Too Young to be Old: From Clapham to Kathmandu (Frank's Travel Memoirs, #1)

by Frank Kusy

  My own experience of theatricals was limited to a single role in a nativity play at primary school. I was playing one of the Three Wise Men – Melchior, I think – and my mother had made me a beard out of horsehair pulled from the seat of an old chair. It irritated my face so much that when I wandered onto the boards, scratching it fit to burst, I wandered straight off again...and fell into the orchestra pit. Baby Jesus was not amused at being upstaged like this, and neither was the school principal. I had never been invited to play anything again...until now.

  The wardrobe department did me up a treat. I wasn’t sure about all the rouge they slapped on my cheeks, but the stripy seaside jacket they found for me and the flowing beige trousers (with braces) were extremely to my liking. As was the fetching boater hat, which I adjusted to a jaunty angle for best effect. To top it all off, I had shaved my beard and was now sporting a thin ‘period’ moustache, which I thought made me look rather dashing.

  Someone in the audience did not agree. The moment I entered stage left and prepared to issue my opening line, a loud voice at the back of the hall shouted: ‘Oi, Mr Kusy! You look like a ponce!’

  There was short, shocked silence and then everybody’s heads turned round to see who the perpetrator of this statement might be. And there, hugging his sides with laughter, was Old Bill. ‘Well, he does, don’t he?’ he howled unapologetically. ‘He couldn’t look more like a ponce if he tried!’

  Then, as everyone’s eyes swivelled back to me again, I did what any amateur thespian confronted by a master octogenarian heckler would do.

  I froze.

  They say that everyone has a secret fear – one thing that might happen to them which would dwarf all others in its scale and sheer, unadulterated awfulness. For me, it was public embarrassment. It had taken all my courage to get up on that stage and perform, and now I was stuck up there – all on my own – and I could not remember my lines. I looked down and saw my mother, her mouth open in mute apprehension, and next to her, Mr Parker glowering with undisguised annoyance. Behind them, an anonymous sea of faces opened up to me, all of them shifting ever more uncomfortably in their chairs.

  There was no more time to waste. I had to say something.

  ‘I must call Lucille on the telephone!’ I announced importantly. But there was no telephone in sight. Worse still, there was also no sight of the chorus line of girls who should have been dancing in with the opening number of “Flappers are we”.

  ‘You’re in the wrong act!’ hissed the distraught director of the show from the wings. ‘You’re in Act three!’

  Oh dear, it wasn’t my night. If I went on like this, it would be a very short play.

  ‘Yes, I must find the telephone!’ I announced even more importantly...and scuttled off the stage.

  The cast were very forgiving, I must say. The play was retrieved, and we all got a very big applause at the end. But I had my eye on Old Bill. If I had my way, he would not be coming on any more public outings for a very long time.

  Back at the home, and having promoted the nervous young assistant cook, Miss Mumuni, to the dizzying heights of first cook, I sought out Betsy and Ethel again. They were seated this time in the canteen and they were sharing a pot of tea and a Battenburg cake.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt you, ladies,’ I said as I hovered around them. ‘But I was wondering, how was Christmas in your day?’

  Betsy peered short-sightedly up at me, then down at my trousers. ‘Where is it, then?’ she mumbled through her cake. ‘Get it out!’

  I looked down in confusion. I hoped she didn’t mean what I thought she meant.

  ‘That bulge in your left pocket,’ she giggled. ‘Or are you just glad to see me?’

  ‘Oh, you mean my Walkman,’ I said, inwardly relieved. ‘Do you want me to tape you again?’

  Betsy’s eyes lit up as she spotted the blinking red light of the recording device. ‘Ooh, you can tape me wherever you like. I’m open to suggestions.’

  Pretending I didn’t hear that, I repeated my question. ‘How was Christmas when you were young? Did you have a rich table of food, and lots of things that you didn’t have the rest of the year?’

  ‘Hmmph!’ snorted Betsy. ‘It didn’t mean much to me!’

  ‘It didn’t mean much to any of us!’ said Ethel. ‘No! We might get an orange, and perhaps an apple...sometimes a few coppers...we didn’t get toys or anything. Our parents couldn’t afford it!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Betsy. ‘We had a stocking with an orange in it...perhaps a bar of chocolate...and a picture book. That was your Christmas.’

