I have been at my desk for 12 hours straight so my responsibility for what I am about to write could be a little diminished. Even so.

I cycle home from the office. It is a 15 minute ride through Leeds city centre. I mean, right through its heart, which is the Headrow, which is up a hill and down one. At the top of the hill, there is TK Maxx and Sainsbury's, and I stop here for provisions I don't need. I stopped this evening, locked my bike and walked over the road. TK Maxx was closed - even TK Maxx closes - but a young man was standing to the side of its entrance. He was crying. Really crying. Crying as he spoke into the phone. His face looked bruised, and it looked distressed. He was telling someone on the phone something about down by the market. I went to get my milk and thought, when I come out I will ask him if he needs help. But when I came out he was still on the phone, and after I had unlocked my bike he was still on the phone, and I cycled 15 metres, thinking, I should have waited until he was off the phone and checked. Cycling with liberal guilt. But by then, by the first traffic light, a police car came at speed and I knew it had come for him. Then an ambulance came at speed, hesitated at the corner, so I thumbed in his direction, and the ambulance also went to him.

And that made me think of Barnett K. Barford. I know that is a journalist/writing cliché, so that "and that made me think of" is usually followed by a word-perfect poem. Rubbish. But this really did make me think of Barnett K. Barford, because I am unlikely ever to forget him. I met him in a resettlement centre in the Ivory Coast that was filled with Liberian refugees. Barnett had won the displaced person's lottery: he was going to be resettled in America. I had spent an hour or so interviewing families who were going to be resettled, and they were large families, and it was a small interview room, so when Barnett came through the door I held it open for the rest of his family, but there weren't any. When Barnett was ten years old, he was tying his shoelaces in his home in Zwedru. A shell was fired. It doesn't much matter which of Liberia's murderous factions and gangs and thugs had fired the shell. War was war and always terrifying no matter who was waging it. By the time Barnett stood up, his family - his father and brother outside on the porch - had been obliterated.  "The wall broke and I dropped down because I was badly frightened and I was badly wounded. My side was cut, and if you wish I can show you..."
No, that's all right.
"No problem. So that's how they died. When I awoke I saw them lying there in blood. I took a back road and I left." He didn't know he was wounded till a gentleman pointed out he was bleeding. His aunt lived nearby, so he went there. She fixed the wound with herbs, because there was no medicine, and they crossed into Cote d'Ivoire. When more killings began, they ran again, and his aunt died in the bush. "I woke up and she didn't move. I had to leave her there." He built himself a two-room house and lived there. He studied. He took correspondence courses. He was alone for such a long time. He said, "Look, I feel lonely all the time. Even at my age, I need a comforter. Someone will come and say, "oh don't worry about that.""

And that is why I thought of Barnett. That, and his astonishment at learning during his Cultural Orientation Course for his US resettlement that there was such a thing as 911 (American 999). That there was a number you could call for help, and that help would come to you. Think about that. Think about that as if you have never had a comforter, and never had help, and always been alone, and there is a number you can call and people you do not know will come and help you, for nothing. That's what I thought of, suddenly, when I saw a crying man in distress call for help and get it, and I thought, that is an extraordinary thing. It is not perfect. It doesn't always work. But a number you can call for help; a comforter: It is such a wonderful thing to have.

 

Here is Barnett K. Barford, aged 24, a pre-American Liberian.

 

The dog barks and the cat mews

The moon comes out in the sky

The birds are mostly settled

I envy your twelve hours

Of uninterrupted dreaming

 

I take your small palms in mine

And don't know what

To do with them. Beware, my son

Of those old, clear-headed women

Who never miss a funeral.

