Climbing the Stairs Read Free Page B

hatred of his wife.
    But once a month on his weekend off he used to go on a real bender. He’d go to the local pub and he’d order a half-pint of cider to be served in a pint glass and into this he used to
tip two double whiskies and two white ports. And this was his starter. Then he would steadily drink white ports for the whole weekend.
    He’d come back in on the Sunday night reeling about, and he would get maudlin.
    All drinkers vary. Some people get very merry. I do. It’s always worth anybody’s while to buy me alcohol because they get good value for their money. I get livelier and livelier. My
husband gets very quiet. Others get aggressive, which is no good at all. But old George used to get maudlin.
    He’d come in, walking on the balls of his feet to keep his balance, and the tears would be streaming down his cheeks. And then he’d start a long monologue about his dear departed
wife. He’d say, ‘Oh, she was a lovely woman, a lovely woman. I should never have persuaded her to come back to this bloody country. She would still have been alive now if we’d
stayed in Australia. This bloody country is enough to kill anybody. Do you know when she was ill I looked after her like a mother. I waited on her hand and foot. And I could have saved her if they
hadn’t carted her off to hospital. They killed her. They killed her in that bloody hospital. All of them bloody bed baths – that’s what did it. Removing the natural juices that
covered her body. Bloody water.
    ‘But,’ he said, ‘I tried to save her. That last few days before she died when they had the screens around her I used to go up with a bottle of whisky. And when the nurses
weren’t looking I’d pull back the covers and rub her all over with it. To try and put back some of the warmth that bloody water had taken away.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I worshipped every hair on that woman’s body.’
    Then he’d burst out crying and he’d sob himself to sleep while we tiptoed upstairs wondering how many hairs she had and how much worship George would have to have done on them.

3
    G EORGE MAY HAVE loved Australia, but it wasn’t until many years later that I finally went abroad myself, with my husband Albert.
    The day that I heard we’d won fifty pounds on the football pools I thought that the millennium had arrived. We’d never seen fifty pounds in our lives before nor even anything like
that amount.
    Well, of course, straight away we started talking about what we were going to do with it. When you suddenly realize you’ve got fifty pounds and the largest sum you’ve ever had before
is about ten pounds then you think that it’s going to do a wonderful lot of things. First of all we thought we’d refurnish the house. We settled on things that would have come to five
hundred pounds at least.
    Then I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I like the place as it is.’
    Then we decided we’d all have new clothes and then that idea faded out.
    And then I said, ‘We haven’t had a holiday in years. Let’s have a holiday with it.’
    A holiday to me and my husband meant going somewhere in England. So we started to consider places. We didn’t want to go to another seaside place, living as we did at Hove. And we
didn’t want to go to the country because I can’t bear the country.
    I don’t like all those static things – the trees and fields and I don’t really like animals. I wouldn’t walk through a field if there was even one cow in it, never mind a
herd. Have you ever noticed the way cows look at you – as if they can see right through and they don’t like what they see? Scornful-like. And then they start ambling towards you. They
might be going to be friendly but it’s a bit too late if they get right up and you find they’re not, isn’t it? I don’t dislike pigs, but with these factory farms it’s
not like the days when farmers used to let you walk around and scratch the pigs. Nowadays farming’s done on such a big scale that they