Molly Cutpurse 

Madonna, Wogan, Hurst, Dickens, Turing and Shakespeare

(Inspired by the life of a certain Israeli lady)

I've just returned from W H Smith and wondered if you can spare a thought for a gentleman called Harry Briggs for I could not find his book ‘Officer of the Waves’. I asked an assistant, but she was unable to find it on the shelves or in any catalogue. She naturally tried the internet, but nothing came up. Now, I know this book was written some fifty-five years ago, and I also happen to know that now he is quite an old man who lives soundly in a council flat on the outskirts of Dundee. Anyway, I wondered if you could spare a thought for him because, well, I’ve just been informed that it was never in fact, published. It took ten years to write, and memorably, it was about his experiences during the Second World War when he was a first officer on the Atlantic crossings, a book which  more than likely would have certainly inspired many a young man to join up and support his country. I guess now that it's not on the shelves at WH Smith, or any other prominent shelf, it's probably languishing in a dark and dusty cupboard with mites destroying the manuscript.

I also wonder if you spare some thoughts, some time and maybe even a prayer for Lillian, an eighty-two year old woman who is living in North London at the moment. She is close to dying suffering liver cancer, and she is pretty much living in poverty. However, in her extreme youth she was once a beautiful, long-legged, charming, vivacious and captivating ballet dancer. From an early age, she had been singled out as a woman imbibed with fantastic potential. Nevertheless, one night, someone let her down, and as a result, she never got her big break. The one single occasion that would have eventually lead her to become a world-class dancer. But it never happened. So spare a thought for her will you please? She has more broken dreams than many of us.

I've known it for a long time but it's a story worth repeating. About a piano playing gay man called Reginald Dwight whose mother did not reply to an advert in the New Musical Express asking for talent. Reg is now a bus driver, and has been for over twenty-five years, and was one of the first to drive the new 'bendy' buses through London. He lives with his partner in a high rise block of flats and suffers with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, a side effect of his forty a day cigarette habit. He no longer plays the piano.

Likewise, I happen to know a man called Jim who is fifty-four this year. Once upon a time, he had an ability to play football unequalled by his peers, and he was tipped heavily for fame and fortune. Unfortunately, he broke his right hip one Sunday morning, and never fully recovered. Now he lives with his invalid wife and when it rains, still limps a little when he pushes her wheelchair to the shops. Naturally, he still maintains an interest in the sport, and watches it often but that’s all he does. He drives a fork lift for work, and mainly loads lorries with rice from a health food warehouse. Naturally, he works shifts to pump up his pay packet.

Mention must also be made of James Sorrowson, a tall and handsome lad who died when he was fourteen. James was born of a respected and wealthy Surrey family and had, even from the very youngest age, dreamed of, extraordinarily, not to become an engine driver, but a politician. On going through his possessions a week after the funeral, his mother found realms of closely written text outlining his plans for a better Britain in the twenty-first century. However, meningitis in 1968, destroyed that dream.

It is very unlikely that you will have heard of the death recently of Harry Webb. But why should you? When, as an eleven year old, he attended his local Cheshunt Secondary School, the poor boy fell ill with a high fever and surgeons had to remove part of his larynx rendering the child incapable of normal speech. However, quite undaunted, the plucky lad eventually studied at Reading university where he read mathematics. With a degree under his belt, and an electronic voice box, he decided to teach and became one of Birmingham's most admired private tutors. The rest of his life was quite normal. He married, had three children, lost his hair, put on weight and lived long enough to become a grandfather, but recently passed away at the age of sixty-eight. There were over fifty personal friends at his funeral.

Perhaps you can also offer up some words of thanks for Jacky Best, a plucky fifty year old. When she was in her late teens, she was a right little hippy, and she was known by her few boy friends as ‘Sunshine’ so that ought to offer a clue as to her nature. Although primarily known for her almost continued laughing, she also created marvellously original songs. She taught herself to play guitar, piano and flute and recorded a good few hundred of them in her living room. However, no matter how blessed she was with a happy intoxicated nature, she lacked the opposite in promotional skills. These were not at all sharp and all she ever received was rejection after rejection. It is a shame that not one of her compositions ever came to wider public awareness. She owns and runs a flower shop now in Harlow, and is still kind of happy. She too, never married dispite offers, but now lives alone, above her shop with her five cats and one dog. She hasn’t played or sung for years. Perhaps you might offer some thanks for the nationally acclaimed song, 'Love will always be between us' that may have been played at your wedding? Just to wish her on her way. She actually still hums one or two of her prettiest songs as she serves her customers. They are never recognised of course.

