Back at Bert's house yesterday afternoon. I knew that his younger son would be stewarding at the Sheffield United match. I stayed for two hours until his older son Paul arrived on his motorbike. I took him a chocolate Easter egg and a bottle of "Timothy Taylor" beer.
Conversing successfully with Bert is becoming more difficult. He forgets so much - like names and dates and even vital words in sentences. He sits there day after day, sideways on to his television and he cannot mount his steep stairs without assistance. That is what Paul was going to do yesterday - help his father up the stairs in order to have a shower.
Bert's shocking appearance - caused by an attack of shingles is now little more than a horrible memory. Sometimes he will even forget the term "shingles" but his face is now cleared up. For some bizarre reason, he always has a vile right wing news channel on on his television and I have to ask him to turn it down or better still - turn it off. He isn't really watching it anyway.
Yesterday I played around with "YouTube" on the TV set and found him two wartime songs that he would sometimes sing in the local pub. He couldn't possibly do such a search by himself. He sang along to them and asked me to play them twice. I am sure this was the highlight of his day or perhaps it was the shower that was to follow..
Bert was born in 1936. Hopefully, he will be 88 years old later this year so these old wartime songs played in the background of his wartime childhood in London and Northamptonshire. Everybody here in Britain knew them and I can recall my mother singing them occasionally in the kitchen of my own childhood home. I feel connected to them even thought I was born eight years after World War II.
First comes Gracie Fields singing "Sally" in what was I think her last public performance in 1978 and then there's Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again". Both women went out of their way to entertain troops during World War II. Another world... another time...
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/mgGKkCh