by Bishop, John
This was Halton Haven, which was run on a voluntary basis and led by a very dynamic man called Dom Valdez. I cannot recall what motivated me as a 16-year-old boy to go into the Portakabin that operated as a day centre to offer my time and my skills, which were basically limited to making tea and talking to old people. I volunteered throughout my A-levels and, as residential beds were added to the facility, I extended my support from making cups of tea to sharing the night shift looking after the residential patients. I was usually on with a retired ward sister called Grace, who had a Scottish accent so sharp you could slice bread with it.
Once midnight arrived, we would take turns to sleep for a few hours; apart from the odd patient dying, the nights were generally quiet. It would seem crazy in today’s world of health and safety to leave somebody with absolutely no experience in charge of terminally ill cancer patients; however, the centre had expanded thanks to the goodwill of the local community, and in order to offer residential care at no cost, volunteers were essential, even if, like me, they didn’t really know what they were doing.
My time at Halton Haven provided me with many life-affirming experiences. You learn the value of family and friends when you see people coming to the end of their life and nobody visits them. There was one particular resident called Stan who was a small, neat man with the demeanour of an accountant: organised, controlling and not particularly friendly. Stan always had a ‘spittoon’ with him into which he would cough up phlegm from the recesses of his damaged bronchial system. The spittoon was basically a Tupperware beaker with a lid which, over a period of 24 hours, he would fill to the top with the congealed contents of his cancerous lungs.
The job I hated most in the building, beyond the bed-pans or taking people to the toilet, or even once shaving a man and changing his shirt moments after he had died to make him presentable to his family who were just arriving, was having to empty Stan’s spittoon.
This was always the first thing to do in the morning prior to helping Stan get ready for breakfast, and often prior to eating my own breakfast. The process was simple. You carried the beaker to the toilet, took a deep breath, poured the contents away whilst trying not to retch, as the previous 24 hours of coagulated mucus would by this point have often merged into one semi-solid mass, wash out the beaker and pull the flush, trying desperately to avoid any of the contents being splashed onto your hands or your clothing. Stan coughed more in the night, and most mornings the contents were virtually a single piece of green-yellow ectoplasm with speckles of red. I could not think of a more undesirable job in the world, and Stan never seemed to acknowledge it was anything more than washing out a cup, barely saying thank you most of the time.
Although he could be grumpy, I quite liked Stan. As he very rarely had visitors, I would pop my head around the door and say hello every time I visited the unit. One morning, I popped my head around his door and he was sitting sideways on his bed, his head bowed over his beaker releasing more of the sputum that gelled his lungs together. The beaker was nearly full to the brim so, when the coughing finished, I said I would empty it. As he sat back on his bed and I picked up the warm container, he put his hand on my forearm. As Stan’s cancer was in his lungs, it would often take him some time to build up enough lung capacity to speak, so there was an awkward moment which seemed to last a lifetime, during which I became increasingly uncomfortable standing and holding a warm plastic container of sputum as Stan rested his hand on my arm and readied himself to speak.
After what seemed an age, he said, ‘You know what I will be sorry about the most?’
Feeling slightly nauseous, and anxious to relieve my hand of the contents of the beaker which, in my mind, were not far away from dribbling through to my fingers thanks to osmosis, I just said, ‘No, Stan.’
‘It’s that I won’t be around to empty your beaker.’
Stan gently lifted his arm and smiled at me. It was a smile of acceptance and of gratitude. For the few weeks more that he was with us, emptying the beaker never seemed so much of a chore. Don’t get me wrong, it still made me want to gag and throw up – no smile, however gentle, was going to make it palatable – but at least I knew it was just part of the circle of life. It was my turn now to be the beaker emptier. In years to come I would be the beaker filler. I will just have to hope someone will be there to help.
• • •
When I returned from Newcastle, the building work to extend the hospice was well under way, and it was primarily being completed by people who were connected with the centre through friends or relatives. Clearly you cannot build something just with volunteers, and Dom was canny enough to know that, as many tradesmen were out of work, the best thing would be to get them to work for cash at a very low rate, allowing everyone the time off they needed to sign on and tell the dole office that they were working as volunteers.
I began working as a labourer by day and helping at the hospice by night. My main job was as a plasterer’s mate. This meant mixing the plaster in a large tin bath with a shovel using plaster mix, sand and water. I would then shovel it onto a hod and carry it to the table where I would place it for the two plasterers I was working for.
One thing about plasterers is that they are very particular about their plaster. That day we had a new plasterer working with us: he was in his forties, had an eighties perm, a constant cigarette in his mouth and a scowl on his face.
‘This is shit,’ he said of the first mix I did for him.
‘This is even more shit,’ he said of the second one I did for him. Even the other lads said he was being a bit harsh on me, but he didn’t care.
‘He has got to learn. If he does a shit mix, we get a shit wall, and the building ends up a shit job just because he was shit at his job.’