  ‘What about the Christmas turkey?’ I asked.

  ‘No...no,’ quavered Betsy. ‘You were lucky if you even saw a turkey.’

  Ethel shook her head. ‘I was fortunate. I lived in Bloomsbury and everybody there went to Leadenhall or Smithfield markets. And late on Christmas evening, they auctioned off all the leftover turkeys cheap. So it was possible to be poor and have a good Christmas table.’

  ‘You? Poor?’ scoffed Betsy. ‘Don’t make me laugh! Living in Bloomsbury and calling yourself poor?’

  ‘No, we had it rough too,’ protested Ethel. ‘Especially in the twenties, when nobody had any work. I can remember – when I was twelve, it must have been 1922 – women coming round with a bucket and offering to scrub your doorstep. The front steps, that is, which was always washed in those days.’

  ‘My mother and I used to do that,’ said Betsy, giving Ethel a glare to suggest it was all her fault. ‘We went round knocking on doors, and offering to “half stone” the steps for sixpence.’

  Ethel looked defensive. ‘...And I can remember many a time my mother giving this woman a shilling – and we weren’t well off – because, as she said, if she didn’t give this woman a shilling, probably her kids weren’t going to eat that day. And I’d come home and perhaps there’d be one sausage on my plate instead of two, because this woman had got her shilling!’

  ‘My mother,’ said Betsy, ‘she took in all the gentry’s washing from Beckenham. Yerse! She’d be up half the night to get the washing done, and dried, and taken back – to get the money to get the six of us kids a meal. That went on till 1945, when the building trade picked up and my dad he went to Mitchells.’

  This sounded familiar. When my dad died young, my mother had also been forced to darn dresses at night in addition to a day job. Many a night I had drifted off to sleep to the sonorous hum of her Singer sewing machine.

  ‘So,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘are you looking forward to the Christmas party?

  ‘I should coco,’ cackled Betsy. ‘And I’m bagging Bertie for all me dances. Nobody can trip the light fandango like Bertie.’

  ‘If he doesn’t fall over,’ observed Ethel sourly.

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about Bertie,’ said Betsy with a titter in her voice. ‘He’s the only one who doesn’t get pissed at Christmas. All the rest of us get tiddly and giggle away like maniacs the whole night. Bertie can drink anybody under the table.’

  ‘When did he start drinking rum?’ I enquired curiously. This Bertie sounded a right rascal.

  Betsy and Ethel went into a quick whispered huddle. The jury was evidently out on Bertie with them too.

  ‘Well, he tells us it was when he was in the Navy,’ said Betsy at last. ‘But we can’t work if he was in the Navy before the Air Force. Or since. Or at all. But we’re beginning to think he was never in any of these things.’

  I laughed. ‘What wars does he say he’s been in?’

  ‘Oh, most of them,’ puffed Ethel. ‘Not only the first and second world wars, but the Spanish Civil War, fighting alongside Mussolini in Uruguay, and even in Vietnam. He also throws in the Boer War occasionally. If he listened to the news, he’d probably be in Afghanistan fighting the Russians!’

  Whether by chance or by accident, the very next person I came across, as I proceeded down the corridor selling Christmas Dance tickets was the man himself, Bertram Button.

  Bertie was holding co
urt at the mobile library, flourishing a book about Rommel in Africa and telling his awestruck assembly of ladies: ‘I was there! I was Montgomery’s batman! Oh yes, Monty and me go way back. It was just before we knocked back those Zulus!’

  ‘Oh, how exciting!’ fluttered elderly Mrs Winch. ‘Was that when you were a bomber pilot or a submarine commander?’

  ‘Or in the wrong century,’ I politely interrupted. ‘Didn’t we fight the Zulus sixty years earlier, at Rorke’s Drift?’

  ‘What do you know, young man?’ said Bertie, looking a little caught out. ‘There’s Zulus all over the place. I even saw one at Clapham South tube station the other day!’

