You Have Not a Leg to Stand On

by D. D. Mayers

  We had found, underneath her bed, the keys to her house and it was in this house a very strange story began to unfold. Her house was an ordinary little house, two up two down in quite a pleasant street in Dulwich, South London. The first thing we had to do was to find if there was a will.

  We opened the front door and the scene that confronted us was so awful, revolting with the smell of decay, and putrefying mould. If it had been left up to me, which it was really, I would have closed the front door, looked on Google for a few house clearance firms nearby, walked the hundred yards to the High St.and told a couple of house agents to sell it. And that would have been that. My wife said that that was taking the easy way out. We had a responsibility which had been, unwittingly, thrust upon us and we were to deal with it to the best of our ability. So that’s what we did. But that insistence cost her, her health for a long time to come. The house was contaminated. But it also yielded a very strange story, and quite a lot of money for both my mother and my Aunt, not that they needed any, they were both beyond caring about anything. Fairly soon, in our delving, we came upon the name of a solicitor. My brother-in-law Douglas quickly found the name of the firm she’d used. They were well-regarded and the original solicitor was still there. He was astonished to hear from me. It turned out, more than twenty years ago, my aunt had drawn up a will but had never completed it. He’s become a friend and still deals with our wills. On further delving, in box upon box brought out to me in the front garden, if that’s what you can call it, many bank accounts began to appear. Not just one or two but fifteen or sixteen. They all had money in them, they all were savings accounts. My mother had felt guilty, as she was relatively well-off while her sister seemed so poor, she’d made regular payments into Sheila’s account for years. It was a savings account and the payments my mother had made were all there, untouched. She’d also had regular payments from social security, so they must have come to the house, seen how she lived and made no further investigation.

  Another strange thing she’d done was to write all her letters, private or letters of complaint, in longhand, quite neatly and with a carbon copy. This was whether they were to the council, to the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Prime Minister of the day. The points she was making usually started quite sensibly, well considered and often provoked a reply. Her arguments then very quickly became exaggerated, and fell apart. She was a religious fanatic, a born-again Christian, so she often quoted sections of the bible to prove her point.

  A lot of her private letters were to Mr. Johnson. She only ever referred to him in that way, his Christian name never came up and she only ever referred to herself in the third person. So her letters would start something like this, Dear Mr Johnson, Mrs Edwards wonders whether Mr Johnson would like to come to tea next Saturday afternoon. Mrs Edwards’ Servant, Agnes, will be present so there would be no impropriety.’ Poor Agnes was a simpleton. She’d been looked after by social services and one day was taken along to a church meeting for an afternoon out. Her life then suddenly took a dramatic change for the worse. My Aunt offered to give poor Agnes a loving home and look after her. The offer was taken up immediately. While sitting in the front garden in my wheelchair, being brought all theses boxes of papers, the next door neighbours introduced themselves, wondering what was going to happen to the house. We naturally turned to the subject of Mrs. Edwards and Mr Johnson. On hearing who I was, their manner changed remarkably, shocked and reticent. They became lost for words and started to move away and I quickly realised what was happening. I explained her whole family found her difficult, impossible to deal with, so we were going through her belongings to see if we could find a will prior to placing the house on the market. They offered to make us a cup of tea. It’s extraordinary how a cup always has a calming effect. So we all sat together, they in their garden and us in Sheila’s garden, with the low hedge between us, and talked about nothing in particular. The weather is always safe. Local politics, the council, bin collection, then slowly back to the strangeness and the peculiar behaviour of their neighbour, Mrs Edwards. They’d lived alongside one another for quite a long time and at first got on reasonably well. He’d help her out with small jobs around the house, although she’d never changed anything from the day she moved in. She’d bought the house about twenty years before, fully furnished, even the pictures hanging on the walls. She then became imperious and started treating him as though he were a lowly paid employee. Another example of her behaviour was when my Aunt Carmen, her sister, had once asked us, as we happened to be driving through Dulwich, to drop in a little posy of flowers just to say hello. My wife was standing there, on the front doorstep, holding her little posy, waiting for the door to be answered. Sheila suddenly appeared, door flung open wide, she half shouted, ‘What are you doing here, clear off.’ And slammed the door shut. My little wife came back to the car in shock, holding her posy in front of her, and said, ‘I’ve just been told to clear off.’