He was basically a bully and kept on at me all day, telling me how every mix I gave him was shit, until I couldn’t take any more. So I decided to give him what he wanted and took a dump in the mix and presented it to him. I had concealed it in the middle of the plaster so effectively that my deed was not revealed until he plastered the wall – whereupon he tried to kill me with a lump hammer, whilst everyone else fell on the floor laughing. But, apart from that, I really enjoyed working on the site, and every time I drive past the hospice now I tell my kids there is a part of me in the building. I just have never explained which part.
I also enjoyed the few nights a week I did within the hospice, which often provided moments of black humour when you would least expect it. On one occasion, a man died at four in the morning. It was always the case that people seemed to die in the early hours of the morning; I remember one nurse telling me her theory that people who died in the night were the laziest, because they chose death instead of getting up in the morning. I have no idea if there has been a clinical study to look into this, but I do like the theory. I enjoy the idea of being warm and snug and in the middle of a dream – in my case possibly involving Girls Aloud – and having enough conscious control of my own mortality to decide not to open my eyes and just slip into the next life with my dream being my last registered brain activity. That would be dying with a smile on my face.
The man who had died on this occasion was called George, and he had passed on whilst not wearing his glass eye. That night the only people on duty were me and Sister Grace. She decided that we should try to return George’s eye to him in order to make him look as respectable as possible. This meant me trying to replace the glass eye from whence it came.
I don’t know if many of you reading this have ever tried to return a glass eye to a person who has recently died, but it’s not as easy as it might sound. When a person dies, the facial muscles completely relax and, as a result, when you place the eye under the eyelids, they don’t close. This means you end up with somebody dead in the bed looking at you. Not only can this be rather disconcerting, it is not the way you would like the family to see the body. I cannot imagine anything worse than being led into the room of your dead relative to find them sitting up in bed
, winking at you.
We decided, after some deliberation, to place the eye in an envelope and give it to the undertaker. He arrived whilst we were waiting for the doctor to sign the death certificate and we handed him the envelope, on which was the name ‘George Andrews’.
‘Is that George from the church, the organist?’ asked the undertaker.
‘I think so,’ replied Sister Grace.
‘What a lovely man. Really friendly when we did funerals there. I didn’t know he was ill. What a shame. Lovely fella, always said he would keep an eye out for me.’
As I write that it sounds like a pub gag, but at four in the morning in a hospice in Runcorn in 1985 it was without doubt the funniest thing I had ever heard.
• • •
When spring arrived, I wanted to try other things before returning to full-time education. There was a short stint as a vacuum cleaner salesman, which really didn’t go too well as I only sold one, and that was sent back in the first week.
I then decided to join my sisters Kathy and Carol on Jersey in the Channel Islands. At the time, the Channel Islands were full of people from Liverpool and the surrounding areas who had come over for work. I have often said in my stand-up that Scousers were the first Polish people because we would go anywhere for a job, and would work longer and harder than the locals, often for less money. For a teenager, though, the money was decent, the jobs were normally good fun, and the social side could be excellent.
The year before I had gone to spend the summer in Guernsey, the smaller island, whilst Carol was working there, and had progressed from washing dishes in a hotel to running a chain of fast-food outlets called Chicken George and the Ribshack, all within five weeks. I had picked up the job in the hamburger shop by convincing the owner that at the hotel where I was washing dishes I was actually the breakfast chef. After five minutes in the kitchen it became clear that I had no idea what I was doing. But as the clientele were primarily drunks on the way home from the pub, the main requirement of the job was not the quality of the food, but the ability to get money out of people and to then get them out of the shop before someone wanted a fight. It became apparent that I was good at that side of the job and within weeks I was climbing my way up the Chicken George empire to become the manager of both shops.
It was whilst running the hamburger shops that I became vegetarian. In Guernsey there was no industrial abattoir as such; instead, if you wanted meat, you called the farmer on Monday and collected it on Wednesday. I did this, but made the dreadful mistake of going to collect the meat and then walking into the wrong room at the wrong time on the wrong day.
A cow was hanging there, a huge gaping cavity where its stomach once was and its eyes wide open, looking at me as if to say, ‘You did this!’ From that moment on, I never ate red meat. I spent a few years eating fish and chicken, which actually makes no sense for anyone who thinks that eating meat is cruel, unless of course you hate chickens and fish and don’t care if they get killed. I have now been a vegetarian for over 25 years, and I have to say that I have not really ever missed eating meat. Having stopped because of the shock of the slaughter, now I see no point in killing something just for the sake of your palate. Really, is anything so tasty that you would kill it to taste it again?
I am not evangelical about this, and if society collapsed and amongst the anarchy I found myself unable to buy food in the shops, I would kill our dog and eat it. (So far that has not happened – but our dog Bilko needs to be on his toes!) I wear leather shoes, I don’t mind people choosing to eat meat, including my own kids; but I do feel that if people were brought closer to the process of production, fewer would eat it. I also have to say that nearly every food scandal in recent years has involved meat. Until we find that the potatoes we are eating are actually carrots made to look like potatoes to enhance profits for the organised crime gangs that import the potatoes from Eastern Europe, I will always feel I made the right choice.
