code
Sitting in lines, these women
Impose order on chaos, redefine lines
And dots and dashes. Elegant shapes
Emerge and then converge

They do not speak
They sit in silence for they come
From disparate worlds, marooned here
Presided over by daemons
In the shape of fear

Of invasion. Sheltered
From the storm only by the delicate
And intricate work they perform
In this great country house amid the heady
Scent of tea-roses and jasmine.

The Life and Times of Fred Unwin

Back to Fred Unwin...

Like Doug he was served in North Africa and Sicily during the war and, like Doug, he grew up on the 'mean streets' of Cambridge (it's not all college and May Balls, you know and, paradoxically, the war saved them both. After the war Doug, using his experience as a medic became what is now known as a paramedic but was by the less impressive sounding 'ambulance man' in those days. (There weren't a lot of women in the service back then.) Fred Unwin became a psychiatric nurse. (Contrary to popular perception there were quite a few male psychiatric nurses in those days - well, they needed some muscle to keep the nuts in line).

They led parallel lives and yet didn't meet until they were pensioners and they had both lost their wives. Fred Unwin is (I nearly wrote 'was') a locally renowned poet and writer. He wrote an auto-biographical study of psychiatric nursing in the late '50s entitled Dew On My Feet which focused on nurse training at Addenbrookes (yes, my old psychiatric Alma-Mater - S3, S4 and R4).

I am reluctant to go and see him even though Doug has suggested that I accompany him. As I said, I am unwilling to face what he has become. When I last encountered him it was at a poetry reading. He was tall and broad and did not look in the least like an octogenarian. He was part-poet, part-historian. Many of his books were self-published and before anyone cries contemptuously 'Vanity publishing, eh?' might I remind you that my own role-model - Virginia Woolf - owned her own publishing house, partially financed by her husband Leonard Woolf and many other writers - great and not so great - have done the same throughout literary history

He praised my rendition of Dorothy Parker's 'You Might As Well Live' and Philip Larkin's 'This Be the Verse'. (Choices that rather suit my curmudgeonly personality). He purchased a copy of my book and passed on his compliments through Doug. I want to remember him as he was then, not as he is now.

An alternative explanation is that I am a lazy, selfish cow.

Yes, the latter sounds much more plausible.

No Cure

Ruby Residue

Your corpse is riddled with ruby residue
My friend, there is no cure for you
God would not be appeased
The spirits could not be pleased. No prayers
Or sacrifices or religious rituals would do
And, once again, I look at you.

What drew you to this troubled region,
This zone of apocalyptic restlessness
This land replete with death
What reactionary pedagogue
Instilled the altruistic madness that resided
So stubbornly in your head

Above, the clouds resume their duel
The wind screams across the land
You walked into the storm
Fearless while we slammed our windows shut

Already I can hear your spirit
Walking above me
Today is the first day of your death.

Interview/Interrogation

Suffice to say that Doug, as always, was immensely helpful. I am concerned though that he might try to confront Andy. 'If he were here right now, I'd kill him!' He is an 89 year old pensioner (albeit a very fit and sprightly one) but he still sees himself as the 25 year old reconnaissance commando he once was.

Ever since I have been spending most of my time in the bedroom with my laptop (my desktop is steam driven), Bella has colonised the living room. Her white fur covered every surface. Doug had only been sitting on the sofa for five minutes and he was covered in white fluff.

The policewoman arrived and, much to my relief, I warmed to her almost immediately. She was polite and efficient and not in the least patronising, a credit to her profession. We discussed the Tony Martin case in the context of ways in which I could defend myself should Andy attempt to gain access to my flat. She told us that Andy has assaulted the police officers who had gone to his flat to question him. I think they (the police) despise him. Assaulting police officers is something of a hobby of his. Maybe they are looking for an excuse to put him away for a while. They have raided his flat (once in riot gear) and have arrested him on numerous occasions but have never been able to make any charges stick mainly because Our Hero: Dr. H and his team have always stepped in to protect him. Andy has told me that he has no criminal record (only in Israel when he was working on a Kibbutz for shoplifting).

'It seems unlikely that he would have had so much contact with us and not have some kind of criminal record,' said the policewoman.

I ran through the catalogue of Andy's 'crimes and misdemeanours' in my head - committed against friends, enemies, strangers. I thought of the day he stormed into the Catholic Church around the corner and struck a priest in the face and then smugly boasted about how he had escaped the consequences of his actions by feigning illness and being admitted to hospital. He even gloated over the fact that the priest had to move to another parish because he was so unnerved by the incident. Andy is beyond justice thanks to Dr H. and his ilk. 'Why did he need to move away if his faith is so strong,' he mocked. 'He should have turned the other cheek anyway.'

