Geoff's Window visits to relatives.

It is my birthday to-day

To-day is Friday the thirteenth of November. Nothing remarkable about that I hear you say. Well, I am eighty four to-day. Maybe there is no great significance in this either , nor does it give me the pleasure that I used to derive from birthdays. However, it is greatly better than the alternative and it does bring to mind the significance of some earlier birthdays and Indeed the relevance to current circumstances. Also, being born on Friday the thirteenth takes away all pretence to superstition. So I have habitually walked under painter's ladders calling for the painter to "Keep it up".

Well, the relevance to current circumstances?.

I am just reading in my newspaper of people's huge objection to having to visit hospitalised relatives through the medium of a glass window. Indeed it would be difficult for us all not to have seen Perspex guards around the tills of supermarkets, so we all have first hand knowledge of current circumstances and can well understand the frustration of trying to converse with granny through the window and I don't want you to think I am being flippant about a matter to be considered seriously.

This brings me back to my birthday and the relevance to an earlier birthday.

So, I now make reference to the thirteenth of November 1942.

On that, my sixth birthday I was captive in the isolation hospital at Alvaston on the Northern fringes of Nantwich. My stay there would be for six weeks.

It was a most unpleasant place and governed by a sad old bitch who rejoiced in the title of Matron.

On that day 13/11/42 I received a visitor. It was my father who had come to see me and to tell me that he had been called up into the army. The earlier described lady would not allow him into the hospital or me to temporarily leave my cot so I had to receive this momentous news through the glass window. We both had to shout to make ourselves understood that when I did get home I should understand that he would not be there.

So you see that nothing is new and shouting through a window is not a new experience, In fact throughout the period of world war two it was not exceptional Indeed it was the norm. The Isolation hospital has now been converted to offices but I could still take you to that window.

I now move forward to the hospitalisation of my baby brother. This took place at the North Staffs Hospital which was then called Hearts Hill.

My dad and I tried to visit Graham on twenty fifth of January 1943.I am able to track the date from my dad's army pay book which I still have.

The occasion is noted in dad's pay book as compassionate leave.

Graham was gravely ill and was in fact soon to die.

Dad affixed a cushion around the cross bar of his bike ,this was my seat for the journey.

When we arrived at Harts Hill my dad after explaining to the Sister that he had been released for a very few days on compassionate leave and asked to be admitted to see his baby son ( Graham was two) and had had no visitors up to that day.

He and I were refused admittance and directed by Sister to a pile of coke stacked beside a window. I remember that during the argument with the Sister I heard my dad say "If you were a sister of mine I would turn you over and smack your arse". Nevertheless, dad carried me on his shoulders up the pile of coke so that I may look down and see my brother through the window. I could not attract his attention and he did not see me. Dad was not tall enough to see for himself. Only I could see and I never saw Graham alive again.

I didn't have to wait until 2020 to experience having to talk and look through a window. It had already happened to me.

Nothing is new! and I am pleased that modern heating systems do not lead everyone to climb a heap of coke to shout through the windows.

Geoff Farr 13th November 2020