Forget the Celebrities: Read about MY Crazy Life!!!

My CRAZY Life: Legs through the Ceiling…

Many years have passed since the big freeze of 1963. It now seems a lifetime away, in another time, in

another would so very different from the life we all now enjoy and take for granted. Life nowadays,

despite all the bad things one hears in the news, is far easier than it was in the 1960’s.

They called it the swinging sixties; I have no idea how they came to this conclusion, because beneath

the thin fabric of superficial change that was gathering pace, the fundamentals of daily existence

remained stubbornly the same.

I was only nine years of age in 1963, and when speaking on this subject I try to use my childhood

recollections as best I can. How I see it and can recall, in the nineteen sixties we all believed that we

were living in a period of great change, a period like no other before it. That, however, was a fundamental

mistake, because we were quite ignorant of our situation and seriously lacking in knowledge. We had

no computers, no Internet or satellite TV to inform us. No, all that we had was a grainy black and white

picture on a small TV screen and some even poorer television programmes upon it. Yes, there were

newspapers, but they were just that - simply newspapers, by no means with any stretch of the

imagination imparters of knowledge. It was a dark time, made all the more darker by the fact that not

only were we oblivious to our deficiencies, we were also in total denial that we could not be living in

anything other than an emerging Utopia…

Now, over forty years on, can we see anything really worthwhile to come out of the nineteen sixties? No,

I don’t mean minis or music or any other such nonsensical items - I mean SOMETHING REALLY

WORTHWHILE!

“That got you, didn’t it? There wasn’t anything - was there? All the major, useful and worthwhile changes

in our lives have come in the last few years, many years after that supposedly enlightening time.

The nineteen sixties was a superficial, drug-induced time of delusion, not a time of meaningful change.

One only had to scratch beneath the surface to see the same hypocritical, racist, discriminatory and

above all BORING life that really existed. The minds of the people in power, the people who really

mattered and who could bring about the change that everyone thought was upon them, were still so very

closed. Closed minds closed hearts. Despite it being proclaimed so loudly as time of love, it was a time

devoid of love; a time of hate, a time of war (cold or otherwise), a time when standing up for what you

really believed in was not a real option.

I can now hear all the voices shouting saying, oh but people did stand up to be counted, to try and do

their bit to change that which needed to be changed. But if you think about it, if you really think about it,

you will have to admit that it was simply the herd mentality, where people only dared stand up to be

counted if they felt safe within that selfsame herd. It was not individuals - like Ghandi - daring to stand-

alone. It’s like I said, it was a time of delusion, the nineteen sixties…

That brings me on to my story…

Because of the severity of the prolonged cold spell the country was under, all the water pipes in our loft

froze solid - the water tank included. Trying to do something about it, dad borrowed a pitifully small

blowlamp from out uncle Eric, and then making his way up the ladder and into the loft, he attempted to

see if he could warm things up…

In those days, houses had no such luxuries as insulation. No, when winter arrived IT WAS COLD. I

remember hearing the glass panes cracking in the steel framed windows. God, it was so very cold!

“Are you all right?” mum shouted up into the darkness of the attic, after hearing nothing from dad for over

five minutes..

No answer.

“Jim!” mum shouted again, “I said, are you all right?”

“Hello?” dad replied in that strange way he sometimes behaved.

“I said, are you OK?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” he replied, “it a bit dark, though…”

“Did you bring up the torch?”

“No, I forgot it.”

“Shall I pass it up to you?”

No - I’ll come down,” said dad, the annoyance only too obvious in his voice.

Mum said nothing.

CRUMP.

“What was that?” mum asked.

No reply.

“Dad, are you all right?”Incoherent mumbles from above.

“Da…”

Cutting off mum in mid sentence, dad began shouting and swearing, “XXXX, now look what you have

made me do!”

“What?” mum asked quietly, for fear of another tirade of bad language being hurled down at her from the

confines of the attic.

Dad said nothing.

There was the sound of some shuffling in the attic, like someone was in pain, then more mumblings,

some of them angry.

Making our way upstairs, my brother, Tony, and myself whispered to mum, “What’s happening?”

“Shush, he might hear you,” said mum as she gazed up into the darkness.

A cold blast of air shot down from the attic.

Trying to get us out of the way, mum suggested, “Why don’t you both go and play in your room?”

“But it’s cold in there,” we moaned.

“Go on,” mum replied sharply.

We did. We did as mum told us and went into our room, but we did not play. No, after we entered our

room, play was the furthest thing from our minds…

“Mum!” we called out in fright. “MUM!” we shouted even louder. “MUM! THERE ARE TWO LEGS IN

HERE, AND THEY’RE STICKING DOWN THROUGH THE CEILING!”

“If you’re telling me fibs, I’ll get the wooden spoon out, so I will,” mum warned as she entered our room.

Then she saw the legs, and she gasped, “DAD - DAD you’ll fall right though and be killed.”

More incoherent, but this time panicky mumblings emanated from the attic.

“Get the ladder, Gerrard,” Mum shouted. “

I got the ladder.

“Quick,” mum shouted, “put it under dad.”

I did, I struggled with the heavy wooden ladder (remember, I was only nine years of age at this time) and

leaned it as best I was able against the wall, close to the dangling legs.

We laughed, Tony and I laughed. It was funny.

“Go on, up the ladder,” mum ordered, “go on up and stop dad from falling.”

If dad happened to fall through the ceiling, I knew I had no hope of stopping him, but I obeyed mum’s

orders nevertheless.

“Jim,” mum shouted, “Jim, Gerrard’s holding your legs… can you pull yourself up?”

“The mumblings from above grew in intensity.

It took a while, but in the end dad finally extricated himself from the ceiling. We cheered when he did

this. Dad, however, said nothing, and we feared one of his moods coming on…

Returning to the trapdoor, dad suddenly shouted, “Ow!”

Neither mum, Tony nor I said a word. Trapdoor

Standing under the ladder, which I had hastily returned to the landing where we had access to the loft,

we all waited with baited breath for the reappearance of dad.

Dad reappeared, his trousers covered in plaster, cobwebs and dust. And as for his head, well, dad now

had a large bump protruding from the top of his forehead. He looked a right mess!

“Catch this,” dad barked as he dropped the blowlamp.

I caught it. It was cold, stone cold.

“And this,” he ordered again.

Mum caught a large piece of roofing felt, which she studied with interest, but dared not to ask as to its

origins.

Stepping off the last rung of the ladder, dad scratched his head, and then said, “It’s no use, that ceiling

board is as thin as can be. Why, it couldn’t even support my weight!”

Tony and I looked at each other in sheer disbelief. Dad had actually been standing on the plasterboard

ceiling, and not on the joists!

“It’s only the timber that stopped me from coming all the way through, one leg on either side - it brought

tears to my eyes, I can tell you, m’lady,” said dad as he folded the ladder.

Mum grimaced.

“And as for that,” dad pointed to the piece of roofing felt in mum’s hand, “it all needs replacing. I held

onto that bit, to steady myself, and it simply came away in my hand… They don’t build house like they

used to…”

It was cold that night. It was a cold the following day and the next one and the day after that. We were

cold for almost a week, until the workmen finally came to fix the ceiling, the torn roofing felt and the

frozen water tank and pipes. There was no more talk about the cold spell after that; we all just knuckled

down, grateful that dad made no more sorties into the attic.

Do I look back to the nineteen sixties with nostalgia? No I absolutely don’t. It was, like I said earlier, a

dark time…

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Kids stories, children's stories, by the crazy-mad writer

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Gerrard T Wilson 2008