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Recently my brother Frank reached 60 years old and in the UK that now means he can travel on the bus at off-peak times completely free. He lives in Manchester which is about 40 miles away from me. Last Friday he telephoned to tell me he would like to come and visit the next day. He, like myself has never driven a car so you could say we have never left a very big carbon footprint on the planet.
The next day he arrived with his wife, Fay arrived about half past 12. Apparently they had set off at eight o’clock so they had shown a determination above and beyond the call of duty to see me! They told me that the buses were all full of old people taking advantage of the recent innovation by the government. They stayed until five o’clock when they had to catch the bus back home.
His visit reminding me of the first time he had made the journey to see his ‘poorly sick’ brother. I wrote about it for a multiple sclerosis magazine called New Pathways. I am not sure whether you are supposed to put a story from the past on the Anthill but I will put it here because it may make people smile!
p.s. Could somebody please tell me how I can put photographs on the Anthill. I know it can be done because I’ve seen them but I can’t figure out how it is done.
Brotherly Love
In the past my older brother, Frank, and I have never been close. This goes back to when we were both very small. I was a twin but unfortunately my twin brother died when a few weeks old. Frank didn’t want me he wanted the other one! According to my mother he would take me down the cellar and cover me with newspaper! He presumably reasoned that if he couldn’t see me I didn’t exist. Looking back it’s a wonder I’ve finished up the sensible levelheaded chap I am today!
We had a fierce sibling rivalry and were continually fighting but because he was three years older he usually came off best. When Frank reached 14 years old he shot up and became several inches taller than me and from then on I was fighting a losing battle.
As we got older our friendship didn’t improve. In the mid-1960s Frank became a singer in a blues band which got up my nose. I suppose I thought of him as good-looking, well better looking than me anyway. He looked a bit like Paul Jones out of Manfred Mann and was always bringing home nice looking girls. I myself was terrified of females. I didn’t know any of them apart from my mother. I was one of three brothers and all my schooling took place at Catholic Boys Schools.
In his early twenties Frank became a devout Catholic whilst I myself chose the happy hippy road! We lived about 30 miles apart and there was very little reason for us to see each other and in 25 years we only met twice, once at Frank’s wedding and again at my father’s funeral.
As I have mentioned in a previous story during the year 2000 I had a serious relapse and finished up living in a bungalow at Cowling on the Lancashire Yorkshire border. After this happened it became apparent to Frank that I was pretty unwell, and if we were going to have any sort of relationship we had better start now. He telephoned saying he would like to come over to see me the next weekend. The problem now was how he was going to organize this visit. Frank has never driven a car but he wasn’t going to let this stop him. He bought a map, figured out the shortest route between Manchester and Cowling then extracted his trusty old bicycle from the shed at the bottom of his garden.
On the day of the visit the weather was glorious. The forecast said that it was going to be the hottest day of the year. Frank had told me that according to his calculations he should arrive about midday so when it got around to two o’clock and he hadn’t shown I thought that a phone call to his wife, Fay, would be in order. She said he had set off at eight o’clock that morning and on hearing he was yet to arrive became quite worried. I tried to reassure her but must admit to feeling a little concerned myself because the weather was so hot. As soon as I replaced the receiver the telephone rang. This time it was my mother wondering how things were going. When I told her that Frank hadn’t arrived yet she said that she thought he had been mad to even attempt the journey. ‘The trouble with Frank is that he still thinks he’s a teenager not someone in his fifties’. After that my mum and Fay took it in turns to telephone every 15 minutes.
We were all getting very worried when about six o’clock the telephone rang and this time it was Frank. He had arrived in Colne, about 6 miles away, really dehydrated. He told me that he had bought two cans of beer and wouldn’t be going another inch until he had drunk them! I telephoned the news of Frank’s imminent arrival to the others then awaited his appearance.
When he did arrive he was in a terrible condition. As he came in I said, ‘Aren’t you going to put a lock on your bike. This maybe the countryside but there are still thieves about’. He replied grumpily, ‘I couldn’t care less if anybody takes it. They can have it as far as I’m concerned. It only has three gears and it’s been stuck in the lowest one ever since I set off!’ He then proceeded to tell me about his adventures. How the journey had seemed so easy when he had looked at it on the map. Unfortunately his map had no contours and since leaving home he had done nothing but go up and down hills.
His complexion is similar to mine; we were both redheads, only Frank has been bald for a long time. He was wearing a cloth cap ala Andy Capp and when he took it off he looked ever so funny, a bright red face and a shiny white head. As he recounted the tales of the mishaps that had befallen him it was all I could do to stop myself from laughing!
He asked if I wanted a cup of tea because he could certainly do with one. I told him to help himself; all he needed was in the kitchen. He went into the kitchen and the sound of water boiling could be heard then suddenly all the lights went out. Frank hadn’t put enough water into the kettle!
I had only been living in the house for a few weeks and had no idea where the fuse box was so we spent the next 30 minutes trying to find it. At the time I found it easiest to get about by crawling and as I crawled my mind went back 50 years and it seemed like we were little boys again who had done something wrong and were desperately trying to put things right. Eventually it became too dark to carry on looking. I gazed across to Frank and he seemed so guilty but there was no way I could be angry with him. He had just cycled all day under a blazing sun on a clapped-out bicycle to see his little brother who was poorly sick. I said smiling, ‘Let’s go to bed and we’ll see how things look in the morning.’
I settled down in the bed and Frank lay in a sleeping bag on the floor. As I lay there I thought about how much my expectations for a Saturday night had changed in the past few years. Tonight was a new low, not even a radio!
I am not a very observant person but because there was nothing else happening I absent mindedly began to look around the room. In the gathering gloom a few feet from my head I could just make out the words ON and OFF in a box attached to the wall. I shouted to Frank that I had found the fuse box and soon all the lights were back on again.
Frank left early the next morning. I received a phone call from him late that afternoon. Apparently he had reached Blackburn exhausted and absolutely sick to death with that ‘bloody bike’! So he had given it away to a stranger then caught a train home!
August 27, 2008 |
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trysh, Crafting August 27, 2008 9:52 pm
Oh, my! I really enjoyed reading this - I’m glad you shared it!!
I just cannot imagine that long a bicycle ride! Lol!!