WHEN THE BOAT (and My Chariot of Fire) COMES IN

Endeavouring to forget that this is yet another snowfall, and forget the coldness of aloneness amid a sea of encroachingly hostile to impassive indifferent faces: I’m thinking..
Were the names I have been called throughout my life individual people, I’d have kindred-spirits in my corner enough to stretch the Royal Mile.
  There’d be the indomitable Gargoyle (the name I called my infant self), the browbeaten Rags, the ebullient Gasbags, the effervescent Fizzbomb, and even a young Jennifer Jones (whod’ve preferred to’ve been ‘Indiana’), to name but a few, congregating warmly around TOAD, whom I’ve been since my teens.. The only missing-link herein this solidarity, being, there is parody aplenty..
But not a Brave Lochinvar to call upon amongst, us.
 But dreaming (for all that a burning-ambition to be nothing but warm reduces mine to pipe dreams) is free.. Unlike freedom.
 Which comes at a high price, yet can never really be bought back. The restraints to constraints, from institution of psychiatry to institution of society, looking the same, from whatever side of the High window one’s stood at.
 For one’s conditioned and positioned to be..
For ever, out in the cold.

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A popular assumption with the sobriquet of ‘Toad’, is that it was spawned from the Kenneth Grahame’s character, in his book ‘The Wind In The Willows’.
  A novel notion.
  But the closest I’ve come to owning an estate like TOAD HALL, is when I took up residency here by the castle in Edinburgh’s cardboard-city..
Where, too proud to beg and too honest to steal. I’d deduced that starving and freezing (at a good address) makes all the difference..
And had my privy-purse jangled to the tune of a bus ticket to London, Buckingham Palace topped my list of good addresses.
  Reposed hereon my cardboard chaise-lounge on King Street, before a captive audience who’re evidently waiting to hear me say something in response to their resounding social commentary on..
Wars? Drought? Famine? Poverty? Greenhouse Gasses? Child Labour Exploitation? Animal Cruelty? Natural Disasters? naah my hat (which if nothing else is of THE TIMES)..
It occurs to me that exercising the vocal chords would animate the muscles that’re cold right down to the bones in my face, and maybe localise some heat. And I’m thinking..
Immersion into heated debate may generate a feeling of overall heat..
Or open oneself up for a further verbal roasting. Therefore, I am not about to divulge that fashion faux pas maybe, an upside-down origami boat undoubtedly.. This hat is nevertheless indispensable. For alongside my denim jacket and jeans and T-shirt with Che Guevara on it, it is all that I have between, being an arresting sight in The Emperor’s New Clothes..
And hearing somewhere once that half of the body’s heat escapes through the top of the head, having numerous layers of broadsheet artfully formed on the head’s got to be better than snow forming on it, which saturates the hair, runs down my face, and soaks right down to the top of Che Guevara’s head. Whom being sensibly hatted, a revolutionary and, moreover, a doctor..
Would know how to stop the coughing sneezing and nose runs, stop the tarry bile from rising and expelling to form black Rorschach inkblots on the snow.. Stop the headache earache bellyache and backache, if..
God alone can stop the heartache. Stop the fainting..
For out here is not the place to lose command of the situation in.
  And a pragmatist to the bitter-cold end, I resolved to fight these climes with whatever means I have left in me.

Another self-preservationary measure is to lose oneself in the warm sleeves of a book, outlining itself in my mind.
  That tells of all the roads that brought me here, to this one..
By far the coldest road. Open all hours to all elements that care to breeeeeeeeeeeeze along it, if..
The heat from burning-rubber is, scant.
  A good cue for a recitation of the poem Song Of The Open Road, were I to think outloud..
And appease the crowd still fixated on pillorying me for my millinery..
Howd’s it go again?.. how?… How?!..
Strange, I used to be so poetically au fait, yet what I once knew so well now eludes me… HOW does it go again?
  ‘Afoot..
  ‘Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road.
  Healthy, free…… the world before me’ ….and the singular line ‘All seems beautiful to me’ is about as verbatim as poetic musings’re gonna get.
  That from beneath the feet of Auld Reekie could be perceived as a paradoxical outlook anyway.
  But, they’re not my words. For all that the future stretched out before me, when I first read Walt Whitman in my teens..
All seemed beautiful to me.

