As he stomped, he waved his arms about and tried to speak, his face suffused in a fairground kind of red, his purple nose pulsating, his moustache and equally hairy eyebrows twitching like three massive caterpillars in spasm. His spitting, frothing fury, and incomprehension of the inexplicable, could not have been greater had the barman at his club told him they were out of Angostura for the pink gin.
His car was, like its driver, a fine example of the species. It was a classic, the sort you could use as a tank if you fitted a cannon to it, with running boards and big headlights on the wings, and my Escort van was bound to have come off much the worse. So what was all the fuss about?
I thought I’d better get out after all. I said I was very sorry and, as he cursed me for a stupid oik of a peasant who should never have been granted access to the Queen’s highway but rather exposed on a hillside at birth, he saw me still slapping at my arms. He stopped dead. He peered. I jerked my thumb towards the van side behind me, where was written in large letters ‘RSPCA’.
‘I’ve just rescued fifteen cats,’ I started to say, ‘and the owner had been dead for days. Fleas were starving so they all …’ but my gentleman with the scratched Rolls-Royce was already backing off, his facial colours modifying to a certain extent, nearer to pastel shades with just a hint of white-not-quite.
His retaking of his driving seat was almost spring-lamb like, and his standing start with added blue smoke would have done credit to Stirling Moss. And I never heard another thing about it.
Rather than explain to my boss that I’d had a collision with a very heavy low-flying bumble bee, I thought I’d get the van fixed myself. I’d have to hope that the owner of the golden Roller wasn’t local, and definitely not someone who might one day call the RSPCA because his lady wife’s little dog was stuck down a badger sett. But that’s another story.
I drove as quickly as was reasonable to my cat and dog rescue centre, the old council potting shed, and installed the cat baskets. Not to worry, I told them. Only a temporary arrangement. I needed to get changed and have a bath. Before setting off home, I sprayed myself with a whole can of Nuvan Top, a highly effective flea killer now taken off the market because it was found to be carcinogenic. Nearly everything we used in those days has been taken off the market. It’s a wonder we’re still here.
Being bitten by fleas was an occupational hazard, which was why I hadn’t noticed much in the way of itching. The odd flea here and there, fair enough, part and parcel, but now I was standing in a crunchy heap of dead ones and I was quite sure they were no more than the advance party. The rest had yet to emerge from my nooks and crannies. I considered my next move. My wife Carol had to be told. There was no way around it. I stopped at the phone box and rang in.
You see, I said, I need a bath and a change of clothes because of this slight flea problem. No way, matey boy, was Carol’s response. I wasn’t going in the house covered in fleas. I wasn’t going in the house even with one flea that I knew about.
My pleas and entreaties, and appeals to the loving side of her nature, eventually produced a marginal softening in her attitude. A plan was agreed.
Her part of the plan was to run a bath and open the bathroom window (we lived in a bungalow). My part was to strip off on the back lawn in the perishing cold, stuff my socks, shirt and underclothes into an old feed sack ready for burning, leave my RSPCA gear spread out on the grass for dealing with later, and climb in through the bathroom window. I could see Carol looking out from the kitchen as I did all this, smiling, with a cup of tea in her hand and a piece of curd tart.
The bath was hot and foaming. Carol had dissolved half a bottle of car shampoo in it. I slid in and watched with some satisfaction as a layer of dead fleas formed in the suds. I pulled the plug, to get rid of this bath-load and start again with another, and the sheer volume of bodies clogged the plughole. I pushed them down with a nailbrush and, the bath clean, ran another tub of hot water.
There were hardly any fleas left now, no more than a hundred or so. I sank back and relaxed, and remembered an old story about how a fox is supposed to get rid of his fleas. He goes to a barbed wire fence, grabs a bunch of sheep’s wool in his mouth then jumps in the river. As he swims up and down, his fleas run along his nose to what they think will be a better berth on a sheep and, at the right moment, he says goodbye.
I too said goodbye as I pulled the plug and called to Carol that the delousing process was complete. While she’d watched me earlier through the kitchen window, she hadn’t only been enjoying my come-uppance from my beloved animals that always came first in our lives. She had also noticed that I had acquired approximately three million flea bites and that my body appeared to have been drained of blood.
She came into the bathroom spraying Nuvan Top before her and carrying a large bottle of calamine lotion, with which she began dabbing. Well, there wasn’t much of me left undabbed but what there was did credit to the cleansing powers of car shampoo. Even when I was mostly covered with fresh clothes and RSPCA uniform, my face and neck were still visible, skin of a deathly pallor liberally blotched with the crusty pinkish chalk of dried calamine.
Carol told me I should take the rest of the day off, having first burned my undergarments in the garden incinerator, sprayed my van and sprayed the uniform in the garden before hanging it on the line, there to stay through several nights of January frost until we could be sure all wildlife therein had been extinguished.
I did as I was told except for the day off bit. There were no SOS messages, for a change, so I was able to take the cats and Buster to York, where I was the source of much amusement and the inspiration for a series of imaginative and comical remarks which would run and run and never quite fade away. My fleas would be a feature of every Christmas do for years to come.
Shirley, the girl on the desk, reminded me of someone. Marianne Faithfull? Mary Hopkin? She sang a song especially for me, an old song by The Coasters called ‘Poison Ivy’.
‘It’s gonna take an ocean, dum-de-dum-de-dum, of calamine lotion. You’ll be scratchin’ like a hound, the minute she starts to mess around.’ Yes, yes, very funny.
I was fading as fast as the daylight as I drove home, feeling feverish, sweating but shivering with cold, and aching all over. I thought I must be coming down with flu but Carol had other ideas. She sent me to bed and called the doctor.
This doctor, quite unlike the breezy young woman earlier, was one of the old school, the sort who arrives in a dinner jacket if you call him out at night. He thought my story most entertaining and had no difficulty with his diagnosis: blood poisoning.
‘I have known very severe cases,’ he said, gravely, ‘where limbs have had to be amputated. In extremis, you understand. Another aspect of the presentation can be boils. Yes, you might come out in boils. If you do, I shall have to lance them, of course.’
Carol has always denied telling this doctor to wind me up but I don’t think she would have missed such a golden opportunity.
Despite having made his diagnosis, he went around the houses again with another examination. Pulse, stethoscope, torch thing for looking in your ears and eyes, thermometer.
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Hm.’ He began to pack his bag.
‘Doctor?’ was all I could manage.
‘Ah, yes, Mr Langdale. Thing is, you see, I am not entirely convinced that your particular case would be best served by the modern treatment of antibiotics. I rather think the old traditional cure might be best. Yes. I think so. In your case.’
‘Traditional cure?’ I asked, thinking of leeches, or perhaps blood-letting.
‘Large doses of quinine and whisky. Half a bottle of whisky a day, for a week, should do the trick, plus quinine tablets dissolved in hot milk. I’ll instruct Mrs Langdale. Good evening to you.’
I had no strength to complain and sank into the pillows