coming here on FRIDAY NIGHT, A NEW POEM ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH!
Back to poetry, at least for the first of the two pieces today. (pic=Tiffy’s Pub)
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What’s a Woman Got to Do?
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What’s a woman got to do,
What is she to do
When she can’t go out for lunch
Without some seedy bloke
Trying to chat her up by saying
He would love a f***.
What’s a woman got to do,
What is she to do
When a yob rides a bicycle
On the pavement, runs into her
And calls her an old bitch?
When that old bore from up the street
Is coming over to see her
To want to know all her business
And wants to tell her everyone else’s?
What’s a woman got to do
What is she to do
When the town centre is run down
And covered with estate agents
And charity shops
On two sides of a busy road
Where the panda crossings never work.
What’s a woman got to do
What is she to do
When she is behind a woman in a checkout queue
Who does nothing but moan,
Whilst behind her a small boy
Wipes his melting chocolate hands
All over her clothes?
As for shopping in London,
Forget it!
You can’t get in by car
The trains never run on time,
And as for the buses…
They are crowded and smelly
And may well contain
Those very same men
That you threw out of your pub the other night
And who said they’ll get even.
What’s a woman got to do
What is she to do?
If she stays at home
And has her shopping delivered
They’ll forget her bread
Ask if kidneys wlll do as they ran out of mushrooms,
Forget that cheap tin of baked beans
And send her de luxury butter beans instead…
And that is if the damned computer works,
And if they have received her order
And it wasn’t wiped clean
Along with their spam
Of dodgy pills
And letters from some high up bod
In Nigeria…
What’s a woman got to do,
What is she to do?
—
Tiffy Witherington.
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And my next piece has appeared on my Clowne site because it’s true, only slightly embellished to make up for the bits no longer in my memory, ie the conversations. Alarmingly though, the bulk of it is true.
As no one ever bothers about the true me, I’ll reprint it here.
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Great Auntie Cathy
________________
(prologue) I once wrote the following memory in story-form as if it were fiction. The basic facts are all true. Cathys fears of motor-transport, Telly and host of other things, Cathy san teeth, san work, Cathy dying in her bed. The last bit is changed as Great Auntie Cathy actually died in my sister’s bed. Susan would not sleep in it again. In those days, my dad’s copper’s wages were low, but on top of the expense of a funeral was the expense of a new bed.
Great Auntie Cathy. A true story.
________________
I’ll never forget Great Auntie Cathy. She was a strange woman, not fat nor shapeless, but a mixure of the two. She had no teeth in and kept scratching herself.
The main eccentric of this eccentric woman was her fussiness over food. She would not touch tea, coffee, potatoes, alcohol, eggs, cakes and sugar. Her main diet was bread, cheese and milk.
One day Great Auntie Cathy was taken ill, and living by herself as she was, my parents decided to help Cathy’s children by having the old lady to stay for two weeks.
Like many country stations, Matlock’s was deserted. When the train drew up, only one person got off, and she was not our Great Auntie.
It transpired that the old lady had insisted in walking to her station, despite her ill-health, and so she missed both her train and the connection south.
Three hours and five trains later. the train rattled in sparks as cold as dandelion clocks in the autumn twilight.
Susan and I had stayed on to meet Great Auntie Cathy, and we saw her get off the train with four big suitcases.
It was no good, she utterly refused to travel by bus, said it made her sick, so we let the old Bristol single-decker go and looked hopefully at a taxi. But Cathy snorted and said in her rasping voice, “Me, pay for a taxi young Sue? Not on my nelly, we will walk!”
Imagine two children of nine and ten carrying two big suitcases each through a park and up a big hill for an ungrateful old lady.
Somehow we got home, and mother made a cup of tea. After a cold walk there was nothing we children wanted better, but not Great Auntie who demanded water, and told us in coarse terms what she thought of children who drank other than milk or water.
Cathy didn’t like her bed, it was too hard, her room was too cold, but she hated the smell of hot-water bottles.
Boy, here was a real loonie! Susan and I were thrilled to bits, this was something out of “The Beano”. But the woman soon wore us all down.
It took the best part of the night to get Cathy into Susan’s bed, Susan having to sleep in with me.
Breakfast the next morning was a farce, lunch a disaster. Great Auntie Cathy was not so much a complainer than a fretter, it was not that she disliked things, she had phobias against them.
She couldn’t be in the same room as the dog, and was petrified of our docile cat. We had a new television and was proud of it, but this unmerry widow had a fit when the telly was switched on.
It came as a relief that the next day was a Monday, and we could escape to School, and Dad to his beat.
The two-weeks dragged into a month, and Cathy was driving Mother around the bend. Cathy feared everything, leaves falling on her, rain “pop” music, my father smoking, and us talking…
On the very day Great Auntie Cathy was due to go home, father said “Terry, go and wake up the dragon” I crawled upstairs, crept into “her” bedroom, and saw a pair of vacent eyes looking back at me.
She had made our lives hell, now her own life was going to the same place, and we had the expense of burying her, with the embarrassment of explaining to the rest of Father’s family how she died in our house.
Life was not made any sweeter to learn she had left the whole of her money to her parish church.
As I said, I’ll never forget Great Auntie Cathy, in fact, she became one of the great boring conversations of my life.
—
Terry Cuthbert.
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