Going on the Turn, page 10
This bizarre and farcical state of events was finally resolved after three days when, while downing a bottle of Guinness in the Blue Anchor, the incisor was finally washed from its moorings and nearly choked him to death.
I never saw Spud unwell. Without question, he must have contracted all the usual viruses and mild diseases that descend on us all, but no pox or contagion ever seemed to overwhelm him. If anything, they seemed to shock and annoy him. ‘Bollocks! I’ve got a fucking cold! That’s that bloke on the fucking bus the other day!’ was a typical announcement, but we would then hear no more about it, apart from his regular explosive sneezes that, especially in later years, I’ve tried to match in volume and power but without success. The only way I knew he’d got the flu was when, after he’d returned from work, I might attempt to show him something in the newspaper and he’d say, ‘Don’t come near me, boy, I’ve got the poxy flu!’ And looking at his heavy eyes and dry lips, I could see this was true.
All ailments would be treated with either the trusted brands or home treatments handed down to him from his parents and therefore chiefly Victorian in preparation. Our house was never without large tins of Andrews Liver Salts or Eno’s Fruit Salts on the cupboard shelves. The bathroom cabinet had bottles of dark concoctions labelled Parrish’s Food and Gentian Violet. Like every household in the 1960s, we stocked TCP, Germolene and Anadin or Phensic tablets as standard. Away from over-the-counter remedies, Spud boiled up bottles of Hooper Struve Lemonade and would drink them while scalding hot in the belief it would settle a sore throat. Incredibly, it always seemed to work. Both he and Bet would talk wistfully about a particular cure-all that had vanished from the market and they made it sound like the key to eternal life. This potion was called, as near as I can spell it, Hepikepper Tonic Wine. The reason I resort to phonetics is because no Internet search has ever confirmed its existence.
Spud’s right leg was prone to ulceration following a badly treated injury at the docks. When this painful affliction flared he would treat it with a bread poultice, made in the kitchen washing-up bowl, and applied amid a fusillade of swearing that I leave you to imagine. Indeed, whenever any of us kids gashed a knee, grew a boil on the back of our neck or even had a splinter in our thumb he would always offer to make us a bread poultice for it, though we never took him up on the offer.
‘That’s why you should always have plenty of bread in,’ he would declare, as though an extra bag of Wonderloaf was right up there with the polio vaccine.
The most vivid memory I retain of Spud self-medicating is of him hunched over the kitchen table, attired in trousers and a vest, a towel covering his head, taking deep draughts of steam from a bowl of boiling water. Epsom salts, Radox crystals or Izal disinfectant were sometimes added to the formidable vapours. I never learned the lesson about not talking to him while he was ‘clearing the passages’ and would bother him with questions like where had Mum put my football boots. From beneath the cover, he’d bawl:
‘Don’t fucking ask me questions now! You can see I’m under here. What are you, batchy? Fuck it, I’ve lost count now.’
Oh yes, there was counting involved.
However, outside of witnessing these treatments and the products on show, there was never any display of what had caused him to resort to them. Admitting to my mum that he was ‘feeling a bit rough’ was the only concession to illness he made.
Another peculiarity – and bear in mind you didn’t have to register with a GP in those days – was that while the rest of the family would be treated locally by either Dr Nath (three minutes away) or Dr Lauderdale (five minutes away), Fred would only ever use Dr Barry’s surgery, which was a good few bus stops distant. This was because Dad visited Dr Barry for purposes ancillary to the state of his health.
The long and the short of it is, Dr Barry was a gambler and a piss artist my old man knew from the various pubs around New Cross. They were good friends and ‘Old Barry’, as Dad always called him, could be relied upon to sign sick-notes during Cheltenham week, or satisfactorily validate any injury claims Spud might have on the go. You didn’t need appointments to see your doctor back then, you simply showed up in their waiting room and waited your turn. A buzzer would sound and everyone knew who was up next. Spud would always try to be the last person in before the end of the day’s surgery, thus ensuring that, as soon as whatever bit of business he had come to see Dr Barry about was concluded, the pair of them could shut up shop and shoot across to the Marquis of Granby for a good session.
