TASHY DID - A LIFE
Hey kids, grand-kids, and any other nosey people who are reading these pages, this is for you to read now or sometime in the future. It may tell you a little
about how life was 60 or so years ago and rather more about me. Why am I doing it?
In the years after my father's death, way back in 1981, I kept thinking of things I wished I'd talked to him about. After my mother's death, just over
thirteen years later, there was less of a knowledge-vacuum because mother talked more about her past.
Just recently, my daughter and I unearthed my mother's diaries which went back to 1929, when she was just 13 years old. This reminded me of the 1998
incident with my 6 year old and I decided to put down here the story of my life so my children and grandchildren could, if they wished, read about what I had done. I would use my
memory and those diaries to build a picture from 1949 to the present day and add some personal observations.
So, here we go. Each week we will have a new year with preceding weeks being archived. In the first few years, as I will have less to say, probably, I will
add some info about your grandparents and their parents.
1977
The final addition to this family was born at the end of August and I nearly didn’t see him. Well I nearly only saw half of him. My friend from work often came to visit us in Wivenhoe. During a visit in early May, she and I had played a game of squash at the local university courts. After 45 minutes of behaving like a moth in a room full of lights, I was still losing. I then did something I had always been told not to do at squash but something that had been imprinted into my brain in cricket. I turned to watch her play a shot from behind me and I kept my eye on the ball. To be precise, the ball implanted itself on my eye, but that’s the same thing isn’t it. I fell to the ground. She helped me up, and with my wife’s help, she was watching from the gallery, I was taken to the ladies changing room. My concern was death through internal bleeding, theirs that I may have lost my eyesight.
In true Richard style, I persuaded them both that I didn’t need a doctor or hospital care and we went home. I couldn’t see a thing out of the eye and spent a fearful night in case that bleeding was terminal. It wasn’t, so in the morning, I was okay. I was still alive. I could see nothing out of that eye but, hey-ho, I still had one working and Colin Milburn and the Nawab of Pataudi had played cricket like that. However, sense prevailed and I was persuaded to see my local GP. He took one look and phoned the eye clinic. Well, he thought he did and what happened next I found really amusing. He dialled and I heard him ask for the eye clinic. When someone answered he went into a long description of his patient (me) and what had happened. Then he stopped and, I now know he was told he was through to the wrong department. He next said “silly me, I thought if I asked for the eye clinic, I would get the eye clinic. Could you tell what should I have asked for, ante-natal, orthopaedic”? I loved it.
The upshot was that I had a week off work and daily visits to the eye clinic where they put drops in my eyes. I had, so they said, been within a millimetre of having a detached retina which would have meant several months flat on my back not moving. As it was, everything was only very badly bruised. My wife ordered me to buy an eye patch because she found it very unsettling at night as I slept with one eye open. I was told not to play squash again for at least six months and then to wear goggles. So I went back to playing tennis. Do you believe in the power of thought? I do. Once I was washing up a milk bottle to put it out for the milkman to collect next day and, as the hot water gushed into the bottle, my little brain suddenly thought, what if it was too hot and burst. It did.
Playing tennis my little brain thought, this is safe you can’t get a tennis ball in the eye the other player is in front of you. In this case my thoughts were inverted as, possibly because focusing with one eye is different from focusing with two, I managed to get one shot on the racquet rim and from there straight into my eye. The good news is a tennis ball is larger than a squash ball and all it did was hit the bones around the eye socket. They were a bit bruised too so it hurt but no damage. I continued the game.
The human brain always amazes me, as does mine. If you close one eye and look at a distant object, marking it with your finger and then open that eye and close the other one you will find that the object is not where you marked it. Somehow, that little brain, when receiving info from two sources, collates that info, to just where the object is although sometimes, in sport and in my case, you wouldn’t believe it as I edge the ball or hit the shuttle with the racquet handle. I have been told that we actually see things upside and our brain converts this too but, unlike my little experiment, I have no proof of this so it may be true but I don’t know. This is true of all my life by the way; I need proof.
On the day after our son was born, while my wife was still in hospital, I had taken my mother-in-law and my daughter down to my parents’ house. Just after lunch, my daughter was having a sleep, my father had gone for a walk, and I was sitting reading while the two mother’s talked. I wasn’t listening at first but then I started to catch snatches of their conversation and, once that had happened, I couldn’t stop myself listening to it all. For about half an hour they discussed the way we lived and brought up their grandchildren. We did nothing right. We knew nothing. We were, in effect, terrible parents. I always had problems believing I was doing things right so this was really hurting but still they went on. We were sitting in the front room and suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father walking down the path. I just got up, walked to the door, opened it and walked toward him and said “let’s go for another walk”. I remember being close to tears. He turned and we set off. He asked nothing on the walk but indulged in incidental chat. He wasn’t stupid and he knew something was wrong. His answer was to let me do whatever I needed to put it right. Once we got back, I felt better.
He was a very clever man, quite an astute man too. Sometimes his refusal to give his opinion annoyed me. He would give advice but never would he say what he thought you should do. I know that in his first marriage he had eventually left because he was never allowed to do anything because he was always wrong. I think this stopped him in later life from feeling able to be responsible for giving an opinion.
He also hated arguments and this was another reason he would stand back from saying what he felt. Some people cannot do this. It is almost as though they need to show their strength by asserting that they are right and you are wrong. The world, as I said to someone only yesterday, is not black and white. We are all entitled, within the laws of the land in which we live, to do things our way. I do not have to agree with, or approve of, that way. But, if I feel that by criticising it I am going to instigate a situation where unpleasantness will prevail, then I will say nothing.
There are a few people in this world to whom I will have a moan about things. Otherwise, live and let live. A comment made, an action taken, can never been withdrawn, however much you apologise. My feelings have always been that if you are apologising for something you said or did, the better course of action would be to have not said or done it. People can place others in ridiculous situations with their own stupidity, lack of thought and stubbornness. There were times when my children and I had to visit my mother alone because she and my wife had fallen out over something. All they seemed concerned about was how they had been treated, not how others had to suffer because of their actions. Still, ne plus ca change.
This year at work things also began to deteriorate. I had a new boss. His first action was to call everyone in and have a chat with them. Obviously you can tell a lot from these. He told me he had been told I was the best thing since sliced bread but he personally would wait to judge. He noted I had not taken any exams. I sensed a certain amount of hostility. I was correct. I no longer enjoyed being at work and I could feel that my nerves, my panics, might take over but, one night in bed, when stressing about doing the journey to work again the next day. I remember suddenly saying to myself, “He won’t win”. This guy was not going to undo all the effort I had put in to doing what others found everyday and normal. I would fight it, and him.
While I still find it difficult to say I had a mental health problem, I suppose it was, and is, true. My reason for not admitting this is nothing to do with it being a stigma or anything like that but, in the same way I now have problems with my back and with my knee joints, I don't view them as health problems. They are, in my little mind, life problems and they have to be conquered otherwise you might as well give up on life and that, as you may have learnt from all this, will never be an option.
However, a part of my life disappeared at the end of this year when my father, now 71, decided he didn’t want to drive any more and sold his Ford Cortina GT, the car in which I had driven so many miles and in which I had first tasted that thrill of being in control of a machine and the excitement of speed. Sad but, as usual with father, sensible.
However, a part of my life disappeared at the end of this year when my father, now 71, decided he didn’t want to drive any more and sold his Ford Cortina GT, the car in which I had driven so many miles and in which I had first tasted that thrill of being in control of a machine and the excitement of speed. Sad but, as usual with father, sensible.
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