John Richerson declared when he was five years old that he was going to be the most accomplished drummer that ever lived. Far better than all his heros. His father though would not have a drum kit in the house so John had to practise on cushions with a couple of sticks he had made from an elm tree in his local park. Dispite this lack of parental enthusiasm, John had learnt a great deal by the age of ten when his father broke his right arm. Sadly, it never recovered properly, and now, at the age of fifty-six, hasn't touched a drum kit for fifteen years. He has his own successful business though, an off licence in one of the less salubrious parts of the East End of London, and sells hard liquor through a steel mesh.

Mandy H; I cannot reveal her real name, when in her teens, she didn't quite know what she was going to do, but when she reached seventeen, she discovered she had the most amazing ability to program computers. Noughts and ones became a second language. She too attended Reading university (it is not known whether she and Harry knew each other) and eventually gained a first in computer science. It has to be restated here that this woman had a fantastic mind. She was certainly recognised early on by her tutors to be a most promising candidate within her field. Unfortunately, she also had an addictive personality, and at the age of thirty, with her promising career hardly starting, she was found dead one day in a toilet cubicle on Liverpool Street station with a needle in her leg. And when the police went though her single room, her work was eventually offered, by her father, to her employers, who were astounded at the beauty and simplicity of her programming skills.

I might mention Steve Robson, a tall boy who kept on growing until by the time he was sixteen, he was six foot four. Following on from his father, he had always fancied a life in the police force, and I'm happy to mention that owning such a dedicated and disciplined personality, his intention was to rise as quickly through the ranks as it were possible, his aim to become the youngest deputy superintendent of the county of Suffolk. Or he would have, had some drunk not killed him one dark and stormy night on the M5 when he was twenty-two.

Spare a thought too please for Robert. A Poet Laureate in the making, an individual so profoundly different in his thinking that the publishing world did not know what to do with his compositions. After twenty-five years he ceased to compose, and took instead to observing the habits of wildlife. His mantlepiece is empty of the acolades he could have won. His walls are bare of awards. He has never travelled, never been aclaimed and lives a life of destitution and hardship. True talent wasted.

And last but not least, mention must be made of Maurice Micklewhite, now aged by sheer continued hard work as a porter in Billingsgate market, an occupation from which he did not retire until recently. Maurice is considered a treasure in the part of the world where he lives. His loyalty to his friends, enthusiasm and ready wit have become almost legendary on a local level, and he still visits each day, albeit now leaning heavily on his twin sticks. He often tries to stand more upright than he physically is able to, and when he attempts this, purely out of ego, is always heavily berated by his single unmarried daughter who looks after him. He still has two passions; beer and watching films. Doing both preferably at the same time. When he dies, a light will go out in Billingsgate.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

They are still, my people. Perfectly still, if one does not account for the occasional twitch of an eyelid or the sound of a rasping dryness which twitches indiscreetly around their dry lips.

They have a unwieldily detachment. As far away from their youth as one can imagine, these elderly, wheelchair-bound statues whose eyes dry off into the distance, many seeing no detail, but reduced to shadows and the few textures which remain to them.

They are not hungry anymore. They look forward to nothing. And the odours in the still air attest to it. These people, perhaps more than most, live just for the next few moments. Their perspective, if we could ever witness it, would be inexplicable to our earthbound mortal eyes and ears.

Yet, their legs bleed continuously, their weekly perms glow when the summer sunshine strikes them with an unfathomable blueness, their forehead's crease and they cry with anguish at the impossible and the unknowable. It is heart-breaking. And each day I dread going in to work for one reason; ugly news that another has died during the night. It is an impossible job.

The wheelchairs are kept spotlessly clean and oiled. As is their last place of residence. Lined up like some macabre race in the living rooms, they are left, always turned towards the sun. As if that is what they have to look forward to. Their clothes too are boiled spotlessly clean and parched, some to the extent of losing colour. But few visitors notice details like that. Mother is clean and silent, and therefore content. That is what they notice.

