Noisy at the Wrong Times (7 page)

Dad’s van generally arrived in the early evenings. Suddenly, from every balcony, mothers would emerge from their doors behind wet dangling washing and scream the names of their children, beckoning them to attend immediately. Usually, the children had already been alerted and were sprinting to the forecourts below their flats to await orders. Coins and notes would rain down from on high as parents babbled instructions to their children who would then rush off to Dad’s van. I am not sure why there was such urgency – as with life, I suppose,
they thought they might miss out if they didn’t get in quick enough.

For me, the arrival of my father was a moment to be relished. Of course, I would have
preferred
him to turn up accompanied by the roar of a Ferrari engine, not the wobbly chimes of his clapped out Mr Whippy van, but those bells were the starter gun for all the kids whose parents had not anointed them from on high with silver coins. Like bees to a honey pot, from every direction they would gather about me in swarms. It mattered not one bit where I was on the estate because I would be hunted down and found. You could hear the relay of shouted enquiry across the forecourts and playgrounds: “Where’s Mike? Find Mike!” I would wait smugly for my coterie to arrive, puffing and panting, eager to impress. If I were indoors, Mum would send me out, if nothing else to consume some time in the company of my father, with an order for a block of ice cream.

“And tella you fadda I’m no gotta ma mentenence dissa week,” she would call as I slammed the door behind me. “AND NO SLAMMA DA FUCKY DOOR!”

If they had not yet knocked on my door, having fruitlessly searched for me in the Court, my friends would be waiting at the foot of the stairs, fervent, excited and hugely pleased to see me. They would take it in turns to put their arms around my shoulders as we skipped hurriedly towards the chimes, and fights would erupt as kids argued over which of them was my best friend. By the time we reached Dad’s van at the Shottendane Road entrance of the estate, we must have looked like the Bash Street Kids, approaching in a comic-book cloud of dust from which arms and legs would occasionally protrude. Peace would return the moment we arrived at the van and I began to bark out orders to Dad, although nothing that my friends asked for was given. You could have a cone, a cone and
if you were really lucky, you could have a cone. They came in three sizes, all of them small. Anyone who had the temerity to request red sauce would get short shrift and very likely no cone either. And even I couldn’t get a chocolate flake. Tutting and rolling his eyes heaven-wards at the demands of us children, Dad was never outwardly pleased to see me. Eventually, I would relay Mum’s order and he would grudgingly hand me a small block of ice cream to take home. If his tip for the 2.30 at Plumpton had come in, it would be raspberry ripple. Ice cream was just about the only thing my father ever gave us, but sometimes even that felt like treasure. As we were about to trot off to enjoy the delights of frozen vanilla flavoured fat, I would remember Mum’s other instruction.

“Mum says she wants her money this week.” Often I would have to shout it again, but louder, so he could hear over the large crowd of customers who had gathered.

* * *

The scorching summer of 1976 also saw me spend two weeks in hospital with an ailment that left the doctors baffled. An agonising pain in my hip and groin left me unable to move during school sports day, and immobility in the fierce sun had led to sunstroke. I ended up in hospital with acute fever and lots of hurting. Putting two and two together and getting five, the doctors suspected rheumatic fever. They took what felt like several pints of blood and, when that proved inconclusive, they took several more, then stuck me on an ECG monitor, X-rayed me, poked me, prodded me and generally acted as if they hadn’t a clue. My consultant was the bow-tie-wearing Mr Jolly, apparently one of the world’s leading paediatricians of his day. I always treat people who wear bow ties with suspicion and it’s common in the classical music industry, but back then it set
Mr Jolly apart and I was chuffed when a year or so later I saw him on the television.

“That was
my
doctor,” I would proudly announce to anybody who was listening, which was everybody if I had my way.

I ought to point out that this was my second stint in hospital; two years previously, I had spent a fortnight in a private room in the maternity unit. I was there because my injury was burns and they had to isolate me as a sterile measure, and the only private room they had was in the maternity ward. I am almost reluctant to relay the cause of my misfortune since it can paint a picture of foolhardy negligence on the part of Mum – but it wasn’t really. I was nine years old when it happened, and it was the same hospital, New Charing Cross (as it was then known) in Hammersmith, that picked up the pieces.