  I opened my mouth to comment but then closed it again. Bertie had come over all strange. His hands were shaking, a thin dribble of spittle had appeared at the side of his mouth, and his legs looked like they were about to give way.

  ‘Here, let me take him,’ said John Gray, fortuitiously materialising at my side. ‘What’s the matter, Bertie? Haven’t you been taking your pills again?’

  Bertie leant on John’s shoulder and fumbled around in his pockets. ‘I knew I was supposed to remember something,’ he murmured, pointing to a knot in his handkerchief. ‘I just forgot what it was.’

  ‘Well,’ said John in a kindly voice. ‘It won’t get any better. Not with Parkinson’s. But you’re off the eye drops, so that’s an improvement, isn’t it? I think you’re doing very well. And keep having that can of brown ale a day. That’s going to do your bowels no end of good.’

  ‘Stuff your can of brown ale,’ muttered Bertie as he sank uncomfortably into a chair. ‘What I need is a tot of rum. Yes, the world would be a much better place if everyone had a tot of rum...’

  Bertie was quite a different man now, all the boastful stuffing knocked out of him. I gestured for John to leave and put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s your story, Bertie?’ I asked. ‘How did you end up here, and how did you feel when you were first admitted?’

  ‘Well, I’d just lost my wife,’ he said, holding his own hands together to stop them trembling. ‘And how did I feel? Pretty disjointed, really. When you’ve been together with someone for 50 years, and then suddenly get separated – not knowing what to do, where to go, who to turn to – your life pretty much falls apart. I’m not sleeping well, you know...disjointed. They tell me off for wandering a lot at night, especially into other residents’ rooms and giving them “frights”, but I can’t help it. My life is disjointed. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, most of the time.’

  I struggled to think of a way of cheering Bertie up. A big man with a wide barrelled chest and no neck to speak of, he seemed small as a child now. My heart went out to him, and I found myself chanting inside for his happiness.

  ‘But you’re a hit with the ladies,’ I ventured. ‘They all dote on you!’

  Bertie gave a low sigh. ‘Well, I’ve got a good front, and it’s all women here, isn’t it? Don’t see many men. And the staff, well, they mean well, but they’re too busy to sit down and chat. I understand that. Of course, I’ve got friends from the outside...relatives...my old neighbours. But they promise to come and see me, and I sit and wait for them to come and see me, but they don’t come and see me. My trouble is, I never made my fortune. If I’d made my fortune, well...’

  Bertie reminded me of my grandfather. A once proud man laid low by the ravages of time, trying to keep his dignity in the face of diminishing health and extinct opportunities. Over the next half hour or so, I learnt that he had been a baker by trade, and that his sudden, impulsive leap onto that P & O ship 50 years ago had been the one brave thing he had done in his life. All the rest of his heroics in various world conflicts – in typical Walter Mitty fashion – had been the invention of a fevered, and very regretful, imagination.

  But this particular Mitty had one more string to his bow.

  And when he drew it, all hell would break loose...

  Chapter 9

  Bertie Steps Out

  I returned to the home after the Christmas break to find it in an uproar. Three police cars were parked outside, and inside, half the committee and all of the staff were running around like headless chickens.

  ‘What the matter?’ I asked John Gray. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Bertie’s gone missing,’ said John. ‘Actually, he went missing three days ago, but Matron was holding the fort while we were all away and she didn’t notice his absence. Then the silly woman rang the police instead of Mr Parker and now we got a media storm on our hands: the papers have us down as “the care home which lets its residents out to almost certain death in the snow”.’

  This sounded grim. ‘What’s Mr Parker’s take on it?’

  ‘Oh, he’s absolutely furious, wants Matron’s guts for garters. But he can’t have them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  John’s bushy moustache twitched in an amused smirk. ‘Because Minnie Glendening put her in hospital.’

  Minnie Glendening? Surely not. A kinder, sweeter old lady I had yet to meet.

