Open Writing

It was something Stephen said on Facebook about having purple hair that started the train of thought in my head. This was one of those trains that didn’t stop at stations, water towers, or coal bunkers. It just travelled on regardless through old haunts and experiences without losing speed until my shingles broke through the pain barrier and I was forced to retire from the railway. So far the LMS has not replied to my request for a monthly pension.

Stephen said that at his school there were regular inspections for head lice and their eggs, known as nits, in which the pupils lined up outside to office door to be admitted one at a time and inspected and, when necessary, dusted off with something akin to DDT that made heads cursed with ‘the plague that jumps about” assume a purple tinge. Rather like the Scottish Highlands when the purple heather is in bloom. There must be rationale explaining why Purple Heather is attractive but Purple Heads are repellent.

Spring Grove School, my Alma Mater, whose motto then was, “Cum on in lads an’ lasses an’ we’ll mak thi fit for’t’mill i’nooa tahme e’tall!” was low-tech in the 1940 and early primitive in its policy of healthcare for pupils.

My parents, that is Mummy and Nanny had their own health service that administered daily doses of Virol or Cod Liver Oil with malt, that worked wonders for our feeble constitutions, and Fennings Fever Cure if we were forgetful to admit to running a fever. FFC is a potion so noxious so that when asked about our health by a grown up, none of us ailed much. But nothing could stop the spread of nits and lice. I believe there are still one or two of them still hanging about even now.

Spring Grove’s Spartan approach to healthcare was rooted in the no-nonsense practicality of the Victorian Era that had not yet slipped into the repository for defunct cultural baggage.

There was a kind of requirement for basic hygiene that was followed by the teaching staff and some of the better off scholars, but rejected as being too foppish by boys and too sissy for girls with crumpled socks, grazed knees, and bleeding elbows.

Physical Training was de rigueur for all except those whose parents were literate and wrote excuse notes for their children so they could miss PT and swimming, but there was no division between children on account of ability, education, upbringing, literacy, or basic sanitation when it came to head inspections.

There was a special nurse subtitled as “The Nit Nurse,” or as "Nitty Norah the Bug Explorer." This major celebrity visited our school every month or so. She was a no nonsense stranger with grim aspect, quick fingers, eyes like ‘an ‘awk’ that wielded her ivory-coloured double-sided fine-tooth comb did not speak to us nor we to her. The whole procedure was as enjoyable and as entertaining as being hanged would likely be. It was rumoured that she was descended from fire-breathing dragons, and that an atavistic recall was expected any day soon.

Like the condemned waiting to be outfitted with a Tyburn necktie, we stood never ending in line around the margin of the hall. We were packed close enough to each other that if we weren't infested with pediculosis capitus when we joined the queue, we were heaving with the little blighters by the time we reached 'Silently Seeking Something Scalpwise Nora.'

When it was my good fortune to secure the position of current victim, the head inspectress reached out and grasped my head in a vice-like grip, thereby betraying her intense dislike of children, as without warning or air raid siren, she set about swashing and buckling her weapon of choice, the Nit Comb, as if she was fending off Robin Hood, working her painful way through my golden locks one lug at a time insensitive to the suffering she inflicted.

It was more brutal because these were days of want - and even that was rationed – besides which it had not then become fashionable for boys of a certain class to put a combs to their hair, and that neglect laid the groundwork for energetic and forceful extraction of hair by the roots, and the roots did not yield to normal tugging for we were Yorkshire kinds and like everything else of the little we had, we hung on to our hair until they broke off just above the follicle.

Whenever the small game hunter safariing through my curls detected insect activity or static proof or previous ovipository activity, I was given a hectographed note to take home. I tried using the notes on the way home to beat the little beggars to death, but when that didn't work I passed them to mother.

The next minute my head was under the hot tap in the bathroom sink and my hair being scrubbed with industrial force unmercifully by what seemed to be a dozen insane washerwomen. Imagine if you will, a small army of Old Mother Rileys full of with steroids and rocket fuel trying to do brain surgery on you with half a house brick, and you will understand. Actually, there was only my Mum and the brick was nothing more injurious than a bar of highly abrasive Derbac soap.