 

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

My mother, at breakfast, after I express disgust, again, at this excuse for a government. "But governments are all dreadful."
Me: But this government is not dreadful. It is:evil
bad
baleful
hostile
inimical
destructive
malignant
injurious
maleficent
disgusting
vile
shameless
mauvoise-foi-filled
appalling
brazen
immodest
sfacciato
unashamed
overt
blatant
repellent
callous
spiteful
vicious
oligarchic
uncharitable
vengeful
partisan
wounding
damaging
sectarian
factional
divisive
bigoted
inflexible
fanatical
revolting
& plain NASTY.

Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.

W.H.Auden

A brief and mis-remembered summary of some things the NHS has done for me and my family. It is definitely a partial list.

Cared for my elder baby sister who died a few weeks old

Saved my brother's life by keeping him in an incubator for months when he was born

Helped me get born

Vaccinations & new-mother advice to keep me alive

Polio drops on sugar cubes

Cut nylon tights that had melted into my legs when I caught fire aged 5; gave my 7 year old brother bandages for the burns on his hands he got trying to put the flames out

Gave me a pot for my arm when I fell head-first out of a tree

Gave my brother three pots over five years when he broke the same leg three times

Removed my tonsils at age 11, ok, a bit cack-handedly (I don't think I was supposed to bleed for 24 hours). But still, I survived.

Healed me for sundry, countless injuries, burns, boils, bites, colds, flus, bugs, bacteria, glandular fever, giardia, various diarrhoeas

Provided a typing-friendly bandage for me when I burned my arm with a coffee pot

Gave me half a dozen appointments to heal a septic abscess, with no complaint at the vileness of it

Gave me contraception without questions when I asked for it, unlike doctors in Italy who refused because they were Catholic and disapproved

Removed a cyst in my breast when I was 21, though it had been judged to be benign, but I insisted, so they did

Stuck needles into my throat to check that a cyst on my thyroid was not malignant, three times
Treated my mother's thyroid problems; gave her thyroid drugs for life

Took two years to diagnose my endometriosis, stage IV (not your best hour, NHS)

Gave me treatment for endometriosis which was crap, OK, but still free.

 

Gave me a second opinion when I demanded one

Gave me 2 MRIs, one that I demanded; various pelvic ultrasounds

Failed to diagnose tempro-mandibular jaw problems but never mind; Google did

Checked my vaccinations were up-to-date for me when I travelled to weird places; provided the jabs that it could for free though my travel was voluntary

Has reminded me to get cervical smears when I haven't remembered to

 

Cared for my stepfather who had dementia. Imperfectly, but they still did it.

 

Put some flowers on my stepfather's chest after he had died in his hospital bed. THAT is the NHS.

Has healed me, cared for me - sometimes well, sometimes not so well - and provided for me.

 

TOTAL COST: £0

Along with eleven million other people, I watched Call the Midwife last night. But I forgot to watch it at 8pm, so at 9.15pm, when I still hadn't watched it, I got a text from my mother which didn't make much sense. "Have you watched it? I had toxaemia, was really ill, and baby died. They weren't very good sorting it even in the sixties."

Baby died. 

The baby was called Susan. She would have been my elder sister. I think I've known about her for a long time, but faintly. I asked my mother about her recently, and that's what she said: she had toxaemia - "it's also called eclampsia," as the dowdy little midwife said on TV, clunkily - and Susan was born alive, but died. I have never seen a picture of her. I am 14 years older now than my mother was when she gave birth to Susan, the first child of her happy marriage with my father Thomas, who had been her lecturer at teacher-training college. I can't imagine how you survive the death of your first baby. My brother almost died too. He lived in an incubator for six weeks. Me, I was healthy and fat and trouble-free, at least in baby stages. Later, I fell out of a tree, caught my foot in a noose and broke my arm; then caught fire and had to have my tights cut with scissors from my flesh. My brother broke his leg - same leg - three times. We had a childhood of calamities. But my mother kept going. There is a beautiful photograph by Martin Parr, from his days living in Hebden Bridge, before he became famous, when he was dark in black and white and not in glowing colour. It's this one. There's not much to it: an agricultural shelter, men in caps, driving rain. It's the head-down into the weather that I like. That's what my mother has done and has had to do. Head down and onwards.

