Page 76 - Gilbert & Me_Neat

NEXT!

Lunch: Chicken soup with added chicken pieces and tinned veggies.

This afternoon, I have nothing planned. While I’m nursing the stab wounds, I decide there’s
nothing much else to do, but watch some TV. So I turn the thing on and sit back to relax,
scrolling through roughly one hundred channels. I see PBSHD, but there’s nothing listed against
it on the guide. Intrigued, I select it and am surprised to see a gang of men, dressed in early
sixties style clothing playing a very rough, street version of cricket. They’re English, and I soon
discover the program is “Call the Midwife”.

This is a series I’ve watched before, when living in Dublin, Ireland. It’s a realistic series about
the small group of Sisters who run a medical clinic in the heart of London’s East End, called
Nunertus House. The series is set at the end of the Second World War, so you get to see real
poverty, depression and dereliction that was the life of Londoners immediately after that conflict
had ended. You get to see communities working together to try and survive serious rationing and
restrictions, England was not a great place to live, if you had no money and little resources to fall
back on, at that time. On the other hand, the community spirit was real and quite inspiring.

Anyways, these Sisters – all qualified nurses, were on call twenty four seven, and handled many
very serious and just as many non serious medical conditions, but mostly, the situations were
related too child birth and child illnesses. They had the assistance of one local Doctor, whose
wife was also a secretary to the Sisters clinic.

In this episode – the series had moved on from the period immediately after the War and was
now into the early sixties – these four chaps were actually newly qualified Doctors who had been
assigned to Nunertus House, but who had, on this occasion, decided to sneak out and play cricket
in the street outside. They only got found out because one of them accidentally hit the ball
through a window, and the ever-present Matron heard the noise.

She was not amused, and the chaps are told, unceremoniously, that if they couldn’t behave, they
could find another more suitable place in which to hone their medical skills.

The programme was entertaining, but what really struck me was the realization that here was a
TV series set during my early childhood. I recognized the style in interior décor in the Doctor’s
small terraced house – the stained, dark, 2 x 4 wood plank staircase banister, the odd-shaped
kitchen cupboards with sliding frosted glass doors, the stark sitting room settee and coffee table.
It was all too familiar. It reminded me of some of the houses where I had lived as a child. The
date for this episode was 1965 – I would have been three years old! Bwai, did that make me
FEEL old.

Once that episode was finished, I quickly scrolled until I got to local news; Mayor Wagner of
Belize City Council was on again, berating the UDP Government for not providing more
assistance to municipal authorities whose revenues had dried up as a result of the cessation of
regular business activities. I know it’s a very hard time for local authorities, so he’s right to
complain. They still have to clean streets, remove garbage, pay staff wages and provide other