Weapons of Mass Destruction

Jimmy Liney danced at my sister’s wedding. I need to tell you now, that’s not true. For a start Jimmy Liney only had one leg. Well, he’d one good leg and a wooden leg that wasn’t wooden. It was flesh and bone, but he was unsteady on his feet. That may have been because of whisky and water he was drinking. He wasn’t sitting at the top table with the family, but he was near the door and the toilets at the bottom of the church hall. Near the toilets in case he needed to go and needed a bit of help. He was sitting at the same table as Mrs Bell and Peter. Mrs Bell was about the same age as Jimmy. They’d seen the First World War and the Second World War and now they were rich beyond all measure. They lived in a council house. Mrs Bell was so wealthy she could walk into the Co-op and buy anything she wanted, such as a gramophone for Peter and all the hoochter-choocter records a man could stick. Peter was the same age as my mum, give or take a year. Peter would know. He knew everybody’s date of birth, when they were born, where they stayed, who stayed with them and he remembered when he had last met them. He was an encyclopaedia of things you didn’t need to know or where trying to forget, but he was that cheery telling you these facts you couldn’t help but smile. Peter had a bit extra in the gene’s stakes and therefore suffered from Down’s syndrome. Only he didn’t seem to suffer. Baldness, a stumpy body and a dicky heart didn’t seem to matter a jot to him. He was so cheery it was depressing. Mrs Bell had his measure and trained him like Pavlov’s dog. ‘That’s enough Pete,’ she’d say and he’d clamp it. Pete’s still alive. He outlived his mum, my mum and dad and just about everybody in his peer group, only he didn’t have a peer group. Peter was unique. Peter is unique.

            They came from a different generation. A generation which turned chemical weaponry into blue hair dye for people like Mrs Bell. If George W Bush had invaded Scotland instead of Iraq they would have found the paraphernalia to create weapons of mass destruction under every bee-hived shaped women’s hairdressers on Dumbarton Road. They didn’t know better was no excuse.

            I would never say Jimmy Liney danced at my sister’s wedding, not because it’s not true, even though it isn’t, but because it would be a literary sin. A cliché. I’m part of the cliché police that hang around bus stops to whack blue-haired old woman on the back of the head and scream, cliché, cliché, when they start yattering about ‘the days are drawing in’, or that old favourite ‘you cannae say we’ve no’ had a good summer’.

            For Jimmy Liney every day after the Second World War was good. He might have been a firewatcher when the Clydebank Blitz was happening, but they didn’t have television in those days. He could still walk with one and a half legs. The post-war council when they heard he had some gardening experience, and a bit of paper with his name on it, gushed, and immediately guaranteed him a job for life.  He had his own bit of council ground to tend outside Yoker flats. And he kept it lovely. They were sorry he moved on. Sorry he retired.

            His wife had moved on at this point. She was dead, but he was a bit like Peter Bell nothing seemed to discourage him. He was always glad to see you. I didn’t visit as often as I should. His house was on Kilbowie Road, near the Health Centre. Sometimes I’d pop in when I’d a stomach bug and had to miss two periods of Maths at school and Mum wanted to get to the bottom of why I always felt poorly on Monday mornings. We’d walk up the hill together. Doctors knew about these things. Growing pains.

            Mum was Jimmy Liney’s home help. She went to him three hours a day, four of five times a week. She washed his feet, hung his curtains, helped him in and out of the bath, did his washings and I seem to remember emulsioned his living room because the pipe he smoked turned the walls yellow. Jimmy was a bit like family.

            Jimmy had his own family, a daughter. I never met her, but I did see a picture of her. She played golf and was holding up some kind of cup. Whenever I watched a James Bond film, such as Live and Let Die, I always expected Jimmy’s daughter to appear stroking a cat.

            Mum’s hours with Jimmy were cut. I met the woman that organised the Home Helps years later. She had a house near the Dalmuir’s Reckie football park. (She might still have a house near the football parks.) She was ex-army or police or something and referred to the middle-aged woman under her as ‘my girls’. She had an office in the social work department and she might even have had a car and been able to drive.

            Cutting the hours Mum spent with Jimmy was the first step in rationalisation. My Da joked that soon all the home helps would have time for would be to make a phone call to their old dears and ask them ‘You alright today?’ Da was good at jokes, we never had a phone.

            The second part of the home help rationalisation was moving the workers to clients nearer their home. Jimmy Liney was a fifteen minute walk from our house or, if you got the bus to Clydebank and came back the way, a thirty-five minute journey. Jimmy had to go.  

            Jimmy had a watery eye, but he did cry. He got Blowfelt his daughter to contact the commander of the home helps and promised to pay Mum’s wages. It couldn’t be done. Home helps were a professional group and sentiment didn’t come into it. So Jimmy was left high and dry with the watery eye.

            A few years later he got moved down to the sheltered housing complex at Boquanran. He liked living there, mostly because he had company, and a warden that looked in on him every day. Mum was sometimes even assigned to be his home help and they could catch up, but it wasn’t really the same. Shorter hours. The trips up and down to the shops took up most of the time allocated.

            I compare those days to another old guy I know. Davy stays in Parkhall. He’s proud of the fact he worked in Hillington and helped make the Spitfires that won the Battle of Britain. His wife’s dead and he lives himself. He’s got a bad heart and a body ringed with rheumatism and arthritis. He’s a cheery old soul. The only holidays he goes is when he’s taken in and out of hospital. He tells me he’s incontinent. That’s just another part of his life. He’s one of the waiting-to-die brigade.

            Someone visits Davie four or five times a day. My Da’s joke has come true. It’s a phone visit. ‘How are you Davie?’ /’Fine’. ‘You need anything?’/’ See you later’.

            My gripe isn’t with those carers. My gripe is with the way the system is organised. My gripe is with the growth of the middle-men, the agencies that employ workers, take a cut of their wages and offer little or no extra value. They make profit off people like Davie. They profit from the care workers that visit him. Yet they pay little of the intrinsic hidden cost. Sick pay- forget it. Holiday pay –yeh whenever.  Agency staff were a short-term solution to the fixed cost of employing someone full-time. Agency staff have been grafted on to most services and our society.

            Competitive tendering should be open to carers working for themselves in a co-operative model. We have colleges and universities that can monitor outcomes. Let’s use them to uncover these hidden costs and make for a better society in which workers and not shareholders or any one group of individuals benefits.

            Now I’m the guy with the watery eye, this should be done soon. Any ideas?

http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole