I was at various times given various pills and potions. There were funny rubber balls which you squeezed and some special air would come out and help you breathe, in theory. Then there was a powder which you ignited and breathed in. None of them worked.
I was once sent to Manchester, God knows how they found the money for the train and presumably the appointment, where a specialist performed a test for allergies. It consisted of having my arm perforated all the way up, so it looked like the edge of a penny stamp, and different things injected, which I might have a reaction to. They found I was moderately allergic to dust. Most people are, so it was a waste of time and money.
I would often be too ill to get up or go to school and would just lie in bed, feeling sorry for myself. If I was really bad in wintertime my mother would bring up some hot coals on a shovel – could it have been the one I made? – and put them in the little fireplace in my bedroom. I would lie there, watching the embers glow in the dark and then slowly fade. Coal was expensive so she could not afford to have a bedroom fire on as well as the one in the living room. I felt privileged and special, being treated like royalty.
My Grandma Brechin had her own pet asthma treatments which she insisted on when I went to stay with her. One was camphor oil which she rubbed on my back so I smelled like a chemist’s shop. Another was to make me wear a silk vest right next to my skin. Both remedies felt nice, but didn’t help much.
I came to the conclusion that the main point of all the treatments and medicines, especially the complicated ones involving apparatus, was not to cure or help but simply to amuse the patient, give you something to do, a distraction while you were having an attack. There was no cure, just distractions.
I eventually found that I had more luck with self cures than anything the doctors recommended. This consisted of deliberately distracting myself. Lying in bed, wheezing and doubled up, I would manage, ever so pathetically, in a low, halting voice, to ask my mother to bring me my stamp album. I would then slowly turn over every page, carefully studying each stamp, thinking about where it was from, where each country was on the map, whether I would ever go there. Slowly my mind would move off my asthma, till I realised it had faded, my wheezing had almost stopped.
Or I would ask her to find my football scrapbook. This was a homemade scrapbook, using homemade paste made out of flour, in which I would stick torn-out photos from the pink ’uns of my fave players, most of them Scottish. They would be all soggy and sticky when I stuck them in, but a day later, they would have dried out and become almost three dimensional, sticking out from the pages, having risen from the dead. And again, looking at them, I would feel better.
Patient, cure thyself. Which very often I did. I would then get out of bed, try a few deep breaths, and then rush downstairs, out into the street – and join the football game. My mother, of course, would make a face, sigh and smile, bring down on the shovel anything left of the dying coals. But I had not made it up.
Asthma is partly psychosomatic. Which doesn’t mean to say it is not real and awful and physical when you do get an attack, but just thinking about it, fearing you might have one, or being excited and emotional about something, can all bring it on, not just various physical causes, like rushing or running too fast.
I found that itchy clothes could bring it on, even itchy socks, but especially itchy jackets and trousers. In Dumfries I once had a little brown suit, a jerkin top and matching shorts, made by some neighbour. I hated it partly because other kids shouted ‘Eyetie!’ at me – the reason being that there was an Italian prisoner-of-war camp nearby and you would see the men walking down the Annan Road on the way to the fields wearing a brown uniform, very like my suit. But also because it was itchy and made me wheeze, or I got it into my head that it did, which is the same thing.
I used to maintain that certain hankies made me wheeze, but this could have been an exaggeration. All adults were obsessed by the notion that children should at all times carry a handkerchief, either in the top pocket of your jacket or in your trouser pocket. If you didn’t use it yourself, they would grab it out of your pocket and drag it across your nose, whether you were sniffing or not. Just as they were always producing a horrible wet cloth, holding you by the ear, and slapping it across your face, on the pretext that your face was dirty.
Kids did easily get filthy in those days, with all the coaldust, the factory smoke, the outdoor muddy games, climbing trees and stuff, generally doing dangerous unsupervised things, and most of us sniffled most of the time, having no heat in our houses, making mothers obsessive about cleanliness.
The worst thing about their passion for hankies was that you were always getting them as presents, for your birthday or Christmas, from aunts and uncles, often in packs of three. Dear God, save us from vests and hankies, so I used to pray every Christmas. I’d rather have sneezed and wheezed.
I don’t think I ever used my asthma as an excuse, to plead for special treatment, except to get out of rugby. If anything I was ashamed. I tried to hide it, not let people see I was suffering, unable to breathe. I didn’t know anybody else among my friends or relations who had it, which is strange, considering it is always described as one of the most prevalent childhood illnesses.
In the fifties, there was no effective treatment. Today, the use of those Ventolin inhalers has totally revolutionised the management of asthma. I used to watch Paul Scholes, when he was warming up for Manchester United and England, to see if he was wheezing. Asthma sufferers can always tell the signs, the hunched shoulders, the rise and fall of the chest, when others are in the early stages, even if they are trying to disguise it, or are not even aware themselves. Then I would look out for him in the tunnel taking a sneaky puff of his inhaler. Lucky sod, I used to think. If only I’d had an inhaler when I was young, surely I would have played for Scotland . . .
