Worse Things Happen at ‘C’

By Keith Powrie

There is an old English cliché, which says, ‘Worse things happen at sea.’ It is usually wheeled out when some disaster happens to a friend or relative in an effort to try and ease the situation and make the sufferer feel better. It seldom works.

Over the years, I have come to realize that things happen either to me or around me but with a twist on the old cliché.

As the title implies, my ‘things’ all begin with the letter ‘C.’

What follows are brief recollections of these happenings, lightened with touches of my own peculiar sense of humour. In some cases, I have written the chapters in a style that befits the occasion or location. For example, the many incidents that occurred during the week’s stay on Bardsey Island lent themselves to being written in the style of the Canterbury Tales. The visits to Israel, not wishing to be blasphemous, but they obviously benefit from a biblical style of narration.

I hope that will explain a little about what is to follow. Some of the anecdotes may sound implausible or even improbable but, where possible, they have been validated with photographic evidence.

So read on and enjoy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543492378

Book preview

Worse Things

Happen at ‘C’

Keith Powrie

Copyright © 2018 by Keith Powrie.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/28/2018

Xlibris

800-056-3182

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

784241

Contents

Dedicated

Foreword

Childhood

Conflagration

Co-education

Callings

Cycling

Carrier cycling

Cycling, camping & cooking

Chemistry

Career

Cut-backs

Cars

Crash

Coolant

Crossing the pond

Cyprus

Cleanliness

Car sharing 1

Car sharing 2

Coach chaos 1

Cymru 1

Cymru 2

Continental bird watching

Coach chaos 2

The holy lands chronicles i

Chronicles ii

Change of continent

Up chaos creek

Cowboy country

Coach chaos 3

Terminal chaos

Cuisine

Chinese junk

Coming home

Cinders

Chemin de fer calamité

Customs 1

Customs 2

Canterbury tales

The bardsey tales

Chapter 1 the meeting

Chapter 2 the birder’s tale

Chapter 3 the fire-eater’s tale

Chapter 4 the telephonist’s tale

Chapter 5 the sailor’s tale

Chapter 6 the burglar’s tale

Construction chaos 1 (or ‘what a way to spend an easter?’)

Construction chaos 2

The big ‘c’

A cock and ball story (or ‘the prostate’s tale’) (a tragedy in many parts!)

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Dedicated

To all the

Daves

in my life,

without whom …

Foreword

There is an old English cliché, which says,

‘Worse things happen at sea.’

It is usually wheeled out when some disaster happens to a friend or relative, in an effort to try and ease the situation and make the sufferer feel better. It seldom works.

Over the years I have come to realize that ‘things happen’, either to me or around me but with a twist on the old cliché.

As the title implies, my ‘Things’ all begin with the letter ‘C’.

What follows are brief recollections of these happenings, lightened with touches of my own peculiar sense of humour. In some cases, I have written the chapters in a style that befits the occasion or location. For example, the many incidents that occurred during the week’s stay on Bardsey Island lent themselves to being written in the style of the Canterbury Tales. The visits to Israel, not wishing to be blasphemous but they obviously benefit from a biblical style of narration.

I hope that will explain a little about what is to follow. Some of the anecdotes may sound implausible or even improbable but where possible, they have been validated with photographic evidence.

So, read on and enjoy.

C hildhood

It all started back in 1940, when Mr. Hitler decided to drop bombs over southern England and mainly on the capital. One night, late in the year, London was taking a bashing and in Hendon Hospital, on the outskirts of the north-west of the city, my mother was struggling to give birth to me on her bed in the maternity ward, whilst all the other expectant mums were hiding under theirs.

Not long after returning to our home in Orchard Grove, Kingsbury, we were subjected to another of the Luftwaffe’s nightly visits. We didn’t have an Anderson shelter in our own garden and so we had to share with the people next door who did. As I was still quite small, I was wrapped in a shawl and propped up with pillows across the arms of a folding ‘director’s chair’.

One of Hitler’s finest landed fairly close-by and the ground shook, violently enough to cause the ‘director’s chair’ to fold up into the closed position, leaving me with my feet up round my ears. I remember thinking at the time, ‘I’d better not cry out just in case he dropped another one.’ My mother didn’t believe me when I told her that I still remembered this, many years later but one doesn’t easily forget traumatic experiences like that.

As the months rolled on, my gran came to stay with us. Her house in East London had been hit. All that was left standing was the mantelpiece with her old marble clock, which she retrieved but it never went again - just like in the song - although my gran hadn’t died, just her house! Now there wasn’t room for all of us in next-door’s shelter and so we had to seek shelter in the cupboard under the stairs, along with the gas-meter and everyone’s smelly shoes and wellies. I suppose it was better than being blown-up but I had my doubts at the time.

Life wasn’t all bad, over the years, my gran taught me how to play a mean hand of cribbage, although I never managed to beat her.

