When Laura heard about Billy’s disagreeable shopping expedition, she became concerned.
‘You’re in danger of becoming an old fuddy-duddy,’ she said.
‘What, me? An old fuddy-duddy? Never!’
‘Then forget about shopping as you seem to end up in disputes.You need to occupy all your new-found leisure hours. What happened to the big plans you talked about when we went out to dinner the other night? Like getting yourself fit and all that.’
Laura was right. As usual. He had been dragging his feet in the matter of embarking on a keep fit routine.
The very next day, he determined to do something about it. He put on his new tracksuit and, bubbling with enthusiasm, sprinted to the new sports centre which had recently opened in the district. It was known locally as ‘Juvenal’s Gym’ because over the entrance was written the poet’s well-known Latin inscription, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano' (A sound mind in a sound body). Inside, it boasted an impressive array of state-ofthe-art equipment.
‘It will cost you twenty-eight pounds a month, or a mere seven pounds a week,’ the gym manager told him. ‘Surely
worth it for keeping fit and raising your self-esteem,’ he added.
Billy signed the membership form on the dotted line.
Of course his sons couldn’t resist making cracks about his latest effort to hold back the oncoming tide of old age.
‘You too can have a body like mine,’ said John, his youngest.
‘All you have to do is neglect it for fifty years,’ added Mark.
‘So, what happened, Dad?’ asked Matthew. ‘Have you been looking at the Charles Atlas ads? Are you the skinny guy who had sand kicked in his face?’
‘It’s easy to make cheap remarks,’ Billy replied. ‘You wait till you see the results at the end of a year.’
At the fitness centre, he was allocated a young lady with Nordic features — blonde hair, bright blue eyes, trim figure. She was to be his personal trainer and coach.
‘My job,’ she said,‘is to design an individualized programme for you. You have a most interesting body type.’ She smiled, giving him the once-over. He wondered what his particular body type was. Maybe kyphosis-lordosis with a suggestion of scoliosis thrown in, or in other words a stoopy-droopy posture. At first, it worried him that a physical fitness expert should find his body shape ‘interesting’ until he learned that trainers at this centre had had only three hours’ instruction to become qualified.
The gym appeared to be crowded with lots of lusty, vigorous young people bursting with health and dressed in the latest athletic gear: young men with bulging muscles in vests and shorts; ladies in skimpy leotards displaying their curves. I’m going to like this, he said to himself, though the latter may prove something of a distraction. But at £7 a week, it’d be worth it, if only as spectator sport.
That first day he was introduced to the various machines that were going to get him fit and give him back his youth. The last time he’d seen instruments like this was in the dungeon of Warwick Castle. The equipment looked more appropriate for torturing sixteenth-century heretics than for
promoting fitness. There was the treadmill, the rack, the body stretcher, and a piece of apparatus that seemed designed for drawing and quartering. Nevertheless, for the first couple of days, everything went fine.
Then he received his bill. It was from some loan shark company in the Midlands informing him that he now owed them £336 plus £72 interest and administration charges, giving a total of £408 which would be collected at £34 per month. The fitness centre had charged him a whole year’s fees and collected it via a finance company. It sounded like a scam and he complained to the fitness centre boss, but to no avail. It was all shipshape and above board, he claimed. Billy was now committed for a whole year, whether he liked it or not. If that’s the case, he thought, then in true Lancashire style I’m going to make sure I get my money’s worth by attending every morning session and twice at the weekend. He worked so hard at the gym that he found that at the end of every session he couldn’t move for an hour or two and every muscle in his body ached. Long hot soaks in Radox baths plus a surgical knee support were the only things that kept him going.
After a few weeks of this punishment, he became tired of running on a treadmill in a sweaty gymnasium and he realized that if he continued along these lines, he was going to end up as the healthiest man in Southern Cemetery. It was time to throw in the towel. What was the point of killing himself when he could work out by simply running round Hough End fields in God’s own fresh air? He wrote off the balance of his subscription and vowed to steer clear of these torture chambers. Instead he would go back to his two other loves tennis and cycling.
He bought a new Kettler bike — regretfully German but there didn’t seem to be any British bikes of good quality. This machine, which cost him £500, was the Rolls-Royce of bikes, with its own shock absorbers and the latest accessories. He
started a routine of cycling round the district every day Bloody dangerous, he found. You take your life in your hands every time you venture forth in a town like Manchester, he realized, and he was lucky not to get himself killed in the first week. Motorists, damn their eyes, allowed the cyclist about one inch of space when overtaking and his signals were completely ignored. He was invisible to them and in the end he had to buy a fluorescent reflective vest. He didn’t wear a helmet and was thinking of investing in one until he read a research report that claimed that drivers gave helmet-less cyclists a much wider berth, judging them to be more stupid than their helmeted brethren. That didn’t stop stationary motorists though from swinging their doors open without warning and it took all his forty years’ cycling experience to avoid being knocked for six. Turning right was only slightly less hazardous than jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute and he found it best to dismount and cross on foot. He read that in cities like Amsterdam, traffic arrangements were designed wholly for the welfare and safety of the cyclist. We could learn a lot from them, he reflected.