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The Geordie word for ‘our own’ is ‘WOR’, and for good reason. However to tell a Jock that a Geordie composed the tune to the Scottish bard’s words (tune the whole world now dances to), would be water off a roast-duck’s back.
  Nationalism reigns supreme hereabouts, right down to the anti-English slogans daubed on walls and bus-shelters and notwithstanding, cards and bric-a-brac in gift-shop windows..

FE FI FO FUM I SMELL THE SH.. THAT’S AN
ENGLISHMUN

.. Charming little tin to keep yer Earl Grey in!
  It was Hogmanay last night: And hearing Auld Lang Syne whistled, bag piped, and on every passer-bys lips sent one to sleep to dream, of home.
  A dream, so real I could feel the warmth of adjoined hands around the rainbow-coloured fountain that once stood in Northumberland Square, as the festive-gathering counted down sixty seconds. So real I could taste the fountain spray on my tongue on hearing the cannon-balls roar and resounding on the sea-wind from Collingwood Monument at the mouth of the river Tyne, at the stroke of midnight and the birth of a new year.
  So real that I woke with The Water of Tyne running through my head, not knowing if I’d been singing outloud..

‘I cannit go to my love
Though I would dee
For the water of Tyne
Runs between she and me;

And here I must stand
With a tear in my eey
All sighing and crying
My sweetheart te see...’

Tonight:
  There’s a Salvation Army band playing AMAZING GRACE, and free bowls of piping-hot soup’re being handed out just around the corner.
  Times however I’ve come here before, and stuck out two eager raw-blue knuckled mits, have been met (not unkindly) with too many questions..
And the answers to which being overly, dear: Now I just come by to inhale what my mind’s imagining the taste of.
  And Grace replaced with an up-tempo jig of DONALD WHERE’S YOUR TROOSERS to get those amongst us belly-roaring and side-splitting who’ve barely got a trouser-leg between us..
Cockaleekie-broth on the wind and laughing one’s socks off were it that I had, socks..
  The queue now stretching to almost around my corner, time’s up to dissipate with the sounds and scents and..
Fade back into the fugue of grey-brickwork, whereupon dreams shall hopefully come bearing a pan of steaming broth… a round of warm baked stottie-cake… a skillet of sizzling singing-hinnies. And an industrial urn of scalding TEEEEA! Just for starters.
  Happy New Year!

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When the sleet and slush came..
I thought about what I thought I heard somewhere, another day.
  And I wondered if what I’d actually heard is it was from the bottom-of-the-feet, that body-heat escapes from.
  It goes out unhindered through sole less shoes. And not even plastic from my bin-bag, barres its passage.

But then I thought again about what I heard somewhere, another day..
In the scientific way.
  Thinking it, logic, that as heat naturally rises..
Its route of escape had to be through the head.
  After a while of course, the hat gets soaked through too.
  However stepping on-and-off trains before they pull out of the station, to search the seats and aisles for broadsheets, means there’s always a stockpile in my bin-bag to make another.
  Except, when I’ve torn and worn too much of my bin-bag.

When the rain and black ice came..
I thought about what I thought I heard somewhere, another day.
  Because I was thinking of apples.
  Not the Isle of Apples..
Though images evocative of the castle ruins on the cliff top at home, where I wish my ash remains to be cast to the four winds, and the sea, from..
Are never far from my thoughts, (a friend once querying why so particularly Tynemouth cliffs? I tongue-in-cheek replied ‘So’s my spirit’ll become a mermaid, what else?’..
At which she countered, ‘Shouldn’t that be the other way round? That it’s a mermaid would want to have a human soul, and a human soul wants to be an angel?’ To which I replied, ‘I associate spirit with freedom and soul with bondage, don’t ask me why. So naah, I could never be good enough to make a convincing angel.’ ‘Good enough to be a mermaid, though.’ ‘….. Someone once thought so.’ ‘Who was that then?’ ‘An angel.’)
.. But I was thinking of a half eaten toffy-apple, a child had thrown into the road..
And thinking to retrieve it, I thought about the consequence of road-kill..
And I thought about Newton’s gravity law. About everything that goes up, comes down..
  And I thought it difficult to understand the scientific complexities of where, heat goes.

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We’re sailing on a strange sea
Blown by a strange wind…….