  They were aware of the arrival of Poor Agnes, who, very quickly became a slave. The whole scene was Dickensian. The brown peeling wallpaper, the piles of boxes against the walls and up the stairs and the smell, the smell was repulsive. My wife tracked it down to a drawer in the bottom of a wardrobe where she found a corpse of a cat and a note lying on top saying ‘God will resurrect my beautiful Bengy.’ My little sister found another box, with another cat, with the same message. The bank accounts revealed she, Sheila, was receiving an extra allowance for looking after Agnes.

  Soon after the appearance of Agnes, Mr Johnson moved in. Mr Johnson was a ‘preacher’. They were aware of orders being barked at Poor Agnes, then shrieks of jeering laughter when she didn’t know what they were shouting at her to do. To give Agnes her due, she must have had more sense than Sheila reckoned on because one day she escaped and scuttled off to the Town Hall, where she was gibbering on in apparent terror. Somebody must have had the wit to realise this poor woman needed help and she very quickly found her way back to her original carers, who immediately summoned Sheila. She burst in, all care and kindness, ‘Agnes dear, dear Agnes we’ve been so worried about you, thank goodness they’ve found you.’ Agnes shrieked with terror, Sheila shrugged it off, ‘Poor Agnes she must be delirious at being lost.’ At last they did the right thing for Poor Agnes. She lived out her days in a kind, caring home for people in her situation.

  While sitting there in front of the house surrounded by papers and boxes, a young, smartly dressed black man, in a well cut three-piece suit, came up to me. He said, in a real cockney accent, ‘Would I be right in thinking you might be interested in selling this house?’ I said I would be, but there might be a few problems to overcome first. He said he quite understood but could we discuss if we were in the same ballpark first and then take it from there. In no time at all we’d come to an agreement, so we shook on it, and he said, ‘Deep joy.’ We swapped addresses and solicitors and he said, ‘I can’t pay for it all now, but I’ll put down fifty grand. I’ll sell it before starting the building work and with the buyers deposit pay the remainder.’

  It would not be possible to imagine something good coming out of someone as awful as my Aunt Sheila. But it did. No will was ever found and Mr Johnson had gone off to meet his maker, so, ironically, everything she owned went to the two people she hated the most, her two sisters. The sale of the house to ‘Deep Joy’, worked out to the letter. The social services were paid back all the money Sheila had fraudulently stolen and the people who bought the new house ‘Deep Joy’ had built, were delighted, over the moon. We went to see them later. We did not tell them about Sheila.

  English Channel

  Now, back to my first boarding school in England. While at this ridiculously expensive school where the classes were purposefully small, so each pupil could have the greatest chance of learning, at least something. I, as explained earlier, had perfected the art of not listening, so learnt nothing. But I did make a very good friend. His name was Christopher Whittaker. Chris was
an incredibly talented young man, something I lacked in abundance. He couldn’t remember when he couldn’t play the piano. He could play anything, classical or show tunes. He could sing the lyrics of shows having heard them only once. He wrote his own, caustic lyrics about all the tutors and performed them in front of the whole school at the end of term. He was a star in the classroom, all his A levels he passed with graceful ease. He could have gone to any University he chose. He chose the University of California to study geology. But his passion, his deep abiding passion, was the sea; Aqualung diving, and the sea. His hero was Jacque Cousteau and the whole purpose of his education was designed around being accepted as part of Jacques Cousteau’s team. He wanted to be on his ship Calypso, sailing the oceans of the world studying them in all their aspects, and the effect their changes would have on mankind. Had Chris lived, I have no doubt he would have achieved his aim. He died saving someone else’s life. For him, it was doing his duty, but for all of us it was a terrible tragedy.