‘He’s as good as gold, Old Barry,’ Dad would glow. ‘Nine out of ten times he’s writing me out the prescription before I’ve even sat down.’
In return, as soon as one of Dad’s claims paid out, Dr Barry would always be his first port of call in the rounds to ‘give a drink’ to all who had assisted in the windfall.
*
Luck doesn’t last forever and even Spud was no exception to that rule. In the mid nineties, he woke one day and found a trail of four or five little blisters behind his ear. The next day there were a few more and he showed them to me – in itself an indication that these were not the only symptom that something was amiss.
‘What do you reckon they are?’ he asked me, delicately fingering the tiny raw eruptions.
They looked suspicious, but I knew he didn’t want to hear that so I concocted an answer that would make us both feel comfortable.
‘Do you reckon that’s where your glasses have been rubbing?’ I said like the true research chemist that I am. ‘Or an infection from them?’
Spud weighed this before accepting that this was the most likely diagnosis. However, he was concerned enough to want a second opinion. ‘Old Barry’ having long since retired, he conceded: ‘I might ask Barry Albyn to have a look when I get down there.’ This Barry Albyn was, by the way, a) another of Dad’s friends and b) the local undertaker.
‘Barry Albyn?’ I couldn’t help but respond. ‘What’s he gonna tell you? He’s not a doctor, Dad.’
‘No,’ said Spud, gingerly putting his cap back on. ‘But he’s in that line . . .’
The following morning my mum called me and said Dad needed to go to the doctor’s so would I tell him that because he was taking no notice of her.
‘Them blisters are stretching right out across his nut now,’ she snapped in a no-nonsense way, ‘and he’s been feeling rough all this week, having bad headaches and everything.’ In the background I could hear Spud shouting, ‘Don’t tell him that! I’m all right. I’ve just been overdoing it. I need a kip, that’s all.’
It must have been pretty worrying because, without telling anyone, later that day he crept over to Lewisham Hospital A&E, where they quickly confirmed that he was suffering from a full-blown attack of shingles. The blisters, which more commonly appear on the lumbar regions, are the last stage of this infection of the nerve ends and would have been preceded by several weeks of great discomfort, low energy and sickness. I felt a little angry that once again he had masked an illness so defiantly, and yet what could I say? I was the one who thought a change of spectacles would be the solution.
Happily, shingles is very treatable, although the patient is required to take tombstone-sized tablets for three weeks and NO ALCOHOL. When I saw him forty-eight hours later with a small balloon of brandy at his elbow, I reminded him of this instruction.
‘It’s brandy,’ he answered contemptuously. ‘It’s what they give you when you ain’t well.’
Naturally, he recovered within that three-week window. In the last few years of his life, apart from acute periods of pain in his hip and knee that would be flagged by the wincing declaration that ‘I might have to sit here for a bit’, Spud’s health and physical appearance defied his seventy-six years. Then one morning, after he’d missed out a few days walking the dogs because of ‘a heavy cold’, he came round looking distinctly unwell and, more alarmingly, distinctly yellow. We greeted each other and said nothing about it.
Spud sat in the big brown leather chair that looked out into our garden and I could see that even the whites of his eyes had an eerie tinge.
‘Blimey, Dad,’ I said, with as little concern as I could muster, ‘you don’t look right. You ain’t half yella.’
He looked at me and swallowed deeply. ‘Am I? That’s what George just told me.’ George had the butcher’s shop nearby.
‘I went in to see him ’cos he was rough a few months back. Thought it might be the same thing. He reckons I’ve got jaundice – you know anything about jaundice? Didn’t one of your mates have that?’
I told him that he was thinking of Mancie when she was a baby.
‘What did they give her?’ he asked hopefully.
I explained that she had to lie in an incubator for two days.
