Short Story: A Celebration Of Old Age…

Short Story: A Celebration Of Old Age By A Baby-boomer Soon To Follow

“I worked in a clap clinic in Alexandria once, you know.”

“Did you,” I said, a spoonful of cornflakes suspended between bowl and mouth.

I looked across the table at Norman and then around the room. Furniture bought new in the 1950s; dark walnut veneer draining the light from the white-painted, wood-chipped papered walls. His statement did not match the respectability of the room: antimacassars on the chairs, an abundance of cheap prints; the Laughing Cavalier next to a collection of spoons. He saw my gaze.

“They were Dorothy’s. She liked to collect a spoon from wherever we went.”

“We bought you some of them. But, how did you end up working in a clinic in Alexandria?”

He looked at me across his bowl of microwaved porridge with honey that his carer had unceremoniously dumped in front of him before she had flounced out.

“She’s a bonny lass,” he had said. “She has a lad at university, you know. He’s doing engineering, good thing too, there used to be shipyards all along the banks of the Tyne. That’s where I started working when I left school at 14.”

“What, in the shipyards?” I asked, thinking this was another side of Norman that I did not know.

“No, mother wouldn’t have that. So I worked as a clerk for Tynebrand down on the Quayside in North Shields.”

I thought of the small section of the boiled tinned meat now on supermarket shelves and pondered the loss of an empire. I wanted to get him back to the clap clinic.

“So how did you go from there to Alexandria?”

A globule of honey-porridge dribbled out of the corner of his mouth and ran down his chin. He did not notice and the bib would catch it eventually. It was a tartan one, a grown up one, not like those for children with inane motifs like ‘mummy’s little treasure.’

Norman gazed off into the distance and I thought he was going to fall asleep again, pitch forward into his porridge and there were still three hours to go before the lunchtime carer came to lift his face out, wipe it and prepare him for his next microwave meal, a plastic bowlful of Lancashire hotpot that was as far removed from Lancashire as Alexandria is.

“Well, I joined up,” he said, as his eyes flickered back to life, “as a medic. But then I jiggered my knee playing football for the Regiment and I got downgraded from A1 to A3 so all my pals finished their training and were sent off without me. After that they did not know what to do with me so I spent the next two years in England. Eee, it were daft man, they sent me all over the place. One time though, I went down south to this big house in Burnham Beeches. There were all these ATS girls there, it was like a hospital but we had lots of time to play tennis.” He smiled at the memory. “You see, I was a canny lad from the North East and I had never seen girls like them before. They were a class or two above me, but we got on and I think I fell in love with one of them. They were grand lasses.”

Norman drifted off again and in the silence that followed I could picture the Geordie lad playing tennis against the prime of youthful womanhood from the Home Counties. It was a vision I had to interrupt.

“So did you go to Stoke Poges?”

Norman’s wife had been a lover of poetry, country poetry mainly, and I thought a wander through the churchyard of Gray’s Elegy might distract my mind from the firm thighs and ruddy cheeks of those 1940s debutantes.

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I got shipped out. Posted abroad.”

“What to Alexandria?” I asked hopefully, getting to the point, expectations raised.

“No. First I went on the Queen Mary. They had turned it into a troopship. Did I tell you about that?”

“No, but I have seen the newspaper on the wall.”

“Ah, that was a time. The paper is very yellow now.”

“Do you want some toast?” I asked and regretted it. More time away from the clap clinic. Norman said that would be nice, with some marmalade to take away the sweetness of the honey.

“My sister made that. She’s 97 and still making her own marmalade in a great big pan on the stove. I don’t know how she manages it. He neighbour comes up to help her lift it off though, because her legs are going now.”

I have to say that I did not know how she managed it either but when I slopped out the thin orange goo it was apparent that her eyesight was going too.

I placed it in front of him and coughed loudly. He slumped forward again, eyes shut, the overhead strip light on the ceiling illuminating his wisps of hair like a crown of dead thorns. He stated awake and licked his lips “Oh heck, I must have dozed off. I was thinking of Dorothy.”

I thought of Dorothy too. His wife of 56 years, born in Lincolnshire but with a BBC accent that remained undented during all the time she lived with Norman in his native North East. She often said to one of her four daughters,

“No, I’m sorry dear, I cannot pick up what you are saying. What does workey-ticket mean?”

This was long before her deafness progressed and left her in a silent world of misunderstanding.

I think if I had been Norman I would have fallen in love with Dorothy too.

“So that was before Dorothy? Alexandria?”

“Oh yes, when I joined up and jiggered my knee. Did I tell you?”

“You had started to, but I think we got a bit distracted.”

He narrowed his eyes and as much as he could he leaned across the table towards me and whispered:

“I worked in a clap clinic.”

I raised my eyebrows and hid my irritation by trying to ingest Edith’s marmalade, which he was devouring in those small, elderly bites. I decided it must be the secret of longevity so glumped another bit down and quelled my protesting throat with tar-tea, three sugars to stop the tannin stripping the enamel from my teeth. He smacked his lips and his top set of dentures stayed down as he opened his mouth. There are some things, that for dignity’s sake are best not noticed so I glanced over again at the Laughing Cavalier but it was a poor reproduction and the quality of the printing seemed to turn the laugh into a sneer. I moved my eyes instead to one of Dorothy’s water colours, this one a view of Dunstanborough Castle painted looking up the coast from Craster. An old coast, and ancient coast. A coast that means something. They had spent holidays there, 50 miles North of their home in Newcastle, loading up the Mini with the weeks food and on arrival Norman gazing out at the seals with a pair of binoculars that a U-boat commander would have been proud of.

“There’s a storm coming in,” he would say and three days later they would be able to get out of the house and go to the village shop to buy postcards. “Having a lovely time, weather a bit inclement.” They never went and bought kippers from the kipper-smoking factory opposite the pub, nor did they go into the pub, both being a little too low class for them, Norman recounting tales of how the fishing fleet used to go out to catch the herring as they came in shoals down the North East coast from Iceland, fish-wives in what are now desirable sea view cottages but then were poverty shacks, gutting and selling the fish.

No, kippers were never to his taste, but then until he got to 90 I am sure microwaved porridge wasn’t either.

“I remember this big African,” he said, “in the clinic.”

“Oh yes,” I said trying not to sound too excited so looked down at the sports headline in the Morning Chronicle. ‘Shearer to return to the the Toon’. Ah, the prodigal son is coming home. My Northern wife, who has little interest in football would often chant, “Shearer, Shearer, Shearer.” Thankfully though, never during orgasm.

Norman brightened. “Well, I had heard these Africans were, well, big you know. This chap came in, he had what turned out to be a case of gonerreah, so I asked him to show me and heck! It was as big as a hose-pipe. I had never seen anything like it. Then this POW came in after that. A really arrogant German Officer and I thought ‘don’t like you’ so I got out the biggest needle I could find and-“

The door opened and my wife, Norman’s daughter came in. Norman clammed up; venereal disease not being a subject you talked about in front of women.

“Morning Dad,” she said. And he gave me a guilty look. He had said too much.

In an effort to relieve his embarrassment I told him that it was great that he was typing his memoirs on the computer and I asked him what operating system he used.

“Oh, Windows 1896” he replied “the same as that bloke Bob in your writer's group.”