Read Online The Gale of the World by Henry Williamson - Free Book Online

Maddison is on a restricted diet, and so I hope you did not bring in any food for him?”
    “No.”
    “I would have warned you, had you rung the bell—the notice is prominently displayed on the board there!—that your father is mentally deranged, and any complaints he may have made should be taken with a grain of salt.”
    “I understand from my sister that he suffered only from an enlarged prostate, and that has been put right, Matron.”
    “He’s over eighty and has delusions, which are not unusual at his age.”
    “What sort of delusions are they?”
    “He keeps asking for some young girl he says has promised to marry him, when she’s older. Why, it’s positively indecent!” she cried; a short woman, imprisoned within fourteen stone of muscle, bone, fat and offal, held within a grey uniform in places nearly bursting, after half a century’s stuffing with the wrong foods. “Why she is barely sixteen! I won’t let her into my Home, not likely!”
    “Is it his delusion that he is having penicillin, Matron?”
    “Dr. Manassa is treating him with penicillin, yes, but that will not arrest the deterioration of his mind.”
    “Is he well enough to go home, do you consider?”
    “That’s for the doctor to say, Mr. Maddison.”
    Phillip got the address of Dr. Manassa. He lived in a mock-Tudor house, of the style built in the early ’twenties, standing in grounds of about an acre, set with flowering and other shrubs. Seeing no-one about the front door, Phillip went round to the kitchen where he saw an elderly short man with nicotine-stained moustache washing out a bottle. He asked if he were Doctor Manassa, and the man shouted, “What the bloody hell are youdoing at my kitchen door? Go round to the front and ring the bell if you want to see me!”
    This Phillip did, and waited awhile. The door was drab with cracked and blistered paint, the brass knocker and letter-box flap dull with a greenish tinge. Obviously the doctor was overworked in a town full of elderly retired people, and so an incipient spirit of Belsen prevailed about the nursing home. It was the war, which had brought exhaustion and excess everywhere. And criminals to an almost honoured position. How many thousand French shopkeepers had been murdered, their entire stock looted for the black market, and a note Il fut collaborateur beside the body? Veritably a cads’ war, a war of the spiritually damaged.
    “Sir, I am Mr. Maddison’s son.”
    “Oh well, that’s a different matter. There are a lot of bloody thieves in this town now, and how was I to know you weren’t a decoy to keep me talking while others entered my house and pinched what they could? You can sell old rope now.”
    “I am sorry, I am a writer, not a totter. How ill is my father?”
    “He didn’t let me know he was ill until complications set in. After the operation he got out of bed when the nurse’s back was turned and picked up an infection. I’m giving him penicillin. Some people are alergic to penicillin as you may know, but it was either that or the infection spreading. If he had come to me two years ago, it might have made things easier. But he’s turned eighty, and there’s not much more can be done.”
    Phillip went back to the nursing home. Richard turned imploring eyes to his son standing by the bed, but managed to keep his feelings back sufficiently to ask how his grand-children were.
    “Very well, Father.”
    “I never knew them, you know. Ah well. I knew Billy, of course, what a bright little boy he was. He’s quite a man, now, I suppose.”
    “He was killed in the war, Father.”
    “Billy? Killed? Oh dear! I didn’t know. Oh dear!” The voice more reedy, fretted away. The old man lay back, weak eyes closed, tears dripping. Then he managed to say, “Elizabeth tells me you and Lucy have parted. Is that so? Oh well.”
    “We are still friends, Father. She’ll feel free without me. You know, I think we men demand too much from our wives. I’m afraid