I'll gloss over much of what happened during the following eighteen months...
Joe had cattle in the fields behind the cottage...he'd come to check on them at two in the morning...park right outside our front door with the car radio blaring and then walk straight across our vegetable garden...
Luke had joined us and we'd settled into some sort of routine...we'd bought a little caravan into which Andy had plumbed in a loo and a sink...Luke lived in that. He's always been a terribly sensible person has Luke...and he was both willing and able to help Himself with all manner of jobs. I'd bought more hens and some ducks and began selling the eggs...the rough pot-holed lane didn't put people off in the slightest...
But the sign Luke had put up at the end of the lane saying 'Eggs For Sale' kept disappearing...we'd find it slung in the hedge or in a neighbouring field. One night Luke hid down there and watched as Joe leapt from his car...yanked the sign out and hurled it into the ditch. Luke put it back. The next day he bought a little bag of ready mix cement and cemented the post into the ground...Joe sawed through the post.
Then one day Cindy 'phoned. She was my eldest son's long term partner/girlfriend with whom she'd had three children...she'd left my son and would be arriving on the early morning flight the following day at Knock airport.
We went to collect her...she had a scabby sort of a dog on a bit of string and a cat in a basket...three children, Corin was still just a baby and one small plastic bag.
No luggage...she'd not brought any clothes...no nappies for Corin...no toys...in the plastic bag was a camera and her empty purse.
If you've read as far as this and are vaguely wondering if I've made it up...I haven't.
We had no beds or spare bedclothes...we certainly didn't have any children's clothes or toys or even so much as a Teddy Bear...and we only had one very small spare room which was used as a dumping ground and somewhere to keep ladders and suchlike.
I 'phoned a friend in the village and told her...'whatever are we to do? ' I wailed at her...a hour or so later Bridget turned up with her car full of bedding...and the 'phone number of the St Vincent de Paul.
Those people were incredible...within a day two men turned up with a small truck...they had beds and mattresses and boxes of clothes and toys and they were cheerful and helpful and made me promise to contact them if we needed anything else...
What no-one...least of all Cindy herself...realised at the time... was that she was suffering from a rare form of epilepsy which made her behave in totally illogical ways...
We settled ourselves down and got on with it. We now had almost no money left...there was just the weekly payment to Himself and whatever we made from the eggs...we were in dire straits.
My asthma grew worse and I had the first of several alarming panic attacks...
Jessie was outside one afternoon when Joe came up with one of his children...he was berating the child for some reason or another and Jessie flew...she shot straight across the front garden and grabbed Joes leg...he kicked out...the child screamed blue murder and Jessie stood herself firmly between him and his son...
I couldn't call her off...she refused to budge so I had to go and pick the little boy up, tell the dog it was alright and Cindy came and pulled her away...
Telling Joe that the dog was protecting his little boy fell on deaf ears...
He must have told his brother Michael, because he and his friend The Black, arrived the following day with a heap of rhubarb for us and The Black said...as he was rubbing Jessie's ears...'Pity the dog didn't bite his bxlls off'.
I found another Doctor...a fearsome sort of a person who had obviously been absent when his colleagues were learning about patient/ Doctor relationships but who took one look at me sitting there gasping and produced inhalers and peak flow meters and plugged me into a nebuliser...I'd dragged an unwilling Cindy along and she was sent for tests and told to attend them or else...
We began to look more intently at places we saw for sale...and it dawned on me that Luke and Cindy were spending a great deal of time together...
Some Of The People We've Met...
Going from bad to worse