Each morning when he went out on the bike he noted that ninety per cent of private cars were occupied by a single person who believed that being surrounded by a lump of metal and being propelled by a mechanical device gave him or her a God-given right over the rest of mankind. And that was saying nothing about the fact that the average motorist contributed to the warming of the planet by pumping out thirty tons of carbon into the atmosphere. A Martian visiting Manchester during a morning rush hour would have been forgiven for concluding that the healthy minority of humanoids got about the place in the upright position by employing their limbs in a piston-like fashion while the sick majority were crustaceans seated in protective aluminium shells and could only achieve locomotion by means of a combustion engine.
It was a different kettle of fish, though, when Billy was out in his car and if there was one class of road-user that really got his goat, it was the bloke on the bike, especially the one in a blindingly psychedelic jacket. He wobbles around like a drunk coming out of a pub on a Saturday night', he inwardly cursed, and he doesn’t see the need for signals and thinks traffic lights are a leftover from the Christmas decorations. On the rare occasion when the biker stops on red, he occasionally maintains his balance by holding on to the roof of my car. I usually shake my fist at him and sound my horn and that makes him jump all right. The cyclist doesn’t consider himself as part of normal traffic and he thinks that permits him to ignore road junctions, road signs and zebra crossings. Naive pedestrians believe themselves safe by avoiding the main road. The poor, misguided devils! They’ve forgotten about the cycling lunatics who mount the pavement and pedal at breakneck speed at helpless old ladies who have to leap into the nearest garden hedge to escape being mowed down. There should be a law banning such psychopathic morons or, failing that, heavy taxation on all push bikers. Why should they get away scotfree? After all, they’re making use of the roads and highways like everyone else. There’d be exemptions for pensioners like me of course, he reasoned.
Sadly Billy’s cycling career on the Kettler did not last long. He was out shopping one day and had loaded up the front basket with groceries, including three bottles of red wine which had been on special offer. As he approached the local pharmacy, he raised his right leg to execute a wide arc to deck off. He considered himself to be still pretty fit. Unfortunately, the crotch of his tracksuit bottoms caught on the saddle and he found himself helplessly trapped as the bike keeled over and he hit the pavement with a crash. He didn’t make a sound but several lady bystanders squealed and shopkeepers came running out to his aid.
‘Are you all right?’ they asked.
‘Would you like to come into the shop and sit down? Have a glass of water?’
‘I’m OK,’ he assured everyone, but he knew he’d damaged something. His left arm and shoulder were out of action.
‘Poor old bugger. They shouldn’t be allowed on bikes,’ he heard someone say, and that remark hurt more than the physical pain in his shoulder. Everyone put the accident down to age, which annoyed him. It was the sort of thing that could have happened to anyone, even a twenty-year-old. That put paid to the Kettler which was a ‘gent’s bike’ with a crossbar. But it didn’t stop him cycling. He bought a ‘ladies’ bike’ which was easier to mount and dismount. He gave the German machine to eldest son Matthew who found daily use for it in that bicycle metropolis, Oxford.
Though he’d slightly injured his left arm, there was nothing wrong with his right and so, despite the accident, he continued to play tennis. He used to play a lot in Kenya and, although he never actually won any competitions, cups or anything like that, he thought he’d been pretty good. People talked about his whip forehand when he would stab the ball with such force that it whizzed across the net and was virtually unplayable. Sometimes, the ball was in the court. But his particular forte was his wind-up shot. He revolved his arm round and round like a windmill before imparting the accumulated force to the ball. Opponents cringed (and inexplicably so did his partner) when they saw it coming and were reduced to quivering jelly.
He had managed to fix up a regular Thursday afternoon game with his three old school chums, Titch, Oscar, and Nobby, even though they were not in the same league as those he was accustomed to playing with abroad and they didn’t always appreciate how lucky they were that he’d agreed to play with them. After all, had he not once been on the Marangu Fifth team that played all over the colony (as Kenya then was)? Admittedly only as a reserve to be called on when they were stuck.
For a start, his three companions wore glasses. From their very first encounter they were constantly questioning his decisions whenever he called the ball in or out.
‘You can’t be serious,’ he exclaimed, stealing John McEnroe’s favourite expression.‘That was clearly out. After all, I’m the only one here with twenty-twenty vision and not wearing glasses.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ they said, ‘you’re outvoted. Besides, you’re the only one here that needs glasses.’
Oscar had a really despicable tennis court habit.This was his tendency to mis-hit the ball with the handle, sending it spinning out of control but in the court. He would break out into high-pitched, maniacal laughter each time it happened. Oscar didn’t take things seriously and obviously thought it was some kind of game. As for Oscar’s partner, Nobby, he was insufferable. No matter how hard Billy delivered his whip forehand, Nobby returned it with a lob a hundred feet in the air. Infuriating! ‘Lobby Nobby’ they called him. An overhead smash would have put paid to his pathetic little game but Billy had never mastered that particular shot.
