Tom Reynolds - More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea

You’ve got to laugh when an ‘old salt’ police sergeant tells you that he’d like to meet the person who assaulted my patient…

…And shake their hand…

…And you agree with him even though you’ve only known the patient for 20 seconds.

The radio sparked into life, ‘General Broadcast, General Broadcast—are there any crews able to deal with a ceiling collapsed on a mother and her two-year-old child?’

We were just finishing up the paperwork on our previous job so we asked for it to be sent down to us. I was driving and we were soon at the house. From the outside everything looked normal.

However, inside the house it was pure chaos.

There were seven children running around the house, all of them under the age of twelve. A single mother was clutching her two-year-old to her chest. At first glance they looked unharmed. The mother seemed more frightened and angry than injured.

We soon got the full story: the mother and her child were having a nap in the bedroom when the ceiling had fallen on them. We entered the bedroom expecting a few scraps of plaster. Instead we were met with the sight of one-and-a-half-foot plaster and lath ceiling, a huge chunk of which had fallen six foot onto the bed.

The hole in the ceiling was about five feet in diameter; there was a lot of heavy debris spread across the bed and floor.

Rather understandably the woman was a bit upset—the individual pieces of plaster that had dropped on her were about the size of my hand and were over an inch thick. I couldn’t estimate the total weight of the plaster, but each lump was very heavy.

It was about now that the headache I’d thought I’d got rid of earlier in the evening started to return.

As a single parent who had just moved into the area she had no other relatives to help look after the children so she was refusing to go to hospital. My crewmate took her and the toddler into the ambulance so that he could examine her more fully. If he found nothing too serious then we could leave her at home to look after her children.

So off they went to the ambulance.

Which left me looking after six anklebiters.

I don’t like children.

While he was in the ambulance my crewmate phoned the patient’s GP and arranged for them to come and visit the patient. He then arranged for the police to turn up and give the patient some legal advice. Rather obviously the patient was a trifle annoyed at the landlord who had assured her that the house was fit to be lived in.

Meanwhile I was doing my best to entertain the children. My best wasn’t enough.

I was relieved when the children’s older brother arrived with some takeaway chicken meals. Yes—there were now eight children in the house of this 36-year-old woman. This older brother was more like a father to the others and he soon had these apparently feral children under control.

Luckily for the woman and her child our initial guess was correct—neither she nor her child was seriously injured.

My crewmate and I escaped from the scene as soon as the police arrived.

An ideal invention for the blogger in your family would be a pair of video-recording glasses—wear them all day, and should something interesting happen the wearer presses a button to save the last 30 seconds of video to a small storage device.

If that were possible I’d now be showing you a video of a lovely young man.

I was driving along on blue lights and sirens (to an ‘intoxicated—feeling unwell’) just heading past the Underground station when from the pavement I could hear someone shouting: ‘Wanker…Wanker…Wanker.’ He was also making the traditional hand gestures.

A quick look at him led me to believe that he was either homeless or an alcoholic, or both. I could see that he had no front teeth and he only looked around 30 years old.

I slowed the ambulance so that my crewmate and I could laugh loudly in his general direction.

He turned his back on us.

He bent over.

He pulled his trousers down.

Suddenly we were confronted with a skinny white arse, and dangling between his legs were equally white and skinny testicles.

They looked shaved .

Just then a police car came over the hill.

I wound down my window and spoke to the police driver, ‘See that fellow with no teeth? He just exposed himself to me.’

‘The one calling you a wanker?’ asked the policeman.

‘That’s the one…Have fun!’

We continued on the way to the call as best we could between tears of laughter.

It’s strange the things that make your day.

The young man breathed a sigh of relief as he finally sighted his quarry of the past four days. The old man was sitting on the park bench enjoying the sun and feeding the ducks.

‘Hello fella,’ the young man said as he sat down on the bench. ‘You said that you’d be able to tell me about the old days? About 2006? About the blankets?’

The old man tore off another piece of bread and threw it in the pond and watched a small crowd of ducks hungrily fight over it. ‘Sure, if you want to hear about that sort of stuff.’

The young man started a mini-recorder and placed it on the bench between them while the old man continued to talk.

‘It was back in o-six, about the middle of February, and if you believe the reports it was the first winter of the “big freeze”. I remember the years that followed, OAPs dropping dead in the road, cats frozen stiff in the streets…Happy days.’

Before continuing the old man took a swig from a bottle of something, probably illegal, which he’d concealed in a brown paper bag.

‘As you know I was working in London for the ambulance service, it was a pretty good job, but back then the health service was run and funded by the government. So a lot of things went wrong.’

The young man interrupted, ‘That was when Blair the Deceiver was in power? Just before the Party started to dissolve parliament?’

The old man looked sullen. ‘That’s right, bad days, very bad days.’

Sensing that the old man was about to enter a fit of depression, the young man decided to prompt him, ‘But about the blankets…?’

‘Yes,’ replied the old man, eyes suddenly snapping into focus, ‘we used to say back then that the only equipment we really needed was a chair and a blanket, but on that day there were no blankets to be found. We searched the stores, we even tried ransacking disused ambulances in case they had some—but there were none to be found.’

‘What did you do?’ asked the young man.

‘Well, we got onto our Control—they tried to contact someone in management, but no one seemed to be around. So Control spoke to their overseers—the people who had the job to look after these emergencies. They were no help.’

‘Was the management ever any good?’ the young man asked.

The old man was quiet for a moment before continuing, ‘In this case it turned out that there were no blankets at our central stores. Normally the blankets would be stored there before being delivered to individual stations by a tender driver. But the warehouse that washed and packed the blankets hadn’t delivered any to the stores.’

‘With no blankets, how could you help patients?’

‘Well, after talking with Control they suggested that we “liberate” some blankets from the hospitals in the area—so some of us went on stealth missions. We’d take in a drunk and while the nurses’ backs were turned your crewmate would sneak out with an armful of blankets.’

The old man threw another chunk of bread to the anxiously waiting ducks. ‘We didn’t call it stealing. Besides, the hospitals had more than enough.