Every morning I had a cup of tea. I liked tea. Lou, my eldest brother loved it, so I would too. Mum called us down in the morning, and I stumbled into the lounge in my vest and underpants, half asleep. I came to my senses a bit when Mum brought me the mug of tea, which I took from her, but ten seconds later promptly fell asleep again. The scalding tea was quite an eye-opener, and I sprinted, screaming, up the stairs, sure Mum would wallop me for spilling tea on the sofa. Serge and Lou came charging after me, I thought, either to help deliver the walloping or to protect me from it, but it was in fact to assess the seriousness of my injuries, which they assumed would be bad. They were. The pain was ugly, all consuming and frighteningly angry. Blisters began to form immediately, and by now most of the neighbours were in the house wondering what the commotion was. I wasn’t happy about that because in my desperation to escape the hot fluid, I had whipped off my pants and vest as I charged up the stairs and was now stark naked, embarrassed that my wedding tackle was
involved in the injury. Whilst an ambulance was called, Mum tried to set about me with a tub of butter, which back in the old country she had always thought best for the treatment of burns. Thankfully, Lou was wiser; he stopped her basting me and put me in a cold bath instead.

I was delivered by ambulance and hospital trolley to the room in the maternity unit and isolated immediately. I don’t remember going to A&E first. Everybody who visited or came to treat me had to don full gowns, masks and gloves. The first person I recall standing at the end of my bed as I sobbed was a social worker – no doubt alerted by the hospital. She was crying too (more than me, to which I took offence, actually). I didn’t know why she was crying. Was I such a pitiable sight? I didn’t recognise her so I can’t imagine she was weeping on account of my being familiar to her, that I was somebody about whom she cared a great deal. But she was blubbing like a bloody baby, and one can now conclude that she was probably more familiar with me than I was with her.
Someone
was clearly paying attention to us.

My lap and upper legs were smothered in blisters and a cold burns sheet had been placed on my injured nether regions. I peeked fearfully beneath it (for even at nine, thanks to kisschase and visits to Fulham baths I had become aware of the value of my equipment) and noticed that a blister had formed at the tip of my
old chap
. Thankfully it was the only one, but it did have a deforming effect that made my willy look like an unpeeled prawn.

Two weeks later three doctors and a nurse gathered around me as if in an operating theatre, with an array of alarming utensils arranged neatly on a steel trolley, and proceeded to pop each of the blisters one by one. Some were huge, and collectively they looked like the cobbles on a street. I remember the warm water running as each was gently sliced at its edge
and I recall the stench of the ointment they bathed me in. It was a tough time being alone in that room, but my brothers walked past my window on the way to school and they, along with their friends, shouted and greeted me through the glass. That was something I always looked forward to.

Now of course, this second stint in hospital with a mystery leg ailment meant further difficulties for Mum. Fitting in visiting me was taxing since she had to be in her kitchen at the nursery by 7am and then had a job to go to after feeding the rest of my brothers. Mum would sit by my bed at five thirty in the morning whilst I slept and would then go to work – I rarely knew she was there in the silent, sleeping ward in semi-darkness but she sat there anyway. One morning I did emerge from my deep, medically assisted slumbers and saw her crying. Her tears were not of sadness, though; the traction they had put me into the previous day seemed to have done the trick.

I vividly (and with no little upset) recall the day they resorted to traction. They were baffled by my ailment and the extent of my pain. Standing around my bed in a huddle one morning, the doctors discussed many possible options and treatments, but one thing I latched onto was traction – strapping my leg and tying a weight to my foot in order to extend and stretch it. To me it seemed like the most concrete idea they‘d had because it was practical, obvious and tangible. They wandered off to make some decisions, and I began to wail at the nurses that I wanted, must have, just
had
to go into traction. I cried and cried with the pain, and a poor cleaner, a gentle Jamaican woman, tried to comfort and reassure me, eventually dissolving into tears alongside me as she did so. We were quite a sight, and when she could take no more of my pleading, bawling and snivelling she marched off to the nurse’s station on my behalf to demand that I be put into traction.