  ‘I just heard from John Trundle,’ said John. ‘It was the middle of last night, and Minnie was in one of her moods. So she got it into her head to get some attention, and started banging on the radiator with her stick until the night care assistant arrived. Then she started off with her: “I can’t see! I can’t hear!” But she could see alright. And a few minutes after the assistant had got fed up and told her firmly to go back to sleep, she was up and off and found her way upstairs, shrieking “I want to see Matron!” until she arrived outside Mrs Butterworth’s door. Then she banged on the door until Matron woke up and came to see what all the fuss was about. She opened the door to an irate Glendening, and came out with a haughty “Don’t be silly, Minnie! Don’t be silly!” Which of course really got Minnie’s back up. Suddenly, she lunged out and grabbed at Matron with both hands, grunting: “Who is it? Who is it?” Mrs B. was petrified, and tried to fend her off with “Let me go, dear! Let go!” But Minnie had her in a grip of steel and pinned her to the wall by her throat. Finally, the assistant came and prised Minnie off, but she lashed out with one hand and cracked Matron across the chin with one mighty wallop, and put her in hospital with concussion.’

  ‘Blimey,’ I said, ‘Every day a drama. So what’s happening now?’

  ‘What’s happening now,’ said John, ‘is that there’s a nationwide police hunt for Bertie. We’ve tracked his movements to Wandsworth, where he apparently borrowed two hundred quid from a friend. Oh, and he picked up his passport. I can’t imagine what he would want with a passport, can you?’

  A shiver of apprehension ran through me. And the germ of an idea of where Bertie might be planted itself in my mind.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I thought to myself. ‘I hope I haven’t reignited his travel ambitions.’

  Memories of our meeting at the mobile library flooded back to me. Bertie had given me a vivid account of his times in Cairo, and I, to be friendly, had given him a vivid account of my times on an Israeli kibbutz. To be fair, my times on the kibbutz sounded a lot more fun than his in an Egyptian hospital and when Bertie heard that everything had been free there – food, booze, accommodation – his OCD kicked in and he’d begun plaguing me with questions of how he could go to one. I hadn’t taken him seriously, of course, so had strung him along with a series of non sequiturs like ‘Maybe tomorrow, Bertie,’ or ‘Okay, Bertie, we’ll see what we can do.’

  The last day before Christmas, however, it all got too much. Mr Parker had been on my case to finalise his 60-table Supper Dance down at Wandsworth Civic Suite, Miss Mumuni, the new cook, had collapsed under the strain of having to cater for 200 people going to the residents’ party, and Matron was fussing about being...well, Matron. All I needed was for Bertie to turn up with one more whining nag about how he could visit a Middle Eastern working commune.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Bertie,’ I’d snapped in a moment of ill-advised temper. ‘If you want to go to a kibbutz so mu
ch, go!’

  My mind fled back to the last time I had issued such unwise advice. A few years earlier, I had gone to Norwich to train as a Careers Guidance Officer and my first videotaped interview, with a spotty little teenager called Duane, had not gone well. ‘So,’ I’d asked Duane, ‘what do you want to do then, when you leave school?’ I wasn’t expecting much: Duane’s school achievements amounted to a single CSE qualification in metal work. But Duane had surprised me. ‘I want to be an astronaut,’ he said chirpily. And I had replied, on camera, ‘Yeah, well, why not? Go for it!’ My tutors had failed me without blinking.

  Now I was facing a similar disaster. Though maybe I was imagining it? Yes, maybe Bertie had taken refuge in some safe house and was wandering his way back to us right now.

  No such luck.

  Two days later a blue aerogramme with a foreign stamp fluttered into my post box. The sender’s name was marked as Mr B. Button, and below it, penned in the same spidery script, was a familiar address: Kibbutz Ein Harod/Meuchad, Israel.

  Closing the door to my office, and then locking it, I carefully opened the letter and read its awful contents:

  Dear Mister Kusy, I took your advice. The kibbutz is great. They got me cutting vegetables and everything. Only downside is, they haven’t got no rum, only Sabbath wine. Staying here for a bit, then on to see that Moses mountain you told me about. Ta ra, all the jolly! Bertie.

  My first reaction, unexpectedly, was: ‘Good for you! About bloody time you did something instead of just talking about it!’ But then reality set in. What was a 75 year old man with Parkinson’s disease and hardly any money going to do in a strange country where few people spoke English and where no-one knew of his condition?