Diary of an Old Man by Chaim Bermant & John Verney

Author:Chaim Bermant & John Verney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448206148
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

February 25th

Snow, getting black and messy, but still thick on the pavements and high on the hedges. I was going to phone the hospital to tell them I couldn’t come for my leg, but Mrs M is out so I couldn’t get to her phone, and by the time I got to the outside phone box I decided I might as well skid on to the hospital. It took me nearly an hour to get there, and when I got there I found I had come two days late, or five days early, whichever way you like.

‘Remind me to get you a calendar for Christmas,’ said the nurse.

As if the cold and snow were not enough, it got foggy early in the afternoon and by the time I was sitting down to my tea, it was pitch black. My paraffin stove still wouldn’t light, so I kept the electric cooker on with kettles simmering on it all the time, and sat there watching my savings go up in steam.

‘Our special account,’ Elsie had called our savings, ‘it’s all for something special’, and this was it, simmering kettles on a foggy afternoon.

I spent a long time over my tea listening to the kettles simmer, when I heard the front door bang shut, a coughing and spluttering, and then footsteps on the stairs.

It was the black fellow. He had kept me awake half the night with his coughing. I suppose he’s never seen snow where he comes from, all heat and sand. Of course it serves him right for coming here in the first place. He’s not built for this sort of weather, any more than I am for his. People are like plants, as George always said, you don’t try to grow cabbages in a hot-house or peaches in a cabbage patch. I remember old Harry telling me that when they first went out to India the men fell like flies. More of them dropped from the heat than from bullets. Well, if Indians come out here they can’t expect to do any better, not even if they’re Pakistanis. There he goes again, coughing himself to a frazzle.

Of course they don’t have any National Health there as they have here; I suppose that’s why they come here. Britain’s about the best place to be sick in on earth. And they can’t be all that healthy, not when they’re that colour.

I had just finished clearing up after supper, when I remembered that I had over half a bottle of cough mixture still left from my last cough, and I took it upstairs.

He had a dressing-gown over his clothes with a towel round his neck and a towel on his head, looking like a maharajah, and bent over a table full of books.

‘I couldn’t help hearing you cough,’ I said, ‘and I thought you might like a drop of this. It’s helped with every cough I’ve had and as I haven’t been coughing lately I have a bit to spare. It’s very good. As a matter of fact it was prescribed by a coloured gentleman like yourself.

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