Alf's Romantic Heart

At the age of sixteen I was once advised by my Head Gardener Alf to join either the Socialist Workers Party or the Labour Party, he reckoned I'd be dead certain to get laid because I was a real little peasant, and there was nothing more that 'middle class posh birds' liked more than shagging an oppressed little turd like me.

I remember asking him if the same applied to the Young Conservatives and he said they wouldn't let me cross the doorstep and the 'top notch crumpet' there was way out of my league, so the best I could hope for was to cut their hedges, mow their lawns, and dig their gardens because there was nothing they liked more than oppressing a horrible little turd like me.

I then suggested I might find a friend in the Liberal party as it was then. 'No point' he said, 'They're all librarians with greasy hair, national health glasses, green teeth and no tits' he reckoned they were all only interested in getting off with some 'mazed (weird) f****r on the Open University' and anyway they'd never be able to make up their mind about a repressed little turd like me.

At some stage in the next twelve months I advanced from being a 'turd' to being a 'boy' and about twelve months after that I reached the pinnacle of being referred to as 'my old boy' which was praise indeed. Alf never once called me by my name till I visited him when he was gravely ill in hospital about 1981, before I left he said 'You'm come a long way Malcolm' I was a Head Gardener by then and it was the only time he ever called me Malcolm.

In sad fairy tale endings it would be fitting that Alf and I would have parted forever with him using my name, but this was Alf and he was never the stuff of sweetness and saccharin....The old bastard lived another nine years and still always persisted in calling me 'boy'.....Alf died in his sleep in 1990, Vera his wife who had never been ill in all her 90 years died 6 weeks later. (See also Journal of 7th February 2008)