A little later, two nurses, armed with a roll of sticky plaster,
some weights and a pulley, performed the duty that in my mind had been demanded and achieved by that lovely cleaning woman. She had got it done, nobody else. And she remains a clear memory for me, that soft compassionate lady whose name I never knew; another of those small but hugely significant people or moments in the lives of certain children that pass by in a fleeting second, yet are burned into their consciousness. Many years later, at the birth of my daughter, that cleaner sprang straight back into my mind as the Jamaican midwife handed the baby to her weeping father with the words, “Here you go bwoy wonder!”

It was the morning after the installation of the pulley and weights that Mum had come into the ward to find me lying, blissfully asleep, on my side, the side of the leg that had been so excruciatingly painful to the merest touch the day before. The mystery had been solved. It had only been a trapped nerve, and so she wept; relieved that from that day forward her mind would no longer be suffused with the worry of what might be wrong with me.

Putting me into traction solved the leg problem, and antibiotics cleared up the chest infection but the sunstroke had struck me quite hard. They wanted to keep me in so that my leg could strengthen and to check there would be no reccurrence. I was out of traction after a few days, but I would spend a further fortnight in the ward. Two weeks in hospital turned out to be quite a bit of fun and needing a wheelchair introduced a unique opportunity for mischief. I took the chance with relish and crashed my way around the hospital with a boy whose entire bottom half was encased in plaster of Paris. He was on his belly on a little trolley, and together we caused chaos. His affliction, which made mine look like no more than a verucca, did nothing to prevent his mobility or potential for bedlam. In fact, his arms could propel him down
the long corridors at giddy speed; with his legs protruding dead straight behind him and his arms waving furiously beside him, he looked like a lobster on amphetamine. He’d cry at night when his legs were aching, but he was full of beans during the daytime and even cheekier to the nurses than I was.

By the time I left the ward to go home, I was walking normally. I went to the bedside of my new friend who had fallen quiet as Mum helped me pack up my things for the discharge. He lay there exhausted from the effort of getting up and under his covers, which he always insisted on doing without help. I felt strangely guilty for being able to walk again. We had shared the same inability to use our legs for a short while, but he had been living with it for most of his life. I don’t think he minded that I had elevated my own minor ailment to the level of his, but I think he enjoyed the company for that couple of weeks. As I said my farewells tearfully, he smiled.

“Have a good time at that school, wontcha?” he urged.

“Yeah, I will. I’ll come and see you before I go,” I lied.

I wish I could remember his name.

The end of summer 1976 arrived. The heat wave, which in those pre-global warming days had become a legend, subsided, and Serge was at the end of the remarkably long summer holidays that Woolverstone provided. My confidence about going there was starting to fray at the edges, and I would lie in bed, badgering Serge about the school. What would it be like? Would I enjoy it? Would I be homesick? Occupying me more than anything else was the fear that I wouldn’t be the toughest boy in the year – a status I thought I enjoyed at primary school. Because I had visited the school many times previously, I had not been required to attend the open day for new boys, but Serge had been one of those showing people around and he sought to reassure me.

“I saw all of the boys coming in your year, you look harder than all of them,” he said.

It is, I suppose, an indication of what was important to me at the time that I had become concerned about such things. I was obviously sanguine about the academic challenges of Woolverstone, but that could well have been because I never truly realised there were any. It is also possible that of all the obstacles Woolverstone would place before me, the one I feared most was being a young boy who had to compete with other young boys of equal or, heaven forfend, greater potential. Serge took some time to explain the protocols and rules of the school, the regulations forbidding me to walk on the grass, rules insisting I use particular doors to enter and exit buildings and rotas for menial tasks around the house. He pointed out with desperate pleading in his eyes that things would be better for me if I developed an understanding of why these seemingly petty demands had a purpose. Naturally, none of this was making much sense or difference to me, and my brother was transparently alarmed by my imminent arrival; I would surely become a responsibility he could do without and he was aware of the explosive consequences once I was required to conform.