DAY ONE: PLUS ONE

Actually it is Plus one and a bit.

Saturday was a bad day. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I had managed to delay my first  ciggie until after lunch, the idea being that if I delayed it a little every day I would end up living in a smokeless zone by week two.
But Saturday was a bad day and I fell right off the wagon. By the end of what was a stressful day  I felt thoroughly ashamed and not a little nauseous.

Sunday: Today I became a non-smoker. It wasn't too hard because I had chest pains, nausea and a mouth like an ashtray.  Sunday was Day One.

Monday: Today was a strange day; I thought about having a cigarette constantly, but now have the mind-set of a non-smoker [I shall be berating smokers next]  and quickly found something else to do. This afternoon I fell asleep on the couch for 1:1/2 hours...so tired...bed at 9;30pm.

Tuesday: I can't imagine that I will give in now...and return to Day one: minus.  I can only think that the reason I feel so sleepy is because I have not slept properly for a long time.  My lungs no longer ache and coughing stopped. Fingers crossed. Actually feeling very proud of myself.   Was it too easy? Will I not receive the kudos I deserve.?

Thanks to you all who wrote to encourage me...I would have felt a right Wally had I let you and myself down.

DAY ONE: Minus four.

MONDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2011

I have been feeling odd; bit of a cough as expected after 64 years of the weed, light-headed yet achy behind the eyes nose and cheek-bones...classic allergy symptoms I've been telling myself when my thought process turns to the most obvious and, some would say, most deserved diagnosis.

But it is the sharp pain under my ribs [ diagnosed by me as intercostal cartilage strain or inflammation of:-] which  is the one symptom, the final symptom which leads me to the decision that I Must Quit.


 To that end I dug in the rubbish drawer for the Niquitin lozenges from my last attempt, only remembering the foulness of them on sucking the first one. I sauntered next door but two to the Chemist - our usual glorious Pharmacist - she of the ebony skin, silken dreadlocks and the whitest truest smile was on holiday and her Locum, a tall elderly taciturn man with a full head of white hair and moustache to rival that of  Dick van Dyke's Dr. Sloan, suggested, when I asked if there had been a breakthrough and had someone thought to flavour the wretched things so that they were palatable, wandered around the aisles and suggested that 'perhaps if I bought some strong mints and sucked along with a lozenge...'

That was Day one: minus one. I lasted until 1pm. I tried keeping busy, but one has to sit down sometime and Milou didn't feel like giving up his afternoon cuddle on the sofa with mum, Doctors, Flog it and Countdown.
My count was six that day...which I felt was a credible effort.
Day One:  minus  two and three followed pretty much the same pattern except that I think I must be holding my breath or somehow controlling the strength of the breaths I do take because though I slept well enough the intercostal pain was worse this morning.

Took another stroll to the Chemist...tablets are mint flavoured but at  £15. Hell's Bells. Forget it. I will quit, but slowly using will power. [famous last words?]

Just Googled Intercostal Cartilage and I think I have been 'Bracing'. Yup!

Life in the old girl yet.

Will no doubt be flagging Day one when it arrives.

I looked for a suitable illustration on Google Images but they are all too preachy, too worthy , patronising or just bonkers; as if we are not aware of the dangers involved in sucking up the tarry smoke.  Then I thought of the very old song by Phil Harris:

 Smoke smoke smoke that cigarette 

                        Puff, puff puff and if you smoke yourself to death

                              Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate, that you hate to make him wait

              But you just gotta have another cigarette.

This song came out in  1939/40 and it was one of the songs in Mother's meagre collection [the B side wassomething about a card game: I remember: Now sitting right there in that there clan, there chanced to be a one-eyed man and he kep' starin' at me out the corner of his eye...an' ol' one eye would deal and then, it cost Bill another five or ten....]


So even then they knew. 1]that nicotine is addictive and 2] It was/is harmful.