I was always being told that I would grow out of it, most people did, so they said. Which I hoped would happen to me, as soon as I became a teenager.
9
PROBLEMS WITH MY FATHER
I hadn’t been at the Creighton School long when my father started staggering. He would come from work and be seen to be holding on to the hedges in Caird Avenue as if he had had a few. Neighbours would smile, go ‘aye, aye’ and nod knowingly. He did enjoy the occasional drink and would go up to the Redfern – the local State Management pub on the estate, named after the architect who built many of the government-controlled public houses in the Carlisle area – on a Saturday and have a couple of pints with his chums, mostly blokes of his age who worked at the MU and lived on the estate. I never saw him drunk, or even the worse for wear.
We never had any drink in the house, except at Christmas time, when I would have to go down to the off-licence part of the County Hotel, beside the station, and buy a bottle of British sherry – ugh, sweet stuff, even I wouldn’t drink it – and eggnog, which was my mother’s favourite, even more horrible. Shops and supermarkets did not sell alcohol in the fifties and there were no wine shops or off-licences, only those attached to hotels or the bigger pubs, at least not in Carlisle, though I am sure there were wine shops in London, a wild, dissipated place which no one I knew had ever visited. We bought drink at Christmas in case people popped in, which they rarely did. The bottle went back in the cocktail cabinet and remained there, going dusty and crumbly, for another year.
So it wasn’t drink that was affecting my father. The doctor, when he eventually went to consult him, could see nothing much wrong with him, and so he staggered on, for about another year. He was by then a higher grade civil servant. Not sure what that meant, but I recall him having to go before some sort of board. Probably a higher grade of MU paper-pusher. That sounds patronising, but I never did discover or understand what he did, but then children are not interested in their father’s occupation, just accept that he goes out to work.
I do clearly remember one awful scene with him when I must have been about ten. Having tried to mend our shoes from time to time, ham
mering on the metal studs, he then got it into his head to do something more creative around the house. In the fifties, men were being bombarded by DIY advertisements. Magazines like Practical Householder encouraged them to make things, put up shelves, build furniture, assemble your own radio, make your own Hawaiian guitar, make an electric gas lighter. In our house one of the three books we had was Hobbies Handbook – the other two were a Daily Express book about the royal princess and a medical dictionary, all acquired free or cheap by saving coupons through the Daily Express. Hobbies Handbook was 300 pages long and gave hints on a staggering number of things a real husband could do around the house and garden. Advertisements offered fabulous new materials and tools to create these wonders. There was a product called Asbestolux, which was a form of asbestos, which you could cut up and do wonderful things with and it would never catch fire. ‘Asbestolux – fire safe board for men in a hurry!’ In a hurry to die, so we later discovered.
The copy of Hobbies Handbook we had, which I eventually inherited, was published in 1935. I imagine my father had bought it after my parents were married in 1934, doing what all young newlyweds were expected to do when they set up house together. Mothers did the cooking and produced babies. Fathers went around the house hammering things.
What he decided to do this time some fretworking. This was pretty big in the fifties, judging by the all adverts for the requisite materials, the fretsaw, blades, wood plus instructions with full diagrams. He decided he was going to make some bookends, for the bookshelves we still did not have, for the rows of books we did not have either.
He set himself up in the kitchen, with the door of the coal cellar open to give him more space, and propped up his materials on a wooden stool. The coal cellar was a dark, scary, unlit hole into which every week two men covered with sacks, their faces and arms as black as the night, emptied their bags of coal, carried on their backs round the side of the house from their horse and cart in the road. My mother would be trying to cook, food would be out or being prepared while they pushed past her – and the resultant clouds of horrible coaldust covered everything in the kitchen, and beyond. Why on earth did they have a coal cellar in a kitchen? Percy Dalton has a lot to answer for.
My father started to work, half in the coal cellar, half in the kitchen, attempting to cut out the shapes of two elephants from the sheet of plywood supplied, following the instructions. In due course they would be fixed to the ends of some bookshelves, yet to be made, and would be very useful and attractive, according to the illustration.
He was finding it difficult to control the fretsaw, which is a very bendy and unreliable instrument, failing to cut exactly along the required lines, and at the same time hold the wood steady. He was soon shouting and roaring, damning and blasting. My mother had got trapped in the kitchen, unable to escape while the cellar door was open, while we four hovered inside the living room, unable to get into the kitchen till he had finished.
‘For Pete’s sake!’ he yelled, followed by more ‘damn-and-blasts’. That was the extent of his swearing, at least in public, or in front of us. Not exactly frightening on paper, but pretty scary in the flesh for the four us, crouching behind the living-room door.
He then called for me to come and hold the end of the wood. I tried my best, but I was never strong. He should have asked my sister Marion, who was stronger than me. I could see that his hands were shaking, and had been since he started his stupid fretwork, showing he had no real control over his saw, but I put it down to his bad temper, getting himself in a state.
