... and nothing but the truth

Me and My Dad

ME AND MY DAD

I was always a Daddy's girl. When I was small I would follow him everywhere. If dad was painting the house, I was stood at the bottom of the ladder helping steady it for him. If he was mending a car, spanner in hand, I was nearby ready to hand him any other thing he needed. He was my special dad and I was his little mate.

Dad loved 'Winnie The Pooh' and often read it to me. It was his favourite of all our books and I can almost hear him chuckling now as he read it to me. I think he liked Eeyore best, the miserable donkey. Dad was the least miserable person you could ever come across. He was fun loving and happy. He read avidly and would often laugh out loud at what he was reading. I think I got my love of books from him. He took me to the library from a very early age and we often went together as I was growing up.

When I was ten years' old (1962) my dad had to go to East Germany to take a course on how to repair certain machines. He worked in a local company which sold and serviced all sorts of office machinery, mostly calculators. They were very big, chunky pieces of equipment, nothing like the sleek calculators of today. He repaired these machines and was quite a clever guy.

Dad was to go to East Germany, not just for several weeks, but for several months.Three, to be exact! For us to manage without him for that time seemed really awful and very scary! East Germany was a bit of a scary place, too. It had been divided into two after World War II and to enter it one had to go through Checkpoint Charlie, which was heavily guarded with soldiers carrying guns. I was not at all happy that my dear dad was going away and going to that scary place. He was leaving my mum, me and my sister, who at that time was fifteen. How would we manage without him?

Whilst dad was away, he sent us all letters. I still have mine. He also sent us post cards from East Germany. It was Easter time part of the time he was away and I have several lovely post cards of Easter eggs and also a couple of groups of dolls, because he knew I loved them.

It was very strange without dad in the house, but we managed for a while until something really horrible happened.

Mum and I loved cake (I still do, as many readers of my poems will know) and we ate a cake which was infected with germs and we both became very ill. We have no proof that it was the cake other than mum and I ate it and were ill and my sister, who didn't eat the cake, was not.

I was the first to fall ill. I suffered from stomach pains and diarrhoea. My stomach sounded like a boiling pot, I can still remember it now. Blop, blop, blop it went! I became delirious and can still remember the strange dream I had. When the doctor came he said it was Dysentery and he called the ambulance. No one came with me. My mother couldn't drive and couldn't leave my sister, although afterwards she said she felt really bad letting me go alone and wish she'd thought it through more carefully, but when situations are forced on one it is not always easy to know what to do. I think I understood and although I felt lonely, I knew she had my sister to look after as well as me.

I was taken to Ham Green Hospital quite a few miles out of the city and placed in an isolation ward. It was a very old hospital with rooms off of a verandah which ran along the outside of the building. They gave me two medicines. One watery looking which tasted very salty and one a red colour which tasted much nicer. I felt much better whilst I was in the hospital. The nurses were nice to me and as I was so ill they gave me blanket baths. I can't remember a thing about the food, which is not like me at all. Food is the love of my life (almost, second to my husband and family).

My mother only visited me once and then she fell ill and couldn't come. I felt very lonely and spent a lot of time listening to the radio. I shed quite a few tears!  I remember my sister visiting me with aunt Phyllis and then with my grandmother. It was such a long way for them to come on the bus as they didn't have cars. They told me that there were lambs in the fields, gambolling and I wanted to see them, but I couldn't. I felt very sorry about it, I wanted to see them for myself. I can remember saying to my grandmother that I was going to run away and come home. She was alarmed and told me to stay where I was to get better, I would be home soon enough.

When I eventually came home, after two weeks in the hospital I had to go and stay with my grandmother and my sister stayed with our Aunt Kath and cousin Julie as now our mother was ill and taken into Ham Green hospital. She said afterwards we could have gone in together as she was poorly at the same time as me. That would have made it so much better for me, but there you go.

I was ill for six weeks and was away from school for all that time. Whilst I was at my grandmother's house the school sent me a beautiful large basket of fruit, it was really lovely, but I couldn't eat it as I had been told by the hospital not to eat fruit for some time! Typical isn't it? I think it's the story of my life...

Soon the day of dad's return was here! I can't remember how we got to the railway station, but we went to meet dad from the 'boat train.' We walked along the platform and I spotted him, my lovely dad, and ran like the wind into his arms shouting, 'Daddy, Daddy.' It was one of the most wonderful moments of my life to have my lovely dad back home again, where he belonged. I'm not sure if he said this, but I can well imagine him saying "I'd better not go away again, if this is what you get up to when I'm not here!" (Meaning our illness).

Dad brought us lots of presents from East Germany. I had two cardboard boxes full of hand glove puppets, three black glass elephants and four little blue glass ducks and a lovely set of steel colouring pencils. He gave my mother a lovely green glass stork which I inherited when she died. It takes pride of place in my glass cabinet. I can't remember what else he brought, but lots for my mum and my sister too.

A few days after he came home, my mum was listening to the local radio station and the presenter mentioned a little girl in a red coat, running wildly down the railway station platform to meet her daddy from the boat train. As I had a red coat and was wearing it the day dad came home, my mother just knew it had to be me!

That was my fifteen minutes of fame, I guess! Ha, ha.