Boiled Alive

     In the mid-1960s my mother had somehow found work on the evening shift at an old people’s home, in Eastbourne, Sussex, lifting the oldsters into their chairs, spooning-in their stewed apple, and wiping their chins and arses. I would later be traumatised by a visit that my family made to this home, in order to say goodbye to the residents before we embarked on our new life in Australia. We children had never met these people before, so it is baffling why my mother decided to present us to them. I recall being traipsed around the little bedrooms, each of which contained a bewildered old granny or granddad. We were surveyed by dimming, rheumy eyes and clutched and plucked at by gnarled witch’s fingers.

     I had never seen a very ancient person before – my own grandparents having popped their clogs during my infancy – and the sight of all these toothless living-skeletons filled me with urgent panic. One old lady had only one eye and an empty socket; another had several fingers missing; on old man sat, catatonic, rocking, in the corner of the room. There was an overriding smell of shit throughout the place, which was not quite masked by a dull cloak of disinfectant. Some tea was served. There must have been traces of faecal matter on the accompanying Battenberg cake, because on the ride home I was suddenly seized with violent abdominal surges. We had to stop the car twice so that I could vomit in the gutter. My parents dropped me at home and then continued on, with my siblings, for more revelry with some friends in a neighbouring town. I sat on my own in the empty house, pale and shivery as a snowman, with my mother’s large mixing bowl between my knees, into which I copiously heaved my guts over the next few hours. 

     One evening, in the autumn of 1966, my father and I were watching some program on our black and white television. Perhaps it was ‘The Avengers’, or ‘The Man From Uncle’, which I had been granted unusual permission to stay up and watch. It was around 8.00 pm. I was eight-years old. I was in my pyjamas and wearing my slippers. My father looked up from the television and asked me to make him a pot of tea. 

    I was used to this request. It invariably followed the same routine: my father would look around the room to where I might be sitting, and then he would begin muttering, “Tea tea tea tea tea.” This would gradually rise in volume until it became booming and unpleasant. At first, I would always pretend that I hadn’t heard him, but when his voice became a bellow I would be forced to comply with his ‘request’. 

     On this occasion I went into the kitchen, stepped over the vacuum cleaner, which stretched untidily across the Lino, filled the kettle and turned it on. I emptied and rinsed out the teapot and spooned some fresh tea into it, in readiness. I then returned to my position on a corner chair near the blazing fire. After a while I heard the kettle begin to sing shrilly in the kitchen. I stood up, annoyed at another interruption to the entertainment on the small screen, and walked back out to the kitchen. It was cold out there. I grasped the handle of the kettle and lifted it. It was very full and quite heavy, so for added advantage, I stepped up onto the metal hose of the vacuum-cleaner to increase my height slightly. This was not a good idea. The treacherous metal tube rolled under my feet, pitching me backward onto the floor. I carried the kettle down with me, its entire content of boiling water emptying over my head and chest before I even hit the floor. I landed on my back, and the now empty kettle fell on my face.

      I recall being unable to scream for some seconds, although I must have tried to do so. And then I found my voice and three horrible shrieks burst from me. My father came into the kitchen and lifted me up from the floor. I could feel my face already swelling to twice its normal size. The pain was excruciating. I could barely breathe. My father gently removed my saturated pyjamas and wrapped me in a sheet which he’d collected from the airing cupboard. I was now in shock and shaking uncontrollably. The woman next door was bang-bang-banging on the wall with her shoe at the commotion I had made, and was still making. 

     My father was ashen and clearly out of his depth. But he did have the presence of mind to phone a doctor. While we waited for him to arrive I begged my father to take me into the front garden so that the freezing November air might cool my burning skin; I felt as if I had been flayed. Twenty minutes later, the doctor arrived. I have no memory of what transpired, but salves and unctions were applied to my face and chest. I was undoubtedly also administered painkillers. My badly scalded left arm was bandaged; but my face was left uncovered. My left eye was swollen shut and the left side of my face was distended and misshapen by enormous blisters that pushed up from the raw, reddened flesh. Over my left ribs, a gigantic yellowish blister stretched, like a new continent in a pink ocean. 

     It was arranged that an ambulance would come and collect me the following morning to transport me to hospital (where, as it turned out, I was kept in isolation for three weeks – a period that I remember as one of the great, serene highlights of my childhood: for the first time in memory I had the luxury of silence, in which my imagination wasn’t crowded out with the constant, incessant babble of my overcrowded household). 

     The doctor took his leave and I lay on the sofa, covered with the sheet, drifting in and out of consciousness. At one point my father woke me and told me that my mother would soon arrive back home. 

     “Why don’t we surprise her?” he suggested, “Cover yourself with the sheet when she comes in.” 

     Shortly thereafter I heard my mother’s key in the front door. My father went out to the corridor to greet her. I heard muffled voices and I pulled the sheet over my face, as instructed. I then heard my mother step into the living room. 

      “Hello, what are doing up at this hour?” she said. 

      “Well”, said my father, “Something unfortunate happened tonight, so we have a bit of a surprise.” At this cue, and sensing the chance to please my father, I quickly threw down the sheet, revealing the unutterable horror of my disfigurement. My mother let out a strangled cry and sank to her knees. I saw her face contort with horror, and any thoughts I might have had that this was some kind of game disappeared in the face of her grief. 

     In the ensuing forty years since this night, I have many times wondered why my father would have orchestrated such a cruel and heartless event. I have come to only one conclusion. I am now convinced that he was attempting to induce a miscarriage. My mother was in the early stages of carrying her fifth child. I am now sure that my father had attempted to capitalise on the situation to relieve some of his mounting financial pressure. There is simply no other explanation possible.