BUS PASS HEAVEN / HELL

The other day I took a bus into the Bay. It was the first bus I'd been on since we bought the car so, maybe it has been at least ten years since we were without transport.  Even then we would eschew public transport, preferring to walk to the end of the road and then down the Downs along the seafront and into town that way. Of course we were both ten years younger then and the short mile was nothing to us [although laden with shopping we would always taxi back up the hill]

Now the car is gone; not too lamented when we count the money saved and bask in eco. glory of a little less pollution,but  there are times when we have to go to town and this was one of them. I couldn't ask NOAOson, who takes us to our weekly big shop out of town as his plate was overflowing at the time and I needed to browse the Charity shops-not a necessary journey but I needed my fix.

So there I was, waiting for the  10-10 bus. It was late and I was reassured to see there was another elderly woman waiting with me.
A small single decker arrived and I followed the woman inside, flashing my bus pass at the driver. He tutted, took the card and shoved it upside down over the thingummy plate and I moved inside and wedged myself in the only free seat on the sideways bench next to a very fat, beautifully made up lady of an age between 18 and 80.

The air was redolent of talcum powder, Ralgex, Lavender water, Christmas gifts of Givenchy Gentleman, my own [thankfully liberally applied ] Mitsouko, and a faint but definite whiff of Eau de Urine.

From my sideways bench I could see down the bus and every seat was occupied by a Senior Citizen with heads bearing every shade of hair from snow white to iron grey, with some bluish and pinky horrors to season the pot. But the most surprising thing-used as I was to the silence of a London bus, where the journey is a trial to be undertaken with as much speed and anonymity as possible lest one is made visible to the drunk, noisy and potentially violent-here there was a raucous cacophony of sound composed of conversations carried across the aisle, much laughter, and in one instance, singing by two couples along the back seat.

Snatches of speech:

'She didn't!'
'She bloody did.'

'I said to 'im, if you want it you can lug it upstairs.'
'My, Jim had one of them.'
'Was it worth it?'
'Nah! Could have done it meself.'  The mind boggles.

'My boy's coming down this weekend.'
'That's nice.'
'He's got a Bentley.'
'If I 'ad a Bentley I'd sell it.'
'Well he's got two.'

'Donald wanted a chop but at those prices I said it's mince or nothing.'

I  alighted  at the top of the High Street, thanking the surly driver who grunted and swished the door shut before I'd hit the pavement.

Now I'm trying to decide on a collective noun for a clutch of OAP's-and as it includes myself it has to be a good one, flatteringly descriptive of our Joi de vivre.

How about: A Survival of Seniors:

ONE AND TWO HALVES

One and two halves a reprint from 2009

by Moannie

We were three, though for a long time, it was just Mick, my older half-brother and me. 

I was Pollyanna  [well, Mollyanne a] always smiling, not a great thinker, a follower, his shadow. He could make the sounds of instruments with his mouth; drums of all types, a flute a  Saxophone.  I sang  'Money is the root of all evil'  and he played along, all jazzy, like the music we'd only recently discovered. He was wound tight, St. Edith's had done that to him. He kept secrets the way he kept his sweets in their paper bag, all screwed up in his pocket so that he had to suck the paper off. Never shared. I would eat my weekly twopenny worth of Bulls-eyes, or Humbugs or toffees in one go, stuffing my cheeks and sussing up the streaming saliva, then beg 'G'us one,' but he never would. 

After St. Edith's it was just him and me...playing Dick Barton:Special Agent in the hidey hole under the eaves, or we'd play shops with the meagre contents of mum's kitchen, or Jazz bands. We'd sprawl on mum's divan bed with the tapestry cover of a jungle scene with lions and tigers and he'd be Tarzan to my Jane, or we'd play mum's few records over and over and he would copy the instruments until I could not tell if it was the record or him playing the snare drum or the trumpet. When Harry was there, before mum married him, we would leave the house and run, always run - to the park, or to the bridge over the railway where we would gaze in fascination as the snorting black and shiny monsters chuntered along the tracks.