A person only has so many cheeks to turn, Andy, my dear.

He also conned a fellow bipolar sufferer out of £5,000. I'll call his victim 'Brendan'. He is pitifully faithful to Andy, following him around like a starving puppy. He went through a severe manic episode and gave away all of his money - £5,000 of it to Andy, who took it and spent it on redecorating his flat and an expensive computer system. (A real friend would have taken the money and kept it safe for 'Brendan' until his crisis was over.) He also abandoned his friend and 'partner in crime' 'Caleb' when he was most in need and then tried to turn me against him by claiming that he had stolen his credit card and had withdrawn four hundred pounds from his account. (£400? Pah! Andy rarely has more than four hundred pence in his bank account. Actually, I'm not sure he even has a bank account). He has taken an iron bar and smashed down two people's front doors. One of his 'victims' was 'Daniel Merchant' (another alias) - a gentle New-Zealand drug dealer (Does that sound like an oxymoron to you?) who has somehow gained the respect of Doug, perhaps because of his love of animals and the fact that he reads for the blind, what a saint, huh? But this just proves that everyone is inconsistent, even Doug.

I thought about his string of ill-treated girlfriends - blonde, buxom Helene who left Andy to live with his flatmate Sean. Years later, Sean left Helene to live as a lodger in Andy's flat where he remains today. Poetic justice, I thought, until I heard Andy and Sean referring to Helene in the most hideously misogynistic manner. 'Helene's huge. She's a gross bitch.' Bearing in mind that Sean and Andy are not exactly God's gift to womankind. I think they're both so deluded that they both look in the mirror and see Adonis or some other Greek God gazing back at them. I remember Helene nodding Andy's front door and referring bitterly to him as 'That thing in there'. I remember the girl who came to live with Andy last summer and the grim face of her mother when the two of them came to collect her things. What did that man do to her? All of these images jostled for prominence in my mind, but one forced its way to the forefront: the look of triumph on Andy's face as he told me that he had beaten Sean up the Christmas before last. And still he returned, as did Daniel Merchant and Brendan. Our Friendly Neighbourhood psychopath seems to have some kind of hold over them. What is going on down there? Some kind of bizarre sado-masochistic society? Andy being the sadist and his followers the masochists (Do they really believe he is some kind of Messiah?) Was Andy's assault on me my initiation ceremony. Well, I'm keeping well away from that weird little cult and I'm going to do my damnedest to warn potential new recruits off too.

The policewoman politely listened to Doug's war stories. He told her he had once been arrested for killing a civilian in Sicily during World War II when he was a Special Services Reconnaissance Commando and tried by a military tribunal. 'There was a riot,' he said. 'And this man lunged towards me. I moved aside and he fell forward over a cliff. I was exonerated, of course. It turned out this man was a soldier who had disguised himself as a civilian - pro-Mussolini. This was before Italy surrendered.' The policewoman noted the parallels with contemporary Iraq in which the occupying forces are unsure of who is friend or foe.

I was frank with her from the start: 'I can't testify. I'd be a useless witness in court. I have a history of mental illness and the Defence are sure to bring that up.'

'Don't worry,' she said. 'Your role in this is restricted to making a statement. You don't have to appear in court. We, the police, are pressing charges.'

She told me what happened during the attack from the point of view of 'the witness'. (Daniel, I presume). A scene flashed through my mind: 'I've always fancied you,' Daniel was saying and in my Schnapps fuelled state I reached out and grabbed his hand. I was starving for human companionship. The police woman said that when Andy attacked me Daniel had stood, rooted to the spot, unable to process what was going on and then he had lunged towards me, seized one of my arms, pulled me out of the door and dragged me upstairs to my flat. It was there he had called the police and, because of my obviously distressed state, an ambulance. 'That's another thing that would make me a disaster in the witness box,' I said. 'That huge gap in my memory. It's as though someone pressed the pause button and, for me at least, time stopped.'

Doug suggested that Andy might have slipped something into my drink and the policewoman conceded that this was a possibility.

In spite of her warm and sympathetic attitude, I was relieved when the policewoman received a call on her radio and announced that she had to leave. The interview had been prolonged by Doug's reminiscences about his time as Sergeant Major of Regimental Police in the '50s. 'I'll see myself out,' she said after I had signed my statement and she had given me details of a victim support organisation.

Doug left soon after. Just before he stepped out of the front door, he turned and embraced me and I clung to him as though he were the last decent human being on earth.