As for the normally placid Titch, he became a bad-tempered bastard once he got onto a tennis court. Although he’d taken up the game late in life after retirement, he nevertheless fancied his chances and imagined he was invincible. If he lost, which he often did, he invariably blamed it on Billy, his partner, with a flow of comments like: ‘Tut. Tut. Tut. I may as well be playing on my own here’ or ‘Dear, dear me. That was hopeless.You were meant to go for that, Billy’, etc., etc. It was this barracking of every point Billy went for (or didn’t go for) that made him nervous and affected his game. Titch went too far one day and Billy stalked off the court in disgust.
‘No one is going to talk to me like that, Titch. You can insult my wife and my kids but not my tennis!’
The others had to persuade him to go back on but it made matters worse, for now Titch remained shtum, no matter what
errors Billy made. ‘I didn’t say a word,’ he’d protest, his face a picture of innocence. He didn’t have to — his expression was enough. Billy preferred his tutting. But that wasn’t the only loathsome thing about him. When Oscar fired over one of his weird corkscrewed mis-hits,Titch invariably missed it and then stepped to one side and called out,‘Yours, Billy!’
Not long after Billy’s bicycle accident, Nobby turned up and said he’d have to cry off as he’d twisted his ankle on a broken pavement. Not to be outdone, Titch replied, ‘That evens things up then, as I have athlete’s foot.’ Oscar had to add his two cents’ worth and complained that he’d been to a really good party the night before and was still groggy after numerous G andTs. Billy reminded them of his fall from the bike but they pooh-poohed it.
‘You hurt your left shoulder,’ Oscar sneered, ‘but since you’re right-handed it doesn’t affect your game. So stop moaning and get on with it.’
Despite their various infirmities, they played on, even though Billy could only serve underarm. Nobby was made to strap up his ankle and persevere. Titch and Billy played on Nobby mercilessly, knowing he could only hobble about, while Oscar was seeing two of everything. Billy had problems with his paralysed shoulder and missed a couple of sitters but that didn’t stop Titch from subjecting him to a constant flow of‘tut-tuts’. Titch and Billy managed to win but only by a narrow margin. There was no quarter given in love, war and tennis.
As he lay luxuriating in his Radox bath afterwards, Billy thought how lucky he’d been that his fall from the bike had been on his left side. At least he could still play his tennis though the underarm serve was a definite weakness in his game.
Then God decided to play him a dirty trick by handicapping his right arm. Laura’s sister Katie had moved to Freshfield, outside Southport, with her husband, Stuart, and Billy had
agreed to help them settle in their new home by doing a few odd jobs, like painting, decorating and putting up shelves. Laura had opted to stay home that day in Manchester as she had a number of chores to attend to. He got to Freshfield all right and did his stint of helping out. It was on the way back that it happened. He decided to return via Liverpool Lime Street, and had to change stations at Moorfields, an underground station almost as deep as any on the London tube. Unfortunately the escalators had broken down and he had to descend by foot, carrying his tool kit. He managed to negotiate the first set of stairs without any problem but the second flight was steep and vertiginous, and he had to tread very warily. He had got halfway down when a young lady behind him asked,‘Are you all right, darling? May I help you with that case?’
Billy swivelled his head round to look at her and said, ‘That’s kind of you. But no, thank you, I can manage.’
He turned to continue his descent. And that was it. He tumbled down the rest of the way, head over heels, with his toolcase following behind. Oh no, not again, he mumbled to himself as he keeled over.
For a short while there was pandemonium and several people at the foot of the stairs came running to his aid.
I seem to be making this toppling-over business a habit, he reflected as he lay there. The young lady was distraught when she saw the result of her kind offer. She took charge of his tool kit and helped him into Lime Street station where she insisted that he go to Boots for first-aid treatment. The gash on his right hand was bleeding profusely and his right forearm had been badly bruised. The lady, whose name turned out to be Veronica, gave him her address, bought him coffee and organized a special trolley to take him to his train. Leaving him with his coffee behind Boots’s counter, Veronica rushed off to catch her train. She was on her way, she told him, to attend a conference in Birmingham on the subject of health and safety.
When he finally got back to Manchester, his family
wondered if he could be trusted out on his own. That of course was nonsense for it was the kind of mishap that could have happened to anyone.
‘People are too quick to assume that if I have an accident, it’s because of my age,’ he protested. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘that escalator was stopped at a queer angle.’
‘You could consider suing the station authority,’ his son Mark commented, ‘but I don’t think you’d have a leg to stand on.’
‘Huh, funny,’ Billy replied.
The one long-term effect that concerned him most was that his tennis days were over for the foreseeable future. Now he couldn’t even serve underarm or return the ball. He was sure his three companions would have been only too pleased to take him on now that his formidable whip forehand had been neutralized.
So much for retirement, he thought. Up to now, it’s been one thing after another. Fallen twice, almost paralysed by overexercise, and if I go on like this it won’t be long before I’m on crutches. It was safer in my little cubbyhole at college. I really will have to look around for activities that don’t raise my blood pressure or threaten to kill me with exhaustion. Meanwhile, how he looked forward to the coach holiday in Ireland.
Chapter Five