Gosh Almighty!
  I was having the strangest dream. A dream, in which I was finding my sea-legs..
Which is funny. For I can no longer feel my feet, so they don’t feel cold anymore.
  And the top of my head feels so far removed from my shoulders, I’m thinking, maybe with a bit of luck it might land on somebody else’s warm-coated shoulders. Under an umbrella.
  It was E. M. Forster wrote, ‘All men are equal-all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.’
  But I don’t believe in the pecking-order of things.
  Unlike turncoat heat I see no one beneath me or anyone above me..
Or, would I wish for anybody else to lose their head’s on my account, to find themselves in my shoes.
  It’s just nice to jump ship, so to speak, to nicer thoughts now and again. Like a salubrious away-a-day retreat.
  Like a rat..
God, I don’t want to be a rat!
  I only want to be, warm..
Yet were I to shout it out-loud I know that my chattering-teeth would sound more lucid than I….’ I I IAGHRrrrr-r-….’

Some passers-by call me ‘Horatio’, which makes me smile, because it’s a hoot. Moreso, than when they call me ‘Titanic’.
  And less than warmly comforting’s R. L. Stevenson’s line..
‘Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.’ When travelling on this passenger liner. No small detail resembling the ‘Big Shiny Ship’ docked down on North Shields’ harbour, bound for the ‘Land of Forever Sunshine’, whereat it’s only the beasts of the jungle and out on the desert plains that’re wild and ferocious, not the people: Daddy’d promised we would board and sail away on, ‘Someday.’
  When someday came.
  With no utterance of a bon-voyage, my father’s last words to me were..
‘Don’t cry.’
  And during what was to be the longest night of my nine years, through the wall that had it not been there would’ve revealed my nose pressed against the roses on the wallpaper and I was so close Daddy could’ve reached out and touched me, hour by hour, minute by minute, I listened to him sob over and over to God: ‘WHY?’
  But, because I wasn’t God.
  And because I wasn’t, brave.
  Always afraid..
Hit, kicked, shook, thrown up and down and around: and worse..
Than a broken tooth here, a blooded nose there, clumps of missing hair..
Everywhere, since infancy. Sometimes, to teach Daddy his lesson, the lesson enigmatically being, me. Sometimes because I was just ‘Born Bad’. The lessons and examples I represented to the adult world, being too complex to understand outside of fear..
Too paralysed again, and dumbstruck to call out that I was.. There.
  For the one whom in my eyes was the Tallest Man On Earth, for when Daddy swept me up onto the dizzying happy heights of his shoulders I could touch the ceiling..
With the unshatterable belief of a child that had he raised me just one fraction further, I would have touched the sky.
  When the moonlight left my room, in the wake of the family who’d left through the front door, and my bedroom window, earlier. Casting not a backward glance my way..
Leaving behind only the cold wind, flapping and flying curtains, and..
The plop-plop-plopping sound of water, that could not be tears..
From the overturned milk-bottle housing a once tall and now, broken daffodil.
  When the room through the wall went, silent..

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Touch me!
It’s so easy to leave me!
All alone with my memory
Of my days in the sun…

..I knew Daddy’d sailed away on his big-shiny-ship, without me.
  And left to sink or swim: with the weight of the rains of that April, held fast behind my eyes. I have felt myself going down-down-and deeper down, all the years thereafter.

They do say that there’s a book in everybody.
  However, right now I’d exchange mine to have a doorstep cheese sandwich in me..
And a gallon of hot tea, would be seventh heaven.
  But resisting the urge to break out into a dose of the Fredastaires, at the thought of ever eating again. The volume that comes out of me shall relay only the cutting-edge of life, a gritty slice of reality that bites..
Food for emotive thought, kitchen sink drama and all..
They do say also that..
Clichéing is a classic symptom of a manic-depressive.
  Which is okay, for at this rites of passage in my life, my symptoms’re diagnosed only as that of ‘Severe Withdrawal symptoms of schizophrenia.’..
Or in laymen terms, abject shyness borne from low self-worth and irrational fear of outdoors. Making homelessness worse than the wrong side of sanity.
  A malady that nowadays is termed as, agoraphobia. But not so long ago within the walls of an asylum built in the Victorian days of the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem, things were looked at differently. And moral values, residual, Victorian.
  And a label once attached is unshakable. A life sentence against which there is no appeal. One’s believability untenable. The universal suspicion being, ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ And oh..
Were there such a fire how I should welcome, the heat!
  Starting out life with a gentle-minded disposition, and artistic and poetic aspirations to, achieve. I became what my C. V. reads today. An ex-asylum-inmate garden variety of a nut, society equates with having the propensity to go midnight walkabout for the purposes, not of stargazing, but of bloodletting with the obligatory accoutrement of an axe…
  God I really don’t want to think about what people, think!