He grew up to be tight-lipped, quick to quip, holding nothing dear. If St. Edith's was the cause, he never told me...he grew a moustache and a goatee beard, and he grew away from me. He wanted no ties of love, or emotion, not even for his mother who died with just me there, holding her hand. He came to her funeral, then left. We have not met since then, thirty years ago.

When Tony was born I was ten and Mick twelve. I fell in love instantly. At first I was forbidden to go near him, then gradually I became useful. He was the Prince-the chosen one, the wartime baby who needed the butter and the orange juice, eggs and milk and sweets [candy], all rationed, but he blossomed and thrived even though his baby teeth grew out in blackened and decayed stumps he was still beautiful and I adored him, which was just as well as he became my shadow as soon as he could walk. Mick dropped me like a hot potato and it was then Tony and me.

 But there was something in him that curdled, like milk left out in the sun, and the loving brother grew up and became someone else, self-absorbed, a braggart, an opinionated - the French have the perfect word which translates as near as dammit to- a...hole.

When mum was dying I called him-he turned over and went back to sleep.

We tried, many times to get back to something resembling family, but it was false and finally failed and it has been many years now since there was any contact.

There are many and valid reasons why they became what they are-and why I am who I am. Mick never knew his father, adored his mother and watched her abandon us then make a disastrous marriage and cling to it, even though we, the reasons why she married were anathema to the man and we hated him. He escaped through National Service in Suez and never went back home to live. Tony was wanted and loved and spoiled, but was born of Harry's gene pool. He loved his father, had no reason not to, but he was left alone with mum when I left home at eighteen and she began her long fight with Multiple Sclerosis and he despised her as weak.

I had no spine, no backbone, I wanted the fairy story, the loving father and mother, the laughing playing siblings, the gingerbread house, the happy ending.
I do not miss my half-brothers-they only ever made me unhappy, bringing JP to anger and me to agonise over each visit.

And in the end I made my own fairy tale.

THE PRUNE ONE

An old photograph

The other day, as we were finishing our lunch, he looked up and asked me 'Do you remember where we were when we had our first argument?'

I was instantly transported back to a Sunday afternoon in1955 and Leicester Square, London. I felt my flesh taut on my bones, brushed my hands through my Hiltone blonded Doris Day DA and warmed to the September sun on my face. The bench is warm too where we are sitting as we wait for the afternoon showing of a film we both wanted to see and heard the voices  and the light Sunday traffic as a distant hum.

We've been 'going out' for a few months; though it really added up to perhaps less than fifteen of my days off from the Hospital.  By the time I had paid for essentials there was little left of my salary for trips home and I seemed to be forever trapped in debt-by the time I had repaid the Paper man for the cigarettes he 'put on tick' for me and the odd half-crown borrowed from someone to replace the holey black nylons I managed to get through as if they were made of cobwebs- I usually only had enough for one trip to Dreamland Ballroom and the first packet of cigs.

I cannot remember if we had three separate trips to London together, or if the 'argument' occurred on the same day that we had to run from Soho, all the way down Regent Street looking for a loo, with me in agony, bursting my bladder; not a romantic scenario at the time. Or was it also the day that we ate at a Chinese restaurant in Soho where I caught the Dysentery that would see me interred in a Hospital for infectious diseases for three months? [The restaurant was closed by the Health authorities shortly after our visit]

Kimo sabe, as we say in this house [this was either a phrase used by the Lone Rangers companion, or the actual name of the Lone Rangers companion] What it means chez nous is 'who can say?'
The argument began as a gentle discussion of fruit,of peaches, which were only just becoming available in Britain as our economy expanded. JP was saying how plentiful they were in the south of France. I said that I loved plums, the large dark juicy Victoria, and pointed out a couple seated next to us who were sharing a bag of them.

