The Demise of Roland Ratso: Chapter sixty

Friday night and Picko the transvestite bingo board maker, bingo player is in the club. He explains to me that the photograph on his account is not a mixed grill – it is a picture of his kidney they removed. The kidney has been cut in half and the white bit in the middle is the tumour which was buried so deep that it didn’t appear on any scans. It would have killed him. Fortunately there were some secondary growths which did appear on the scan. He is now living on half a working kidney which is probably why I haven’t seen him in a frock! David the compere who someone described as a young Larry Grayson is on form. “Have you got your Ann Summers glasses on? “He asks Madge. Madge is a young sevety year old who sells bingo and David calls her Mum. “OOOO sorry” He lisps “I meant your Ann ROBINSON glasses!” Madge huffs and puffs with false indignation. “Mind you” David goes on “I have been in her bedroom and you wouldn’t believe what she has got on her bedside cabinet!” The singer sings my kind of music and in particular the summer of 69 by Brian Adams which is a sort of anthem for me. My father had a bit of wanderlust which is why I finished up going to four grammar schools – one of them twice. When I left Hove County for Strode’s School in Egham the syllabus was totally different. One was Oxford exam board and Stode’s was Cambridge so I went into a school where I had done most of the syllabus already. Then when I moved back to Hove County after about a year and a half I had done none of the syllabus so I was extremely disadvantaged. Then the old man decided to move to Herne Bay the year before I was to do ‘O’levels and another move would have been disastrous so as a fifteen year old I was left in Hove in digs, first with a family friend and then in Westbourne Street. Number 3 Westbourne Street in Hove was owned by my friend’s father who we called Arbuckle due to his size. Westbourne Street was a three storey Victorian terrace and was inhabited by Arbuckle, his son Jonathan and his wife Maggie and his daughter Sarah. He was separated from his wife, Kate who had moved into a flat with their other son, my class mate Robert. As a fifteen year old hormonal adolescent my transfer to the house was unbelievable. Arbuckle was definitely a libertine and basically anything goes, or rather went. Arbuckle was tolerant to the point of insanity. He allowed exotic tropical herbs and other recreational drugs to be used. Brewed wine which he allowed us to drink on Saturday nights. The house was a party every waking hour with Arbuckle trying to watch television amongst the chaos. I thought that there were many incidents where I was going to be thrown out. Robert or Kipps as he was known decided we were going to make the breeze block shed into a swimming pool. We cleaned it out and nailed the door up and removed the window to facilitate entrance into our very own pool. Borrowing the next door neighbours hosepipe we started to fill it. Kipps rolled his trousers up after removing his shoes and socks and of course had to be the first one in, paddling in the dirty water in our makeshift pool. Filling it by hosepipe was rather slow and as the water crept up the door, various leaks sprang making the filling even slower. We tried to stem the flow using polythene sheeting and at last it was fairly watertight and the filling progressed at a greater rate. That was until the door broke. (Probably cheap foreign wood!) The water cascaded down the garden and backed up against the back door, actually draining through the door, into the kitchen and up the passage. Sarah came in from college and opened the back door to see where the water was coming from. Big mistake. The contents of our makeshift pool was washing around the kitchen and up the passage to the living room. I feared the worst. This MUST be an ejectable offence. My father would go berserk! We cleared a blocked drain and managed to get the water to subside and then we squeegeed the water back into the kitchen and out of the back door. Kipps as usual (he always disappeared when we had a disaster – and there were many) and I decided that the best policy (as always) was to meet the problem head on so I went to meet Arbuckle as he came off his bus from work. By now he was used to me meeting him from work when there problems. “Let’s have it,” he said in his usual phlegmatic tone. “Well we’ve had a flood” I started. “What sort of flood, “ he asked as we walked down the road. “The kitchen passage and front room and it might have gone in your room. (Arbuckle used the dining room as his domain) “How has that happened?” he asked. This was crunch time. “Well Kipps decided to make a swimming pool in the shed and it was going really well until the door broke!” Arbuckle squelched through his front door, into the living room with it’s sodden “carpets” (Arbuckle’s house was carpeted throughout with carpet tile samples glued on to hessian sacking) along the passage and into the kitchen. A bonus in the kitchen was that we had mopped the floor and the kitchen lino was positively glowing. He then went into his room and the draft excluder on the bottom of the door had stopped most of the water. “You’ve cleaned up well,” was all he said and went into the living room to put the television on and watch the news. Another lucky escape – of which there were many. How did I achieve seven O levels with all the distraction? Because of the teachers that were at Hove County. They were truly inspirational.