So, I had a sister, and her name was Susan.

Happy new year. I truly hope it is happy. My last year was appalling. Too much illness, too much death. The anniversary of my stepfather's horrible death from Alzheimer's is tomorrow. January 4, 2012. I don't much want to remember what was happening on January 3, 2011 as it makes me shiver and cry.

This year must be better. It must be.

I have been writing, some, at last. But of course still procrastinating. I thank god for Freedom the app, which costs money and is worth every penny a million times over, because it prevents you from accessing the internet and makes it annoying to re-connect. It works. I love it. Thank you Fred Stutzman, you genius, and please buy his app at www.macfreedom.com

Unrelatedly, I was procrastinating - it's late, there is a gale outside and Freedom has run out - by looking at the ways people are carried to my blog. It is always entertaining. People call me eclectic, you see, and I suppose I must be, given these. I particularly like "dewsbury is a dump" and "big rose."

rose georges 10
rose george 8
the big necessity 5
rose, george 3
rosegeorge.com 2
the big necessity by rose george 2
colors shit:a survival guide 2
rose gorge 2
www.rosegeorges.com 2
rose george author 2
george rose 2
www.r0segeorges.com 2
“touchdown tours” “aviation” 1
www.r0se.georges.com 1
lunch lady reston virginia 1
rose blog journalism 1
the uk association for schools for the blind in sierra leone 1
lorry spotting games 1
rose george.com 1
condom delivery brighton 1
it may be shit to you but its bread and butter to me 1
n.ram and the hindu – comments in blogs 1
john martin eddie stobart fan club 1
korrespondenterna 1
big tanker boat 1024 1
spinkwell mills dewsbury 1
dewsbury is a dump 1
big rose 1
toto travel washlet 1
groge bitg 1
www.rosegeorge.com 1
commander trevor dann 1
book review of the big necessity 1
potholes in abidjan 1
who invented space shuttle tiles

My father was an army chaplain in the Second World War. He served in Burma, Belgium and Germany. He died too soon for me to ask about it, but recently I found his official chaplain notebooks, where he noted down who had died, where and how, and the address of the man's next of kin. He didn't fire weapons, but he ingested the war nonetheless.

He wrote that one man died when a jeep overturned on him. Another was unrecognizable because shrapnel hit him in the head. All that was left of another was size 7 boots. There was a picture on one of the pages of a young blond man, a German who he had had to bury. It was the only picture in the book. On another page, there was a drawing, showing where he had had to dig up a man buried in a Protestant burial place, and where he was reburied, in an appropriately Catholic ground. Such a strange mixture of respect and desecration.

He had to write all this down because nearly every page had an address. It was the job of the chaplain to follow the awful death telegrams with a letter, a narrative of how the son/brother/husband had died, whether the chaplain knew or not, I suppose.

I have never traced my father's war record exactly. We only had five and a half years together before he collapsed in the back yard, carrying in a box of shopping from the supermarket, and I watched his face pressed on the cobbles - his right side pressed to the ground, his left side uppermost - and listened to him breathing, and the sound was wrong. The rest is lost in crying.
So I know only this and that of his war life. That he was in Burma, because we have a Japanese sword that he found in the jungle, and a collection of beautiful wooden carved heads that are my favourite possessions. He was in Belgium, because that is where the burial book was based. And once I went through the boxes of sermons and objects that my mother had kept for me and my brother, and found a plate that said, 'This is a sacred plate. It was used on SS (something) to celebrate the sacrament on 6 June 1944." It is typewritten on a piece of paper that is still stuck to the plate. The ink is red.

My father stayed enlisted until the end, and he remained a priest, and he still believed in God. He just stopped believing in people. My mother tells me that one day he stood in the kitchen and said, "I fought in a world war to save this country. I saw people die to save this country. And now my greatest fear is that this country will go under, and it will be out of apathy."