My Life with Wellington: And Others

By Stephen Phillips

A he and she, in the full flush of middle age, meet and spend one day together.
It becomes a lifetime.
In a tiny terrace house in the heart of London, they create together their very own rural idyll. They breed chickens, ducks, cockatiels, guinea pigs, and cats, and fill the pocket-handkerchief garden with fruit and flowers, sharing the house, garden, and their life with Wellington, a large black Newfoundland.
Their life becomes one of life and death, a story of struggle, of hope and dread against the sentence heart and cancer diagnoses impose upon them.
Find here a world apart, a jewel where beginnings and ends become irrelevant, and the minutiae of their day-to-day existence creates a mosaic, illustrating lifes beauty and joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481769600

Stephen Phillips

Stephen Phillips was born in Clevedon Somerset, UK, in 1944. He is married with two children and five grandchildren. He has written art criticism for Artspace, poetry, a few short stories, and several course programmes professionally, as a 3D art and design lecturer, and Art School head. He is a practising artist and educator and has travelled extensively throughout Europe and the UK in self-converted camper vans.

Book preview

MY LIFE

WITH

WELLINGTON

AND OTHERS

STEPHEN PHILLIPS

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©

2013 by Stephen Phillips. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/31/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6959-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-6960-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

1.   WE MEET ONE

2.   AT HOME: THE DAY BEGINS

3.   AT HOME: OUT AND ABOUT

4.   WE MEET TOO

5.   AT HOME:FEEDING TIME

6.   THE FIRST YEARS

7.   AT HOME: THE CHICKENS

8.   AT HOME:THE REPORT

9.   THE MIDDLE YEARS

10.   AT HOME: MORNINGS

11.   AT HOME:LUNCHTIMES

12.   THE FINAL YEARS

STEPHEN PHILLIPS: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Eighty miles north of London on the edge of the fenlands home of Hereward the Wake and Cromwell, is the cathedral city of Peterborough. Lord Burleigh when he refused to allow the railway to go through his estates or Stamford diverted it through Peterborough instead, so it also became an industrial city. I was born and raised there, sang in the church choir, rang the bell, played in a brass band, coxed eights, enjoyed amateur theatre and left for an architectural college at 18.

But I was not happy. I had seen nothing of the world or my fellow man and little of my fellow woman and thought in consequence inadequate to design for others, so I left. To get a stake I worked as a railway porter and took off for London where I managed to obtain a place in an architects office until summer came and I took my new bicycle to Paris. But lotuses or the fleur-de-lis were not my flowers so eventually I cycled back, non-stop to Peterborough.

I joined Garfield Weston’s Fine-Fare supermarket company and ended up trouble-shooting with the regional supervisor but discovered Town Planning. Unable to get a job in that field I passed a War Office Selection board for Officer Training and disappeared to Aldershot but just in time a place at Durham University for Town Planning came up and I could go. But the costs were not covered and I had to cut it short not even able to find work that far north to switch to part-time.

After a period of all sorts of jobs I finally managed to take a six-month temporary job studying Regional Shopping in Oxford’s Planning Department. I was off and running.

The job finished and I shot of to Scotland to establish residency as I was eloping with the girl next door and her parents were dead against it. In Scotland we didn’t need their permission. But as I had insisted that she took up her place at Manchester to study medicine and this resulted in her falling in love with the son of a Turkish millionaire, she never came to join me.

But I did manage to get my first full-time planning job in the Isle of Ely planning department and start part-time studies at the Nottingham School of Planning, I was on my way.

I became the representative of part-time planning students on our National Student Body, arranged a conference in Cambridge for them and went on TV to describe it. Promotion took me to Huntingdon County council and following that when the government decided to double the size of Peterborough I managed to get a position with the consultant directed to carry out the study. I still look back with fond memories of the day I drove my Jaguar down to London and my new flat and the office in Grosvenor Street next to the American Embassy. Whoopee!

It was one of the most enjoyable jobs I have ever had and I also managed to write newspaper articles in connection with the project,.

That year saw me married to a Spanish teacher and the next a move to Camden Planning Office in the centre of London where a consultant from Canada found me.

Three weeks later I was working for him in Montreal where I wrote the recommendations for 220 acres in Ottawa, the sub-regional study for the capital of Newfoundland, St.Johns, and worked on the Townships of Montreal West, Teck and Cowansville. Then followed a period when I was the Development Control Officer for the Province of Prince Edward Island where I founded a branch of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Going independent I did private design work including furniture and built 11 houses in 12 weeks, from scratch. My elder son was born here. Then after a stint designing in British Columbia I returned to the UK.

The new position in London was Head of Research in the planning department of Bexley after which I stood as a local Councillor and was elected to the Borough Council which also involved being Governor of three schools and other community organisations. I also performed in two pantomimes winning an award as the best actor in Bexley that year. And my second son was born. But deeper involvement in politics particularly the debate on education and other problems ended in divorce. One of the lowest points of my life followed.

An second attempt at marriage also failed I suspect in part because it was on the rebound. I was now living in Suffolk where I founded a choir and at one performance, an orchestra to go with it. But London called again and I answered.

I took a degree in Development Studies and Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University) but now we are entering the period covered by the Life of Wellington and Others.

There is of course much more than the above but the main and important elements are there.

Stephen Phillips

WE MEET ONE

WE MEET-ONE

Now that my life with Wellington, my partner and others, is over, I look back on that epoch, that time of mellow fruitfulness, with wonder. Wellington was, still is, my Newfie. That´s a Newfoundland dog, sorry, person, now preoccupied with country pursuits, rather than metropolitan delights.

It was not the first time I had lived with a Newfie, or a partner, or others, come to that, but it was the best. It wasn´t just Wellington, or my partner, it was the little terraced house off the Old Kent Road, the tiny garden, the chickens, the rabbits, the guinea-pigs, the cats, the cockatiels, the neighbours. The one hundred pounds of soft fruits from the garden that last summer, eaten, frozen, jammed, jellied.

There was the occasional dead or nearly dead mouse you squidged on with bare feet in the early hours on the way to bathroom or kitchen. Initially there were the rats but when we pulled down the outside toilet and ancient lean-to at the back to rebuild with the downstairs toilet inside and dug out the nest, I could exercise a final solution. I killed fourteen that day.

There was still an early Friday morning when I came down to pull the blind up and leant over the back of the blue chair in the corner, and saw, sitting upright behind it, a young beautiful male rat frozen