'Oh, you mean, Prunes!'
'No, prunes are dried plums.'
'Non, they are pruneaux '
'I think you mean prunus which is the generic term for plums, damsons, greengages etc.,'
'Eh?'

I tend to forget that his English is pretty basic; when we first got together he had: yes and no, I'm hungry and, I love you.

'What do you call those round sweet greeny yellow fruits?' I asked.
'Rene Claude.'
'Well we call it a Greengage and it too is a member of the family Prunus.'
'No, a pruneau is what you call a plum and what we call a PRUNE!'

Now I'm getting a bit het up. I stand up and I'm afraid I took a stance, very Calamity Jane with hands on hips.

'Well, here in ENGLAND a prune is a dried up wrinkled PLUM.'
'And in FRANCE it is a PRUNEAU!'

I can't believe we are shouting, or why. He is standing now and facing me, mouth tight and eyes blazing. I walk away from him to the edge of the square and look back and see that he is walking in the other direction. I slow down and walk around the edge of the square tears falling as my anger dissipates. He has the train tickets and the money for the cinema. I hate him, arrogant French boy.  Head down I bump into him.

'Prune,' he says.
'Plums' say I.
And he holds me and kisses me and all is well with the world.

'Oh yes,' I say.  'I remember it well. And a plum is a plum and a prune.'

SO HAPPY TO BE BACK

I don't think anyone has missed me, and that is a bit, well, sad really. I know I am not that prolific but it has been 20 days since my last post I had thought to see  at least one or two...'Moannie where are you' [s].

The saga began when I finally got truly mad at Hayhohell and cancelled my contract with them, and, at the same time cancelled   BT who have done nothing wrong, but we decided to put all our eggs into the basket at Sky, thus saving a bundle [eventually, we hope] This all happened on the 1st of this month and I, in my blissful ignorance believed it would all be fixed and finished by the eighth.
Hayhohell however lived up to its name and reputation and refused to give me my mac code so that Sky  has made me wait till the 18th to do whatever magic they had to do to get me connected. The parcel arrived with all the bits and pieces I needed to get it done but...and there's the rub, I didn't have the nerve. Today the wonderful Debs and Gary came by and he fixed it for me and now I am back and it is as if I had never been away.

Well it is for you 'cos you didn't miss me.

Twenty days of twitching, of irritability; of dusting and weeding, cleaning in corners that have not seen a duster since we moved here seventeen years ago.I have walked and wormed and weeded until dog and garden have yelled 'uncle'.  I've begun baking, even using yeast  to great effect [pizza dough] and disaster [Chelsea Buns] and brought out my Encyclopaedia Gastronomic  to produce some great meals much to the approbation of JP. I've dillied and dallied and a couple of times lost my way home and the time CREPT BY.

I could have used that time to my advantage, storing up posts in word, but nothing happened when faced with that blank white page; there is something about this small rectangle which gets my creative juices flowing.
Hayhohell still showed me the little place where my emails are stored but it mocked me, creeping up from 6-to-155 and of course I could not access them. It has been awful.

And now that I am back, in touch with the world and my friends and I can ask Google questions [I have a list]   it feels good.
Don't let me down Sky, you have my on-line life in your hands.

HELLO WORLD!

ANOTHER PIECE OF THE PUZZLE

Another piece in the puzzle.

I have used that title intentionally, because I am beginning to think that these posts, dedicated to my past are bits of the jigsaw that, completed, and read in the correct sequence [I purposefully publish out of order] will help me to understand why I am me.

Gretel S. [Mutti] really deserves a chapter all her own in my story. Not just because she was an extraordinary woman, which she was, but because of the effect she had on my life.

Born in Holland in I9II Mutti moved with her parents to Germany when she was eleven. I am not sure exactly when she moved back to Holland but it was there she married an Englishman, Norman S, and had a daughter, Marjorie. The marriage broke up, Germany invaded Poland breaking their treaty with Great Britain and war was declared. Wrapping two Persian rugs around her middle and with only what she could carry, Mutti brought her eight year old daughter to England as the Germans marched into Holland. She arrived when the country was in turmoil.