  To this day I have no idea why Chris took me up as a friend but there’s no point in wondering, I just have to be grateful he did, because he was responsible for the only two things I achieved at that school, aqualung diving and potholing. More of that later. It may seem odd, but those two activities go together. He made me keep a log of all the dives I did. My first dive was in the freezing cold, muddy, smelly, six-foot deep pond, at the bottom of the field our schoolhouse looked out on. I still have that logbook, it could well have been the only exercise book, I ever wrote in, during the four years I was at that school. He had all the equipment, the tanks, the pressure valves, the wetsuit. Actually, the wetsuit didn’t fit me as I was so small. So he bought enough double-sided rubber foam and a pattern and told me to build it myself. As it happens, practically the only talent I have or had is, I’m quite dextrous. So I set my mind to it. In a few days, I not only surprised myself but everyone in my dormitory. I made it on my bed, and the result astonished Chris. Unfortunately, depending on the way you look at it, that wetsuit only lasted me one term, because quite suddenly, my voice broke and I started to grow, I grew five inches in one year. I was in a lot of pain all the time. I kept on going to the sanatorium and saying, ‘I ache all over,’ it was as though I’d strained my muscles and joints. ‘You’ve done too much training, go away.’ You would have thought they could have told me, it must happen a lot at a boarding school, suddenly bursting out all over at that age, it was growing pains.

  An attractive blonde American woman called Jane Baldasare, made an announcement in the Daily Mail, she and her husband were coming to England for her to attempt to be the first person to swim the English Channel underwater. When Chris first found the article about Jane and her other record-breaking achievements, he was so excited he could hardly contain himself. There was no question in his mind, ‘he’ was going to be part of her team on that swim.

  The then famous Billy Butlin, of Butlin’s holiday camps, had agreed to be her sponsor. He was a excellent choice with his outgoing, entertaining character and advertising skills. He’d also agreed to put up Jane and her husband Fred, in one of his hotels in Folkestone while setting up the whole, very complicated, ‘event’.

  Chris somehow engineered a meeting. It was a foregone conclusion, with his determination and genuine knowledge of all it would entail to approach such a swim, he was not only accepted, but paid to be a member of the team. However, what she hadn’t bargained for, I was part of Chris’s own team. She said ‘but he’s so small.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t matter how small he is, in fact, the smaller, the better.’ She had no choice but to agree.

  It took quite a long time to set the whole attempt up, as you can imagine. So when she saw me again some time later, having sprouted like a well-watered plant, she stared at me in disbelief and said, ‘but how can you be the same person?’

  The English Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Very tough training and teamwork was essential. She had to train for the possibility she might be swimming for thirty hours non-stop. The energy she’d be using, against the cold alone, would be a thousand calories every half-hour. For the attempt to be registered as an underwater feat by the Guinness book of Records, the swimmer could not break surface. It was much more efficient for the swimmer to stay at the same depth all the time, and be given the food to feed herself while on the move. A formula of baby food and chocolate Milo, the highest calorie intake with a volume of water to quench thirst, was mixed and poured into a rugby football bladder and given to her every half-hour.

  She did very well and became incredibly strong. Unfortunately, she made two attempts and failed twice. It wasn’t her fault in any way. The first failure was caused by a stupid muddle on the boat, and an empty air cylinder was taken down to replace hers. Can you believe it? On the second attempt, Chris was put in charge, but the weather got so bad the divers could no longer get in and out of the boat with the food and air cylinders. It was quite calm down at twenty feet, it was very difficult to persuade her to come up. She was so disheartened she couldn’t try again. I don’t blame her. Her husband got so fit training her, later he made an attempt himself and did it. It took him over thirty-two hours. So he, Fred Baldasare, was the first person to swim the English Channel underwater. There wasn’t much coverage in the press, possibly because he’d left his wife now that she’d decided not to continue a record-breaking career. Or maybe because she’d left him for one of the pressmen aboard from the Daily Mail.