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I wasn’t always the object of ridicule and recipient of misnomers and labels.
  Come to think of it..
There was a time, when I wasn’t even called Beth..
That name too close to the bone of Bethlehem aka BEDLAM.
  For the first nine months of my life, my mother had called me ‘Roma’, after a girlhood friend she’d admired.
  In as it was only my foetal life however.
  When I was born, my mother reluctantly acquiesced to my father’s wish to call their child after the woman he loved, and not the school friend my mother had loved.
  And I thus became ‘Arriverderci Roma’. Destined never to fulfil all that early promise of all that was beautiful and joyous, and beloved by my mother.
  And to be seen as having potential to be made good in her eyes, I would have swapped myself gladly for, Pinocchio.

The cacophony of noises from my stomach’re drowning out the commentary of this, yet another, gathering crowd.
  And not knowing if the salivation spilling down from my usually dry mouth’s subsequent to thinking about food again, or symptomatic of my last meal..
I’d prefer they didn’t look at me like this.
  ‘OCH!’
  ‘Aye aa ken, UGH!’
  A preference they’re remonstrating, that they share with me anyway.
  Spread, like Rome, across seven hills..
There are many highs to this city that leave one feeling gaspingly low.
  But even if it means facing the underbelly of Auld Reekie again I really must eat something, soon.
  The grass reserve in my bin-bag ran out days ago. And having had nothing since, it’s either a trip back into the dark park for more handfuls; or a shop up the twilight back lanes to see if there’s something edible in other people’s bins..
Mindful that Alka Selsa’s yet to be found in the stratums of al-fresco dining.
  Having frothed at the mouth and lost my stomach-lining to a deep fried Mars Bar coated with batter and possibly bathroom cleaning agent; thus gastronomical journey-into-space experience, like other equally awful swallows, wasn’t much to relish last time around.
  So I’m thinking..
Fresh frozen greens it is. Grass consumption being a walk-in-the-park to digest compared to Mr. Muscle.
  And, logic deducing, if grass makes milk in cows so too must it in I..
When here with one’s chin near the ground and tail-end in the air, wondering how to get up on two feet and walk sans hands again. One’s almost a quadruped anyway.

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On leaving the mental institution..
Thus that the white-coats and police-wagons on all out alert would never forcibly incarcerate me again, and the sword of Damocles remove what pieces of my burned out brain-cells they had left to me: (First time around, having picked up a pair of scissors, not for a psychotic slasher fest with headlines blazing GASBAGS the GASHA alias FIZZBOMB the FLASHA alias LIZA the LASHA’s grave retake on multiple personality disorder: simply cutting short my waist-length hair to deflect unwanted attentions that exacerbated symptoms of agoraphobia, and in precipitation of Coming Out and committing oneself to the woman I loved; and getting committed under state section 26 instead).
  Anyways, chain an animal to hot coals and it invariably conforms to dancing to the stated tune..
Hence, one’s entrée into another institution. That which is reputably made in heaven.
  And, with the marked absence of my angel..
Mr. NotRight considerately relieving one of the extra weight on one’s feet (ergo a three pint blood transfusion received the day prior spilling down heaven’s stairs), on reaching the bottom headfirst.
  I’d no illusions that whatever such bliss is:
  It is the antithesis of true happiness..
With one beloved and, cherubic, exception.