 Unprepared for a war that was inevitable - thanks to the dithering of Neville Chamberlain the Prime Minister of the period, men were hurriedly conscripted and trained, factories converted from peacetime products to producing uniforms, guns and ammunition, tanks, planes and field kitchens. The powers that be, requisitioned schools, houses and land as headquarters, living accommodation, training bases, and stores. Khaki, pale blue, and navy blue uniforms now predominated and the accents of all nations could be heard in the towns. Sign posts and place names were removed from roads, sticky paper strips criss-crossed windows in trains and blackout curtains in every home cut out any chink of light that might lead an enemy bomber to its target.
Rationing began; gas masks were distributed and were obliged to be carried at all times. Municipal parks were dug up and planted with vegetables, and Barrage Balloons looking like floating elephants protected important sites. Lorries collected iron railings and garden gates to be turned into shells for bombs and bullets and the Black Market was born.
After living for a while with her estranged husband Mutti moved to Bedford to be near her only brother Paul, who was a Trades Union leader.

Mutti was a sturdy five foot nothing of energy, with the face of a mischievous but rather plain, elf. If there was something she wanted or needed she would find a way to get it. She would badger people into submission using a mixture of coercion, persuasion and moral blackmail. She sold her rugs and some jewellery and bought a large run down house and proceeded to beg or borrow the means to repair and paint it. When it suited her she would play the poor refugee who had escaped Hitler by a whisker. 
She had the idea of creating a housing billet where officers could rest and relax; near enough to London to commute to their offices, yet far enough away to avoid the nightly bombardment. Having conceived the idea she followed it through by shaming those who were doing nothing, to help her in her plan. Beds and bedding were donated; shops were scoured for the necessary equipment for her kitchen and for all the other essentials. 
Mutti knew her antiques and was not above trading the food her officer’s food stamps brought her, for more rugs, fancy tables even object d’arts. Eventually she had room for eight officers and her fame as a cook ensured that the waiting list for places grew and the numbers stayed constant. She knew how to make a little go a long way. Cream was a thing of the past and butter rationed so she would take the cream from the top of each bottle of milk, letting it stand for a while before draining off any liquid then whipping the cream to top her coffee or her fancy puddings. Her soups were legendary; made from a stock pot that was always on the go. It began with a chicken carcass or meat bones with onions, celery and bay leaf and then took all the leftovers that came back from the vegetable dishes. Nothing went to waste, ever. She bought day old bread and stale sponges for half price. The bread was held under hot water for a second then baked in a hot oven until it was as crisp and fresh as new baked. The sponges were soaked in sherry and made the base for sherry trifle. She gave her men Goulash and Blinis, bashed tough steak into submission, tied pieces into sausage shapes and pressure cooked it in rich gravy until it melted in the mouth, salted runner beans in the summer glut for winter delight and made her own Sauerkraut. In a time of restrictions, her officers ate very well. 


She did not waste money on sending soiled washing to a laundry. Monday was washday and beds were changed to crisp fresh linen and she would still be ironing at eleven in the evening. She had one particular and peculiar quirk which she credited for her boundless energy. Every afternoon after lunch she would retreat to her bedroom, remove her shoes, climb on the bed and cover herself with a rug. She would close her eyes and sleep for precisely ten minutes and wake refreshed. Wherever she was in the world [and I have witnessed this in London and New York and heard of her search for a bed or bench in Franco’s Palace in Madrid] she would enter a hotel lobby, remove her shoes, lie back on a couch, close her eyes and sleep for the required ten minutes. No one disturbed her. By the time hotel staff decided to rouse her, her ten minutes were over and she was up, shoes on, shopping bags retrieved and on her way. 