As to myself, I never felt anything moving around 'up there,' but our irascible and perfunctory family physician, Dr John Joseph Hanratty explained that phenomenon in a stage whisper as if to no one in particular with, "Where there's no sense there's no feeling!" I was almost fifty by the time I figured out what he meant by that.

The delay in comprehension was due to my education being consistently and vigorously overlooked. I suppose it was a bit of a challenge for the school to educate a lad that spent most afternoons at one or more of Huddersfield's nineteen palaces of pleasure in company with flickering images of slender beauties, manly men, desperadoes, shot sheriffs, and intelligent horses.

By the time I discovered that the school had given up imposing education on me, I had removed myself from their influence, even when I was present, fundamentally because I couldn’t grasp what we were supposed to do there. Very little of anything made any kind of sense to me.

I had been gone from school for several years before I realised why I was sent there in the first place. I thought it was punishment for my misdeeds as a lad, probably because I was blamed for everything that went wrong with the world including Hitler and Mussolini. I was relieved when I learned that I had nothing to do with that lot.

Although I was not aware of having head lice, I was superlatively aware of fleas and bedbugs, because although the tiny half of the attic bedroom was mine, and the big half was my Granddad Bennett's, we were outnumbered by drillers, biters and bloodsuckers by several hundreds to one.

That number is a Conservative estimate. The Liberals thought they ran into the thousands, but you know how they exaggerate, and no Labour councillor could be reached for comment.

What is amazing is the skill and cunning of the Victorians in the field of death-dealing engines, fatal contraptions, and non-mechanical methods of annihilation. Dear Arthur Negus was fond of saying that if an article was Victorian but one did not know its purpose, then it was invariably a trap.

As no handy trap was available for the disposal of fleas and bugs – the Victorians let the side down on that one – it came down to death by suffocation with noxious fumes, a remedy that was discovered in the times when Yorkshire was a Danish kingdom, in the times of Roman Occupation before the railways came. It was also before the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (including Danes came), but history is a funny thing if you want it to be factual.

Death dealing sulphur blocks on a bed of hot coals sat on the coal shovel with the sulphur sat on top of that [Ha! I just met myself coming back. I knew I would some day], and then the room was sealed at door and window with souvenir issues of the Huddersfield Daily Examiner and my old floor-strewn socks.

I must remark that my socks alone would not have killed the dinner guests, because I have never had smelly feet, and still do not down to this very day.

The deed done, the potion placed and the hot coals and seen to start burning, the executioners retreated down five flights of stairs to avoid hearing the screams of the dying. If you imagine that we lived in a lighthouse, then you are mistaken. Your mistake is understandable for we were no more than a good mile from the navigation canal at Turnbridge.

Why has no one thought to honour these human companions with a ballet such as ‘Les Lac de la Phleaux’ [my French is original]? Are there any hexapodic ballet dancers?

On several occasions I turned down pleas from Mother and Grandmother - The Cast-Iron Valkyrie, or ‘She who MUST be obeyed,’ for me to remain in the room during snuffing-out attempts so that the flocks I reputedly kept beneath my cap could be punished for trespass and damages while the nomads were being exterminated for having no boarding passes and being engaged in medical practice, to whit: phlebotomy, without the approval of the British Medical Association.

A little voice deep inside told me to refuse such entreaties - with violence if need be. But since the invariable result of attempted mass insecticide was that they suffered nothing apart from lengthy spasms of coughing and wheezing, all in the same key, I figured I would have been safe to stay in the room with them. If nothing else, maybe the curling fumes would have cleared out my sinuses.

They are days that I look back on, not fondly, but as part of an unusual childhood in which I was so close to the wonders of nature that I could both see and feel them, unless they were under my cap, and they were close enough to me to see and bite me. So, I count myself fortunate. How many Huddersfield lads could say that?



Copyright © 2009 – Ronnie Bray
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