‘Fuck that,’ he said. In the carrier bag he had with him I could see he had bought a bottle of Lucozade.
It was cancer. In his lungs, in his spleen, in his stomach, in his oesophagus. God knows how long he’d been putting up with it, but an earlier diagnosis would have made little difference anyway. The agonies and indignities were only beginning now.
The doctor at Lewisham Hospital, when delivering the terminal prognosis, asked me if Spud had ever worked with asbestos. I turned to him and said, ‘You worked with asbestos a lot in the docks, Dad, didn’t you? Bloke wants to know how much.’
Typically he squirmed a bit in his seat and looked at his hands.
‘Oh, don’t go on about all that, boy,’ he said, irked as ever that someone wanted to know our business. ‘It was fucking years ago. It’s not that, anyway. I’m all right, it’s the fucking flu, that’s all.’
Five months later I was on the radio in the afternoon when someone came into the control room beyond the soundproof glass and began talking to my producer. Then they both looked grimly towards me. As soon as I put the next giddily upbeat song on air, she came in and said St Thomas’ Hospital had called and said my dad’s condition had worsened sharply and I needed to go straight there. The rest of my family had been informed.
I had spent the last few months since Spud’s admittance visiting his bedside before and after my radio show. Even though his decline had been visible on an almost daily basis, I hadn’t anticipated this news just yet. On arrival at the ward I found that my mum, my sister and her husband, plus a few other immediate family members, were already there. Spud lay unconscious, breathing strangely into a clear oxygen mask. I spoke to a doctor who told me that, in fact, the old man had rallied in the last hour and though ‘it’ could happen at any time, ‘it’ wasn’t now expected to be imminent.
An hour later we were all still gathered around the bed and, in the way we are and the way he had raised us, we were making endless jokes about the awkwardness of the situation and whether Dad would want us to shoot over the road for a quick one. During one of the less suppressed group-giggles, the most incredible thing happened. Spud opened his eyes. Looking around, his brow furrowed and a quizzical expression developed. We stopped laughing.
‘Dad!’ I said, in the sort of everyday tone I know he would have wanted. ‘How you doing, mate?’
He raised his arm, dragging the various drips he was wired up to with it. His reduced hand weakly grasped the oxygen mask and pulled it to his chin. In a voice that belied the shrunken state of his frame, he said, ‘There’s a lot of you here . . .’
He seemed frankly suspicious.
‘Well, we thought we’d all come to see you,’ replied my sister brightly, she being probably closest to Spud’s temperament out of all his children.
What he said next were to be his last words.
‘I dunno what for. There’s fuck-all wrong with me.’
Then he put the mask back over his mouth and lapsed into unconsciousness. The breathing became shallow again and after another few hours we were all asked to step outside while he was moved to a side room. A different doctor then told us that, on most recent intelligence, it looked like he would now last another day at least, maybe two or three. We had a family meeting and it was decided I would stay there overnight, my poor bewildered mum would go home with Sharon, and I would call first thing in the morning to arrange the day’s movements.
The side room in which Spud lay was on the eleventh floor of the hospital with a large window looking across into Waterloo Station about half a mile away. There was only his bed and a chair in there, and I sat in the dark switching my gaze between his face, the cheekbones – now very prominent on what had always been a healthy ruddy old dial – and the little red lights on the last trains making their way in and out of the terminus for the night. His breathing was wheezy but regular. At about 2 a.m. a nurse who had been popping in and out, mainly I feel to check on me, came by again with another offer of some tea. I said I was fine and she told me once more that I could go home for a few hours because there was little chance anything was going to happen tonight, and probably not tomorrow either. Thinking it over, I didn’t need to try too hard to figure out what Fred would have said to me at that point.
What’s the matter with ya? Go home! Fucking morbid, keeping watch. Stop being so dramatic. Fucking daft, staying up all night. I’m not going anywhere . . .
So I eventually got in the lift, aimed my Land Rover out of the car park and half an hour later climbed heavily into my own bed.