The wood suddenly totally split, the part-elephants parted, ruining his whole creation. He threw everything on the floor, then kicked the stool over and then shouted at me, blaming me, saying it was all my fault for not holding the wood steady. He then seemed to collapse, his legs giving way under him.
I stormed off, running upstairs to my bedroom. I got some belongings in a large handkerchief, came downstairs again, stepping over my father who was now sitting up, my mother fussing over him. ‘I am never coming back!’ I shouted, standing at the back door. ‘Yous will never see me again . . .’
The twins, then aged about seven, started crying. Johnny, aged five, looked transfixed, alarmed and scared by what was happening. My mother looked very upset and also on the verge of tears. I stormed out of the back door, slamming it shut. I was probably away for, well, perhaps an hour, at most.
Looking back, that was the moment I realised there was something seriously wrong with my dad. However, it took at least another year and endless tests by experts before finally it was decided that he most likely had multiple sclerosis.
Whatever that was. I don’t think the Daily Express medical dictionary gave us much information. In fact, no one did back then. The National Health Service, still in its infancy, did not have all the social workers and physiotherapists and support systems they have today.
He carried on working for a year or so, staggering off most days, staggering back, till eventually he was given early retirement on health grounds by 14 MU. In a touching little ceremony at the base, the wing commander in charge of the unit presented him with a horrible, nasty clock, made of ply wood by the look of it.
For a few months, his old chums from work popped in now and again to see how Dave was, which was how he was known, then their visits petered out. He was given a wheelchair by the hospital, so that was something. Once a week he insisted that I push him up the hill to the Redfern. The wheelchair was like a tank, hellish to push, and I was embarrassed by him being an invalid, confined to a chair.
We would sit outside the pub for half an hour or so. People would offer to buy him a drink and bring it out to him. He would smile and chat and wave and be ever so cheerful to anyone who spoke to him or recognised him. Then I would have to push him home again. Once in the house, he would shout and scream and rage against the world.
When he could no longer manage to get upstairs to his own bed, he was moved into our front parlour, the little room reserved for special occasions. The old piano was removed, which the twins had never played, and a divan bed was installed in which he stayed from them on. This was how he remained during all of my secondary school years. In fact, I can hardly remember a time when he was not an invalid, confined to his bed. He was only in his early forties when it all started, a young man really, but in my mind he is always old, always ill, and always in his pyjamas.
My mother brought him meals in bed from then on, which now and again he would throw back at her. ‘What do you call this, woman? After all the money I bring into this house. Damn and blast you, woman!’
My sister Marion was the only one who stood up to him, shouting back at him, picking up the food he had thrown on the floor, saying that was it, he was getting nothing else, and if he did that again, if he shouted at our mother like that, he would get no more food again, ever. After an hour of silence, we would hear a tiny pathetic voice. ‘Marion. Marion . . .?’ By this he meant my mother. She would come in and he would mumble an apology and his meal would be redone for him.
He acquired a passion for salted peanuts, would eat them all the time, dropping most of them so that the hairs on his chest became permanently matted. Washing him was a nightmare, as he hated being washed or helped, struggling and swearing. I have no memory of any social workers or home helpers coming to the house. It all devolved on my mother. Eventually he developed awful bedsores, which made his health worse and his temper more terrifying.
I had to fill in his football pools for him every week, reading out all the fixtures and trying to get him to guess the result of eight games, the so-called Treble Chance. The treble part was because you had three chances – you got three points if a game you had picked ended in a scoring draw, two points for a goalless draw and one point for a home or away win. You had to reach twenty-four points, or as near as possible, then you were in the money.
They had begun in the twenties, the leaders being Littlewoods and Vernons, both based in Liverpool, and the competition betw
een them was intense. In 1935 Littlewoods were spending a fortune on promotion, flying aeroplanes over London with streamers behind announcing ‘LITTLEWOODS ABOVE ALL!’
Post-war, football pools were a massive business, with millions putting on bets each week. In 1948, when football started again, the clubs were receiving £4 million a year in gate money – while the football pools were taking in £50 million a year, just from punters trying to guess the results.
The most famous winner was in 1961 when Viv Nicholson won £152,000 on Littlewoods and went on a ‘spend, spend, spending’ spree. I suppose that would be about £2 million in today’s money, so nothing as obscene as some recent big lottery prizes, but in the fifties the whole nation was convinced that a big win on the Treble Chance would set you up for life.
Every Saturday evening at five o’clock I would have to go to his room and tune the radio into Sports Report. Then, along with the entire population, we waited for the signature tune, listening in silence, hardly daring to breathe, awaiting the first reading of the football results. The programme began in 1948 with John Webster reading the results then in 1974 James Alexander Gordon took over. By their inflexion, how their voices went up or down, you could guess the result before they got to it. But if I tried to say aloud the possible score, I got screamed at.
The results each week were always the same as far as we were concerned. ‘Not a bloomin’ sausage,’ my father would say, throwing down the copy of his coupon. Not a sausage was really all he had in life from then on.
The Co-Op's Got Bananas Page 8
