Private pleasures
Jeremy Clarke
y boy's maternal grandfather, a retired farm labourer, loves his food. Almost his entire conversation is about what he ate in the past and what he is going to eat in the future. The remainder is about the general consistency of the waste product and the ease, or otherwise, of its evacuation.
As winter approaches, however, the subject of logs (wooden ones) enlivens the discourse: whose logs are the least expensive, whose are seasoned, who is selling predominantly ash this year and who oak. He prefers to buy 'rings' (tree roundels) and split them himself, because it works out cheaper that way. Once his logs are bought, split and stacked in his outside lavatory, we get regular updates on the rate (an endless surprise to him, this) at which they are going up in smoke.
In summer, the account of his diet is supplemented by reports on the feeding habits of his marrows, which enjoy their grub as much as he does. It says in gardening books that marrows are 'gross feeders', but in my boy's maternal grandfather's marrows' case, that's putting it mildly. They cat anything: potato peelings, bacon rind, even small pieces of rubble. The mysterious disappearance of his blind arthritic cat was only half-jokingly attributed to the voracious appetite of his marrows.
Eighteen months ago, deteriorating knee cartilage forced my boy's maternal grandfather into early retirement. He was reconciled to being crippled when the National Health Service offered to build him an entirely new knee out of plastic and steel. Unfortunately, the local NHS hospital was too busy replacing knees to fit him in for a year or two, so he was offered instead a knee replacement at a prestigious local private hospital at no extra charge to himself. So my boy's maternal grandfather, who rarely leaves the parish, has never been on holiday, stayed in a hotel or eaten in a restaurant, went away for a week to be pampered in a private hospital.
The hospital was 40 miles away. None of his immediate family owns or drives a car, and I was away, so the sight of this unassuming, self-consciously working-class man lying in state in a private hospital ward was denied to us, and there were no photographs. When he came back, new knee and ail, we searched his face, as one would search the face of someone who had been abducted by aliens and lived to tell the tale, to see whether the experience had marked it in any way.
When I first saw him after the operation he was back in his own bed, recovering. I'd not seen the inside of his bedroom before. He was lying under a faded orange 1950s candlewick bedspread, surrounded by 1960s wallpaper that had been pasted over 18thcentury walls. I'd already heard secondhand accounts of the private hospital's smiling room service, the breakfast menu as long as your arm, the fabulous lunches, and the cake in the afternoon that melted in your mouth. It sounded so sybaritic, I thought, that surely it had been exaggerated in the retelling. 'I hear the food wasn't bad,' I said.
Speechless, and with the expression of a mortal man who has been vouchsafed a glimpse of eternal Paradise, he held up his right hand and showed me the distance, about three inches, between his thumb and the forefinger. The diameter of the mushrooms? The thickness of the strawberry cheesecake? The width of the spoons? No, it was the height of the mid-afternoon sponge cake.
Some people I know, if bullshit were music, would be German oompah bands. Not so my boy's maternal grandfather. Not only does he still believe in an objective truth, even at his age; he is also a stickler for it in his conversation. He looked at the gap between his forefinger and thumb and adjusted it by perhaps two millimetres to be more exact. He'd not had cake like it, he said, in all his born days. Then he gave me a description of everything that passed his lips between his admission and his discharge, plus a gripping account of the struggle he had with that all important first post-operative stool.
Next to the quality and quantity of the food, and the friendliness of the nurses, it was the room temperature that made his hospital visit one of the most extraordinary events of his life. He'd never been so hot. It was far too hot to sleep with anything covering him. On the second night there was a nurse on duty who insisted he cover himself with at least a sheet for the sake of decency. She was the only one he saw throughout his stay who was less than friendly. But she kept goats, she'd told him, which explained everything, because according to my boy's maternal grandfather keeping goats can be very trying and tends to make people either cynical or pugnacious.
Wondering whether this observation ought to be factored into any serious discussion about democracy and the situation in the Middle East, I picked up his empty cup and saucer, promising to return with a refill if he'd show me his new knee.
Previous page