So it was 1985 and I went to Jersey and worked days with my sister Kathy in a café (insert your own joke here) in a beautiful harbour, and nights as a bouncer in the nightclub of the hotel where Carol worked. Though saying I worked as a bouncer makes it sound a lot more exciting than it was. There was only one fight of note, and that was amongst a fancy dress party. I had the dubious honour of explaining to the police that I had thrown Andy Pandy out because he had started on Snoopy.
The worst night to work was always Sunday. On Sunday nights in Jersey in the 1980s, you could open the nightclub and you could play music, but nobody was allowed to dance. I have not made this up, as crazy as it sounds. Yes, during the 1980s, in a place that is part of the British Isles, you were banned from dancing on a Sunday. This was due to ancient laws, which have since been repealed. (I just spent 30 minutes on Google trying to find why the law existed at all and when it ended. I couldn’t find any information, which I think indicates that Jersey is so embarrassed by the whole thing they would like to just forget it.)
There is nothing harder than being a bouncer telling people to get off the dance floor because on Sunday, despite the disco lights and the nightclub setting, the dance floor is just a ‘floor’. People were even forbidden to tap their feet too hard just in case that raised the spirits of the witches, or whatever other black magic we were saving the world from.
It was a Sunday night when I decided to leave the job. The ‘DJ’ of the club – I use that label on purpose because he could not have been more of a stereotypical DJ if he tried: open shirt, talking over songs, sunglasses in the dark, giant knob on his head (I made that bit up) – could not have played more inappropriate records for a Sunday night. Instead of putting on what would now be referred to as more ‘chillout’ music, the DJ used Sunday to play his real party pleasers. Everything was bouncy. One Sunday, we were spending all our time asking people to leave the ‘dance’ floor, when DJ Knob-head suddenly said, ‘This is a real special one I’m going play for the squadron of paratroopers over here on manoeuvres!’
With that, he put on ‘Baggy Trousers’ by Madness. The dance floor became filled with skin-headed men jumping up and down in the kind of frenzy all men of a certain age reserve for Madness songs. The manager came running over and informed me and my fellow bouncer, a thin lad from Glasgow called Dave, that we were to clear the dance floor.
Now, both Dave and I knew that we had been given our jobs in part because fights were so rare anyone could do it, and partly because we both had accents that allowed people to think we might be hard. A hard accent may be enough when faced with a farmer dressed as a cartoon character, but I had little faith that it would be enough to quell the throbbing mass of testosterone jumping up and down on the dance floor. So I handed the manager my dickie bow, told him to do it himself and walked out of the building. I had somewhere much better to be.
CHAPTER 9
MOVING ON
For the rest of the summer of 1985, I went to America for the first time.
One of the things that I had done whilst in Newcastle was to complete a course to become an FA-qualified football coach. Completing the course and gaining my preliminary coaching qualification allowed me to apply for a job to coach ‘soccer’ in the United States for the summer. I applied to a company for whom many of the Newcastle lads had worked: North American Soccer Camps. What was great about this company was that it was not a traditional residential summer camp, but was instead a dedicated organisation that offered coaching in three-hour blocks anywhere in various US states.
When you arrived in New York, you were given a car or a plane ticket, told about who you would be working with in the coming weeks, and then sent off to a region of that great land. It meant that you could be coaching at one soccer camp in the morning, then at another in the afternoon in the next town, and staying at a motel, or with families, in between.
I coached in America for four straight summers and, as a result, I have had the privilege of travelling all over the country. My first year was spent around the East Coast
states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the following year expanding out towards Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the state of New York. In the third year, I covered everywhere from Niagara Falls to Key West, spending most of my time in Florida and South Carolina. And then in the final year I spent all summer working in California, which was just as good as it sounds.
It was in South Carolina that I realised that the UK and the US are two nations separated by a common language. After coaching one day, one of the young mums came over to me.
‘Y’all should come to Howlers bar tonight. A bunch of us will be there and we’ll teach you boys how to shag.’
‘Really! I think you will probably find we can shag already.’
‘No way! Ain’t never heard of any English boys who can shag. Martha, these English boys say they can shag.’
‘No way, sugar pie. I would love to see that, y’all.’
‘Well, you will tonight, love!’
We arrived at the bar prepared for almost anything apart from what we saw. It was full of people line dancing. The mum that I had spoken to came running over and took my hand.
‘Hi, y’all. We all soooo excited about havin’ you here. This here is my husband, Frank. When I told him you boys could shag, he couldn’t wait to get here to watch.’
‘Sure thing. When Tammy told me, I thought I gotta see that! I ain’t never seen an English man shag.’
Everyone within their group laughed and the Englishmen in question began to wonder what we had let ourselves in for. We were to learn, however, that the ‘shag’ they were all referring to is a dance which is best described as a complex jive and which is very popular in the Carolina states. We were also to find that everyone was right: Englishmen cannot ‘shag’ as well as they think they can, and instead of finding ourselves embroiled in a mass orgy we instead found ourselves stepping on toes and bumping into strangers but having a great night. A very different night to the one anticipated, but a great one nevertheless.