I must have lain there for all of five minutes before I got up again and started getting dressed. Wendy, who had only just finished listening to me explaining the current state of play, knew immediately why.
‘You’re going back, aren’t ya?’ she said.
Of course I was. The alarm on our front door barely had time to set itself before I punched in the code to let myself out again. Getting into the still-warm driver’s seat, I started up the engine and headed for the hospital on Westminster Bridge. The same nurse was on the ward reception as I came back in; she must have thought I’d popped out for some fresh air. ‘I’m back, Dad,’ I chirped, taking up my seat once more. It was just after 3 a.m. and the black night outside was pierced sharply by the moon shining on the railway lines.
His breathing seemed to have a pronounced rattle on the intake now. I put my hand on his and told him I was there, even though I know he would have hated my repeated assurances.
Fuck’s sake, boy, why d’you keep saying the same thing? I was in a lovely kip there – you do know it’s gone three a-fucking clock?
I put on the sidelight but angled it away from his face because, out of habit, I didn’t want the light to shine on his eyelids and disturb his sleep. I’d brought a book back with me, a biography of Al Jolson, and for the next hour I read it, reminding him every so often that I was still there. The rasp in his breath became noticeably more shrill at around four fifteen and the breaths themselves shallower yet, until the process sounded like a repeated gasp of surprise. There was a small toilet cubicle in the room and I walked over to use it, closing the door behind me as we always, quite properly, did in our house even when home alone. I flushed, slid open the lock and emerged from the cubicle.
And he wasn’t breathing any more.
I could sense it immediately. I knew this was no laboured pause between gasps or a breathing so faint that my ears couldn’t detect it. I knew it. He’d gone. In the thirty seconds or so that I’d literally turned my back, he’d slipped away. For a while I did nothing but stand on the spot, looking over at him, feeling a terrific sense of calm. So that’s that. There it is. Then I spoke.
‘I’m still here.’
I walked across to him and kissed him on the forehead.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said.
I sat down in the chair next to him and looked out at two lights that were all that were currently on in a tall building across the way. Probably office cleaners, I reasoned. Spud had been part of an office cleaning gang for a few years in the eighties. I immediately gave amused, silent thanks that, being his son, I could so easily nip that sort of maudlin observation in the bud. I then noticed the white tissue that had been clutched in his hand since I’d arrived at the hospital the previous afternoon. For some reason I thought I should now remove it, but as I tried to do so, it tore in half. The rest of it remained lodged in what I now saw was his still-clenched fist. This was a piece of symbolism I did allow myself to indulge.
Frederick Joseph ‘Spud’ Baker: 26 May 1928 – 17 January 2008.
He Who Would Valiant Be
At the service for my dad a few weeks later in St James’s Church, Bermondsey, I gave a very lively address to a completely packed house. Indeed, I delivered it with such vim and peppered it with so many outrageous stories that afterwards the startled vicar said, in all sweet seriousness, that he’d never heard such laughter in the church and that I really should’ve been in show business. I told him that if I could work with raw material like my dad’s life story every day then I would have considered that. I hadn’t been morose or sentimental in the slightest and nobody who had ever known Spud could have felt otherwise. Besides, there was something about solemnity, even in death, that tickled him. I remember as a kid watching him fold back the South London Press at the obituaries column and read aloud, in a pious sing-song voice, the cloyingly worded tributes placed there by the relatives of the locally departed.
‘“Your healing smile is with us yet,”’ he would begin in a tone reminiscent of Derek Nimmo at his most unctuous, ‘“your blessed ways we can’t forget. An empty chair, an unworn coat, not gone from us, nor love remote. RIP Auntie Fran from Kath, George, Terry and baby Rose.” What a load of balls that is – why’d they do it?’
My mum would always rise to the bait on these readings. ‘You’re wicked, you are, Fred. They’re being respectful, that’s all.’ Truth be told she could barely conceal her smile at his weekly performance.