My dad, during all this, was touring Africa by kind permission of His Majesty’s Service in the REME; this was despite having only one eye. It wasn’t in the middle of his forehead, as I used to tell people, but as the result of an accident whilst chopping wood. (See, things happened to him as well - it must be in the genes.) In the only photo’s I had seen of him, he was clean-shaven and with very short hair - army regulations. Upon his return his dark hair had grown and now he sported a beard. It scared the hell out of me, so I burst into tears and my mother had to take me out into the kitchen and wash my face, explaining that he was my father! (Wonderful some of these old-fashioned remedies for soothing the troubled child.)

* * *

C onflagration

Eventually, over a long period of time, I became able to co-exist with my father. It wasn’t a great father-son relationship but we managed. I realise now, that the war had kept him away from the woman he loved and I had become the object of my mother’s affections during his absence. He obviously resented this and I was too young to understand why. The only time he actually made bodily contact with me – without a bamboo cane in his hand, was at my mother’s funeral, when he took my arm for support.

Most of his working life, he and mother ran a grocery shop in a draughty shopping arcade. It was hard work, standing up for most of the day and continuing into the night, whenever sides of bacon were delivered each week. He would be stood at his chopping bench until the early hours, removing every piece of bone with a sharp pointed knife and stripping out the ribs with a piece of string which fascinated me. But I had no desire to follow in his footsteps, despite the fact that I obtained a compulsory education in the trade by having to work in the shop every Saturday. I wonder what the anti-child exploitation league of today would have had to say about that.

This next incident happened during my youth, not to me directly but to my father – so it confirms that it’s definitely in the genes!

My father rented 3 shop units – I say shop units but they were nothing like today’s well lit, well upholstered, glass fronted palaces. They were concrete boxes, without windows or a front, just a roll down shutter which he secured with strong, enormous padlocks. One of these units, lit only by a single 100Watt bulb, held a small bench, where my parents could take it in turns to have a cup of tea during the less busy periods, his boning block, and his bacon slicer. This was a hand-cranked device, which was the reason for his nightly vigils removing the bones from the sides of bacon, ready for the coming week. The presence of these bones would have made it difficult, if not impossible to cut and it would have certainly blunted the cutting blade more quickly. The modern, steam-driven devices will cut through anything and that is why they don’t bother boning anymore and we end up with bits of inedible bone on the edge of our breakfast plates!

The second adjacent shop unit was also un-windowed and with a securely padlocked roller shutter for a front. The third unit was a little more refined. It actually had a glass front, still no windows but it had a door which could be locked. This, he sub-let to a dear, little old lady who sold hats. She must have sold some, I guess, as he received his rent regularly but I never saw anyone go in there.

The next unit along was a Greengrocer’s. This unit had a number of long but narrow windows near the ceiling at the rear of the unit. These windows backed onto the Underground Railway line and I guess the powers that be thought that this would be enough of a deterrent. However, the youths of yesteryear were resourceful and slim. They used to hop over the fence and climb up the embankment, smash the windows and steal whatever they wanted – hence my father’s strong roller shutters and enormous padlocks.

The greengrocer was fed-up with having to fork out for new windows on a regular basis and so he decided to give any would-be intruders an educational lesson. He had rigged up a network of bare wires, which were connected to the mains, across the inside of the windows, so that when they broke in, they were in for a shock, in all senses of the word!

One night, just after my father had pulled down the heavy shutters and padlocked everything up, a delivery man turned up with 2 large boxes of tinned pears.

‘Oh bugger!’ said father, ‘I’ve just locked up.’

‘Not to worry Harold. Leave ’em in my place,’ offered the greengrocer who was still in the process of securing his property.

‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ Dad replied.

And so, the delivery man dropped them off into the shop unit of the greengrocer.

That night there was an almighty storm with torrential rain and strong winds. Not a night for any would-be felon to be out on business. However, somehow, the rain managed, with the assistance of the high winds, to penetrate the closed windows of the greengrocer’s shop and short circuit the mains operated burglar prevention system, which started a fire. As the whole arcade was locked and shuttered and the only windows were on the side of the railway embankment, nobody’s attention was alerted until eventually, the roof fell in. By this time the blaze was well under way and the rain poured in. The electrical short-circuit now provided a heating system that encouraged the flames no end and they reached a height of nearly a hundred feet. (Remember, this was pre-decimalisation). It was now that people started to notice and the fire brigade was summoned. But it was too late – the heat, the rainwater and the greengroceries had produce a vegetable soup which ran, unhindered through the hat shop, through both the grocery units and out into the night.

The following morning, father arrived at work to observe the devastation of the previous night. The greengrocer’s shop was an empty shell except for a pile of unlabeled, tinned pears, stacked neatly in the middle of the wreckage. All the little old lady’s hats had a greyish tinge to them along with a peculiar odour, from the smoke. In my father’s shop, the bottom layers of the packs of granulated sugar had congealed into lumps and anything else that had been stored on the floor was ruined.

Needless to say, we used the lumpy sugar ourselves, and tinned pears and custard were for ‘afters’ for many months to come.

When the