Death reduces us all, it has often been said. But when it catches up, and overcomes, as it will, our feeble and time-limited attempts to keep it at bay, address an expression of thanks to your God that you have friends and family around you; not dry and, to my eyes, still incomprehensible statues.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Despite the pretty decor, the flowers, the family photos, some still, some ever changing and rotated by an eframe, and all of them witness to past happy major family events, where the subjects perpetually beamed at the observer, the room where my grandmother was to spend the last months of her long and productive life had to be likened to a prison cell. One could not escape the similarity, no matter how hard one tried. There were no bars on the single window, but the length and width and height of it gave it away. As did the lock on the door.

A faint odour of urine, like a strong brown colour, assailed me as I entered, but it was so negligible that it was forgotten straight away. Nan did not know I was visiting, and it would not have made the slightest difference to the situation if she had. She did not hear me knock on the standard thick fire door and did not notice my entrance either.

She was slouched on the corner of her single bed, her eyes closed, thin creased neck bent forward, her clothes clean if not pressed, her thin grey hair awry slightly, her treasured battered brown and cream handbag, clutched unconsciously in a fist. I called her title louder, noticing her hearing aid, and both sets of false teeth on the bed side cabinet despite it being mid afternoon. I frowned at this. Nothing. Only when I was three feet away, did she visibly jump to become immediately annoyed. Which itself was soon replaced by confusion as she wiped the sleep from her eyes before focusing on her intruder.

She referred to me as nurse and, as I sat on a single hard-backed chair, I explained, that I was her granddaughter, 'Little Bobby' I empathised until, there it was, at last, some semblance of the beautiful and no nonsense woman I had known in my young life. The woman who had been so particular about the condition of the backs of her chair legs and how they were not to be scuffed, the angel who fed me bacon and mashed potato every Saturday afternoon as my mother had offloaded me to give her some respite for one afternoon a week, the laughing and gorgeous woman whose presence in her old kitchen she undoubtedly dominated.

However, there was no domination now. Not in her last place of residence. At that moment, feeble in mind, tired, weary, battered and withdrawn, she looked at me disinterestedly through pale blue Alzheimer's eyes as that momentary flash of who she once was, disappeared back into the choppy sea of confused consciousness that was now her only world. I spoke again of the past, touched her hand as if to press home the memories I was trying to evoke but this ploy only worked for a limited number of seconds before she, every time, sank back into her confused mutterings about how little money she had and shockingly, mentioning what bastards and fuckers they were to do that to her. Even holding up her empty purse for me to see how wicked everyone was that they had stolen her money. If it had not been so tragic, it would have been amusing. No other emotion or reaction would have sufficed.

She referred to me as a nurse again, and reached across to her bedside cabinet and retrieved a twin-headed razor from a white china mug adorned with a colourful print of flowers before gently proceeding to stroke it dryly across her chin. And I could hear the rasp of the stubble. This was a bizarre experience, and in that long second, I became confused as to how the young and delicate flower of her species, as I had remembered her in the few monochromatic photographs which existed, taken long before I was thought of, could have changed into the shameless woman who now sat before me.

What sequence of events could have taken place which would culminate in this once proud individual, a woman who had once occupied a high position in the Ministry of Defence, to unblushingly scrap a razor across her chin in front of, to her confused perception, a complete stranger? What power in all the world could have so altered her perception, her sense of dignity, her perspicacity, her...nobleness to this extent? What could have brought her to this?

The urine odour returned quite suddenly and I heard an unwelcome noise. A slight hiss. It was time for me to leave, to fetch a carer, and then to examine my own life with the assistance of a cigarette, and a few tears in the car park with the horror that, at that moment, I could well be looking at my own future, perhaps some forty years hence. Yes, at that moment, I would never undertake any cosmetic hair removing work in front of anyone and that includes my husband. Had granny once felt the same? In her young and smooth days? I touched her marbled hands again briefly and offered my good-byes. I did not kiss her, and she only offered me a look devoid of feeling, as if my beloved grandmother had already departed, leaving just this animated shell. "Good-bye nurse", she mumbled. Two months later, my mother blasted me with the news that she had died.