Her fame spread and her bank balance grew. She grew close to one of the officers, Reginald Floyd, a tall buffoon of a man who could see at once that her dragooning character was a perfect foil for his own laid back laziness. Marjorie went to Bedford Girls High School and became a perfect English rose.


Sometime in the late forties Mutti bought a large rundown hotel in The Bay, and with her usual formidable energy and courage turned it, in double quick time, into a convalescent home. She took patients from all over Kent for two weeks of convalescent care and some of her very good cooking; with the aid of a regular turnover of German girls, and a number of her ‘stray lambs’; girls like me who needed tender loving care. Reginald or Flukenbush as she called him drove her around in his large black Packard, to the station, to the Wholesalers or to the Bridge Club where they played every Thursday evening. For the rest of the time he played solitaire in their sitting room, changed the occasional light bulb or parked outside the Pier and waited for the showgirls to exit from the Summer Show.

I953 and I enter her world.
I was given a card to take to the Home for an interview with the owner, Mrs Gretel S. who needed a cleaner and general dogsbody. I had been a week without money and I was very hungry. Mutti looked me over with her small twinkling grey eyes, saw with her amazing antennae that I was a waif in distress and hired me on the spot. ‘Time for lunch, my dear’ she said in her comic Dutch/German accent. ‘Come and join us’. It was stew, not any old English stew with gobs of fat floating on thin tasteless liquid; but Mutti’s stew. Succulent meat, bite tender vegetables and soft fluffy dumplings floating on rich thick gravy. I ate three bowls, an act that became part of the folklore of the Home.


I worked from Monday to Friday with Mrs.Robinson- a long term member of Mutti’s staff - I stripped and remade beds, vacuumed carpets and swept the oak-stained and polished floorboards. We dusted and polished furniture, cleaned windows and bathrooms, and folded linen. If all that was done Mutti would find me another job. Dampening and rolling pillowcases, sheets, table cloths, shirts and blouses ready for the iron. Or she would have me stringing runner beans, shredding cabbage or simply stirring a pot. Mrs. Robinson, [Robbie] knew better than to show her face. If her work was done she would hide herself in an upstairs room and smoke another of her endless cigarettes. I however was in some kind of heaven. 


The work, though never-ending, was not hard and everyone was pleasant. Mutti’s assistant, Erna, a tall grim looking German woman was a bit severe but Mutti herself more than made up for her. We had coffee at eleven around the big kitchen table. For the first time in my life I tasted proper roasted coffee and with Mutti’s famous ‘milk top cream’ it was sublime. There would be cake, almond slices, or biscuits and the conversation would be mostly in German. I was told that after a while there would be no translation and I would soon pick up enough of the language to follow what was being said. Sometimes we would sing. Around that table, with our coffee and cakes, one of the girls would hum something and another would pick it up. I learned to sing Das wonden ist dast Muller’s luste [probably not quite right but that is the phonetic spelling] A Roundelay, you know, where one singer starts and the next begins midway, then the third and so-on. The first time it happened it made me cry. I couldn’t believe such happiness existed. I sang all the time and no-one told me to stop. At the top of the house in the attics I would sing 'Oh Mien Papa' from Madam Butterfly, and hit the top note [just]. I was almost delirious with happiness. At the end of the first week I bought a bottle of Hiltone bleach and became a blonde and would remain one for the next eighteen years with a few hiccups along the way. After three weeks I moved into one of the attics at the top of the house and, at eighteen and a half I began to venture into what today would be known as teenager territory.

Marjorie was three years older than I. At first she was distant. I was just another of her mother's stray cats and I think she would have loved to have Mutti's attention to herself, but little by little we became closer until we were inseparable-at least when she was home from the hospital where she was in her third year of nursing training.

Because of Mutti and Marjorie I would begin my own nursing training within a year.

Because of Mutti I became a good cook, learned to appreciate music and gained knowledge of antiques, spoke German and a little Dutch and discovered that caring comes in all shapes and sizes and that by 'paying it forward' can be endless.