  The school I attended was one of the most expensive in England, so most of the boys had a reasonable amount of spending money. I was the exception. So Chris persuaded a boy, called Simon Paterson, to set a record for swimming the English Channel underwater, in the shortest possible time. To do so would be even better than doing it for the first time. So we set about training. And my god did we train. All Simon was allowed to do was eat, sleep, and train. Simon wasn’t a big person, but he was very wiry. He got leaner and wirier, stronger and stronger. You could see his strength growing in the bounce of his step and the way he flew upstairs. I rather envied him. But the envy soon waned while watching him being forced to swim faster and faster, up and down that bloody village pool for hour upon hour. He begged Chris to let him get out, ‘No, just a few more.’ ‘You said that an hour ago.’ ‘Just a few more.’ He outgrew the pool, now he had to endure the cold, up and down that awful beach at Folkestone. Chris shouting at him from those pebbles, ‘No, you can’t get out, faster, faster.’ We were working to a deadline. The Channel shipping authorities couldn’t allow too many swimmers to attempt a crossing, it’s quite dangerous as it is. The time was soon upon us. We’d had a frame of a cage built out of two-inch steel tubing. It was twenty feet long by twenty feet deep and five feet wide. It was kept afloat by two forty-four gallon drums tied to each end. The frame served a number of purposes. He could follow the boat and tell the boat, by means of a bell, to go faster or slower. He knew what depth to keep and one of the team of six divers would also be with him at all times without having to swim to keep up. Finally, and most importantly, he could be observed by a member of the Guinness Book of Records.

  We started at Cape Gris Nez on the French coast, at midnight, the moment the tide turned to run away from the shore. As the bottom of the frame was twenty feet down the boat obviously had to be quite far offshore. The rules stated the swimmer had to be beneath the surface as soon as it was deep enough to be so, only a couple of feet. So he had to be lead with a cord pulled by a swimmer on the surface. That swimmer had to be very strong to stay ahead of Simon at the peak of his fitness and the impatience of starting. We set a cracking pace. We feared it might be too fast. After six or seven hours, you would have thought he might slow down a bit. On one of my shifts, I could only just make it back to the boat, he was swimming so fast. We were also lucky in having a superb Captain of our little fishing boat. He knew, like the back of his hand, the complexity and position of all the different currents that flow back
and forth across that twenty-two miles of water. He would turn the boat slightly into each current, therefore keeping us in as straight a line as possible, without slowing Simon down by turning the boat too directly into the current. He was doing so well we arrived off Dover beach too early. He was swimming towards the beach as fast as the tide was coming out. He asked, on the slate tied to the frame, where he was. We wrote, just a couple of miles off Dover. An hour later he asked again, we told him what was happening, he began to flag. Chris had a little pep-up speech prepared, ‘New record, it’ll never be broken, poor old Fred,’ along those lines. His spirits lifted enough to hang on. We came to the point where the boat could only pull the cage so far, he had to be lead to shore the same way he had to be lead to the cage. I was given that job. It was extraordinary how much strength Simon still had. With all my strength, I was only just strong enough to keep the cord taught. When I walked out of the water first, all the awaiting cameras started to flash me. It was all I could do to stop myself from helping Simon by pulling the cord as hard as I could. He had to make it himself to above the high tidemark. He couldn’t stand. He crawled. He crawled so slowly, it was agony to watch. He told me later, he felt as though a ton of lead had been loaded on his back. I think that was the only detail, of all the dedication to gruelling training by Simon and Chris and everyone on the boat, to culminate in this incredible feat, Chris hadn’t considered. Simon reached the high tidemark on the Dover Beach, from the high tidemark on the shore of Cap Gris Nez in France, in thirteen hours and forty-seven minutes. I think it’s a record set in stone.