I have cried so many endless nights
Just clutching my pillow tight
Heaven must have sent you
Into my arms…

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Eating for two..
I’m non-askant of the proverbial milk of human kindness. Or am I expectant of medical care.
  Having already received, both.
  And signed discharge papers, discharging the Tyneside hospital of all responsibility for my irresponsibility.
  Namely, should I ‘collapse on the street’ so on and so forth.
  Doctors, know best..
(And with a bedpan shoved coldly under my rump and instruction to, ‘Bear down, hard. And it’ll probably come away on it’s own. It’s only held in by a thread, and if you keep pushing it’ll save us from having to remove it……’)
.. So, what do I know?
  Nada, but the will to fight for life.
  Not my own life: But that of one too small and helpless to fight for it themselves.
  Whose kind offer of a waste-disposal-implement for a cot made me want only to miscarry, oneself.
  Small and voiceless as..
Three little phoenixes, I encountered by the bedpans and the vomit volumes awaiting measurement, in the ward’s sluice during my nurse training days..
Aborted and abandoned into ice-cold kidney bowl receivers in awaitance, not of their proud and happy parents to take them home..
But of the ward porter enroute to the hospital incinerator.
  Not because they weren’t beautiful enough, or heart-breakingly sweet button-nosed enough to live. But because their respective mothers wanted, to fit into her little black dress again the irony quite lost on her, to concentrate on her career, to remedy the having forgotten to use protection. (Not subjective or moral judgement just ascertained fact).
  And untimely mistakes: One! By One! By One!..
The unprotected little threesome were dually, taken care of.
  It’s not in the job-description for an eighteen-year-old nurse to cry. Thus I dutifully didn’t, proceeding to smile at expectant and former mothers equally until my gums ached.
  But when the porter wheeled the trolley away, that day..
No ceremony, no flowers, no prayers, no tears..
Never a smile, or even a small scrap of clothing fabric between them. Guess you could say I’d learned the (hard) way about life. And bewildered about the paradoxical duties of saving it; knew oneself destined to be useless nursing material and failed, Angel.

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  Having followed not my own dream, but in my older sister’s footsteps to afford my mother the pride in having, two angels (rather than an art college student that was tantamount to the devil-incarnate to her) at the ripe old age of nineteen, feeling oneself to be the world’s most worthless failure. I resigned from my post in caring.
  But the first lesson one’s taught in nursing school, is to see caring as a ‘vocation’, and with or without the altruistic calling..
Is not something that can be readily resigned from.
  And, for all that I cared for my own baby boy, my first-born, best as I knew how.
  The ruling was..
I had cared too much. The coroner’s verdict on my little boy’s ‘cot syndrome death’ at just three months, (having taken into account the history of an-ex-mental hospital-inmate)..
Cited that the ‘hospital-theatre clean home environment’ I had thought to protect him in ‘lent no resistance against air-borne bacteria’..
Concluding that neglected and unwashed tots were better equipped at survival, than he. And if my baby was killed by anything via my hand, it was..
‘By love.’
  Which’s gotta be one humdinger of a hard act to follow, you’ll agree!
  And pragmatism to the fore, with a child now in need of sending to the angels. I briefly returned to nursing on the terminally-ill wards of a hospital in Hertfordshire ironically bearing, my Christian name. And offloading honesty to the prospective employer I was forthwith employed and all other applicants cancelled, with the kind sanction that he believed one to be amongst ‘the sanest individuals’ he had ever met.
  And, I guess I didn’t let him down. Resigning when I could no longer convincingly smile over the cracks, as ‘Nurse Sunshine’ to the patients and ‘Nurse Simpering Sunshine’ to a colleague.
And off I pragmatically went with my hard earned wages to the undertaker. Affording payment in full for his adherence to my wish. That my baby be buried, not on H. P. but with his.. Dignity.
  And you see his funeral was just last year!
  And, I can’t find another scalding tear in me to shed..
For another!
  Anon, my life’s journey has brought me to this road..
  ‘Och, wid ye jest looook at thaaa?’
  ‘Aye aa ken’s drink’nd, drugs…’
  ‘And a sore disgrrrace!’
..This icily looked down upon road, perpetuating the chill.
  Where I go down into the gutter fighting for (dear) life, hiding my fear of defeat behind a brave face.
  The face of, Che Guevara.

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When the winds of closing winter and early spring came..
I no longer thought about what I thought I heard, somewhere.
  My mind had moved on to the next road..
Rising up to meet me.
  Not like an Irish Prayer but yet another, tsunami.

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And we’ll walk down the shoreline
One last time together
Feel the wind blow our wanderin’
Hearts like a feather..

Take my hand
We’re gonna go where we can, shine.

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e. TOAD | Book 1