Yesterday is the day when our domestic usually calls around but this week she was going to come along on Friday instead. I have got quite a lot to moan about to her this week as the care agency has been falling short of requirements this week. We had a fairly horrendous day last Tuesday when one thing went wrong after another. For a start, I needed to be the 'second hand' to assist the care worker first thing in the morning, Then the promised 'sit' call did not materialise as they had forgotten that the scheduled care worker had actually returned to college. Half way through the afternoon, I discovered that the downstairs toilet was blocked as the morning worker had put a non-disposable wipe down it. I stripped to the waist, donned the only Marigold glove that I had which happened to be the left hand, cleared the loo which was not a pleasant job but at least succeeded. Then the scheduled care workers were an hour late in the afternoon as they had encountered horrendous traffic jams (probably because it was raining all afternoon and this plays havoc when parents use the car to pick up children from school and the whole system jams up) When the care workers turned up for the evening session, Meg had a bad mood change which made getting her to bed somewhat traumatic and, as I suspected would be the case, it took her a couple of hours to get to sleep. So it was one of those days that we all experience from time to time which it is best to forget.
Life in the civil service hostel proved 'interesting' at least for the first few weeks. Initially, I shared a downstairs dormitory with three other quite adolescent lads who were all into rumbustious horse play which I did not actually like but had under group pressure to join in. After a couple of weeks, the Personnel Officer at the COI sent for me and I assumed (wrongly!) that I was going to have a pleasant chat about how I was settling in and so on. Instead, I was greeted with the fact that the 'lady' who had the basement flat below the hostel had made an official complaint to the hostel warden about the thumps and noise coming from the room above and this then resulted in each one of us being summoned within our various ministries to explain our bad conduct. I explained about the horseplay and then mentioned that the occupant in the flat below us seemed to have a succession of men throughout the early evening and wee small hours of the morning followed by a series of all night parties. We concluded, righty or wrongly, that the occupant of the downstairs flat was 'on the game' and when I mentioned to the personnel officer that the complainant was probably a prostitute, I have never seen anybody work so fast to get me out of the office. After all, she might have assumed that I was in a type of moral danger but she was powerless to do anything about, so I promised to be more quiet in the future and was quietly amused by the whole episode. Later I was given the opportunity to share a top floor double bedroom rather than a dormitory at a considerably enhanced rent which I could scarcely afford but there was a consolation that my fellow flatmate came from Leeds and was working for a year before he went off to Cambridge University. We were given a breakfast and an evening meal as part of our hostel rent but the remainder of the time I was desperately short of money. For lunch I often had half a pound of broken biscuits which cost me about 4d (1.5p) but when I could afford it, I treated myself to a warmed Cornish pasty which cost about 6p. The London Hostels Association had a sort of inter-hostel sports and social organisation the main function of which was to arrange football matches between the various hostels. We used to play on some football pitches in an obscure part of Regent's Park and the games were generally shambolic, not least because we did not any uniform strip and it was not uncommon to pass the ball to a member of the opposing team who, similarly, did not have any appropriate strip. However, I became a close friend of the Sports and Social organiser of the hostels association, so much so that I almost became his Man Friday. My friend was training to be an opera singer and tried to inform me about some of the roles in the operatic pieces that he had been practising which was lost on me then but not now. Through his good offices, we actually received a grant of £20.00 from the Lords Taverners (cricketing group) which was meant to be spent on cricket equipment. But we had some old cricket equipment lying about and did not really need it so I went down to a sports shop in central London and bought some football strip. I could buy whatever I wanted so I went for a black top and then (very fashionable) cut away black shorts so that the whole team looked like an assembly of referees. This did such magnificent things for the morale of the team so on the first occasion instead of losing about 11-1 which was the norm we won by several goals, such is the tremendously motivating effect of some good kit. Apart from the football, I did actually run some inter hostel general knowledge quizzes which provided us with something to do in the evenings. I need to explain that there was no TV and none of us could afford to go to pubs or anything that cost any money at all. I then helped to compile and published the inter hostel magazine of which the social organiser was technically the editor but actually we split the task between us, In this, I wrote some stories and some jokes, as I remember and this is when I first got the taste for writing, publishing and putting together a communal magazine. I also save up as hard as I could and purchased an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter (which later I discovered was regarded as a modern design classic and was featured as such when I saw an exemplar of it decades later in the Design section of the Museum of Modern Art in New York) The typewriter was to be my constant companion in the next few years because I used it to type up all of my lecture notes when I eventually attended Manchester University.
© Mike Hart [2024]