Shock proof

Like most other kids of my generation, I believed that my father could do anything. This was mainly due to the fact that - like most fathers of his generation - he told me he could; and because this was the first father I had ever knowingly had, I believed him - at least up to the age of 13 or so.

The evening meal would be cleared away and dad would spread out newspaper over the vast kitchen table and begin laying out various oily components of a part of one of about three motor cars which he had on the go at any given time, and - knowing the outcome from previous experience and the way this would affect his state of mind for the next 8 hours - we would all retire to a different room and from thence to bed, leaving him cursing on his own until the small hours of the morning.

We had one of those old, Victorian style kitchens in which the windows were fitted with the cills at about six feet from the floor to prevent the servants from wasting valuable time by idly staring out of them when they should be preparing meals. This meant that we had to make informed guesses as to which tradesmen were about to knock on the back door, as we heard them brush past the beech hedge which lead to the little covered courtyard in front of it.

The Adiss brush salesman was an easy one, because he was a tall, Indian Sikh, and his pink turban could be seen bobbing along for a few seconds before the doorbell rang. In this situation, us kids were told to stay low and quiet until he gave up and went away - my parents always had a hard job just saying 'no'. On a few occasions, the Indian salesman caught them out by creeping below the window, and I still have a couple of unused brushes that date from this period, about fifty years ago.

The dustmen were easy, as they would roar into the graveled drive with a thumping great diesel truck, shouting and swearing as they savagely tossed the corrugated metal bins around, and at Christmas time, when they vainly expected a tip on Boxing Day, they would also let us know that they had gone empty-handed, by leaving a trail of rubbish up the path and the bins on the gravel.

For some reason, all the gardeners in the area were Italian, and I guess that they were left over from the war, when they were unpaid prisoners who became indispensable after 1945. The previous owner of our house had shot his Italian gardener when he discovered that he had been conducting an affair with his wife, and my father had never bothered to replace him. Just to put your mind at rest, I can tell you that the previous owner was not charged with murder when he pleaded that he had mistaken the gardener for a rabbit. I think it was more acceptable to shoot Italians in those days.

When I was about 12 or so, we (my brother, two sisters, parents and I) were sitting down at the kitchen table, just about to take the first bite of a traditional Sunday Roast, when we heard a sort of muffled, gurgling groan coming from one of the open side-windows. We all looked up to see a half-severed hand - dripping with blood - on the end of a hairy, blood-stained arm, being slowly waved at us above the ledge. My sisters screamed, I dropped my knife and fork and my father leapt to his feet and went running out of the back door.

Our next-door neighbor's Italian gardener had suffered a terrible accident with a lawn-mower, and being only about five foot tall and unable to speak any English, he had tried to tell us what had happened by waving the injured limb through the window before he lost consciousness through loss of blood. It was a while before my sisters could eat a roast dinner again.

Our vast garage (which could hold up to about six cars, and often did) was situated right alongside the path which lead to the kitchen, and many was the winter's night that I spent holding a torch and falling asleep as my father conducted his own short-lived and ineffectual repairs on the old bangers within it. They say that if you want some new bit of information or knowledge to firmly stick in your brain, then read about it in bed, just before you go to sleep. I think it was these long nights of torch-holding that set me up with a basic ability in car-mechanics, but I have no recollection of ever consciously learning about it.

My dad also believed he was shock-proof. He did not normally go for the sort of horror films that I loved, but one of his heroes was Bela Lugosi. Lugosi (or his PR agent) had told his fans that he was shock-proof, and nothing could frighten him. My father - normally a bitter sceptic about such claims - believed him. He even tried to emulate him. Later, when my mother died of a massive heart-attack, my father said to me, "That's it now. I am really shock-proof. Nothing could be any more shocking than that, and I have survived it."

One day, my dad was up a tall set of wooden step ladders in a living room, about to replace a light-bulb in a wall-mounted bracket above the fire-place. He had climbed up with the new bulb, but could not remember if he had turned the switch - which was way over on the other side of the room - off. Rather than climbing back down to check, he licked the thumb of his right hand hand held it over the two brass contact prongs, pausing briefly to say to me, "Don't you ever try this," then planted his wet thumb on the live prongs.

There was a bright flash, a loud bang and quite a lot of smoke as he literally did an involuntary back-flip from the top of the ladder onto the carpet in the middle of the room. He sat there, staring at his blackened thumb.

"Ok Dad," I said, "I won't." Do you know, I kept that promise too.