Latcough
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Jul 14, 2006, 1:08 PM
Post #1 of 1
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GROW BAG FINISHED
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Lifes been hard for me. My mother was a junkie and I was born a 'crack' addict. There wasn't a midwife present at my birth. The fire brigade was there instead to hose down my mothers womb.
When I was born my mother put me in a cot.Well, she called it a cot, other people called it a 'grow bag'. I'd lay in my cot when Fluffy the cat wasn't using it as a litter tray. contemplating what life held in store for me.
Normally the cot was in our kitchen during the day. Mum wanted to put me in my brothers bedroom, but it was too dangerous. My brothers bedroom was what designers called 'minimalist'. It didn't have any beds, carpet, furniture or curtains. Each brother was allocated his own personnal space, four floorboards wide by the lenght of the room. My mum called the floorboards beds. My brothers were all bedwetters. The floorboards suffered from dry rot. In the mornings all of my brothers used to rush downstairs to the sitting room,directly below. Mornings were spent harvesting the mushrooms that had grown in the carpet overnight. This problem in my brothers bedroom was overcome when one of my uncles came home with a big polythene sheet. He put this on the floorboards and nailed the sides of the sheet to the skirting boards. We were the first family in our street to have an indoor paddling pool.
Mum often sent of my brothers up into the loft, to bring down some insulation for her. This she would make into a four inch fibreglass nappy for me. It was itchy but, very very warm.
If it was a nice sunny day, mum would put me and the cot on the kitchen windowsill. I'd be looking out of the window, when sometimes, Fluffy the cat would jump up and join me, to do his business. After, with his little paws digging furiously away, he'd eventually finish and I'd have clean sheets and a new brown duvet covering me.
With the hot sun coming through the window. my nappies on and the brown duvet covering me, I would sweat a lot. To protect me, at the end of the cot, I had not one, but two parasols over my head. They were funny looking things. The shafts were long and thin and made out of timber. Above that, the parasols opened out. The canopy, comprised of long, elongated, serrated, pointy green leaves. The leaves were sticky and smelled. My mum had a nickname for the parasols, she called them Christmas trees. I remember saying to mum, I didn't know that you could smoke Christmas trees. She said, that was why Santa Claus was always happy. He didn't have to pay for his cigarettes.
When I was in my cot one day, I called out to mum. She asked me what was wrong? I said, I had yellow dandruff on my head from the snowfall coming from one of the trees. She explained, it wasn't snow, it was pollen from the male tree. Half an hour later I called mum and said it was raining hailstones on my head from the other tree.
She again explained, it wasn't hailstones, it was seeds from the female tree.
To keep me quiet mum cut off the end of one of the branches from the female tree and put it in my mouth, and told me to suck it. She said it was a green icepole. After sucking it for ten minutes I seemed to be happier and more mellow. Sometimes I wanted to laugh at nothing in particular, I couldn't, because as hard as I tried, the icepole was stuck between my lips. I'd be laying there looking around and see one of our pets playing on the floor. It was called Roland. He'd sometimes jump up on the windowsill and playfully nip my little toes with his sharp teeth. Sometimes his little friends that played in his brown fur would jump off and bite my feet and ankles. For the first two years of my life everyone thought I wore red ankle socks.
I'd start crying when mum pulled the icepole out of my mouth. The skin from my lips were stuck to it. Mum would often dry the icepoles and sell them for twenty quid to the man next door. Mum warned me about swallowing any of the seeds. I did once. A week later a seedling started growing out of my bottom. A couple of weeks later with a constant supply of manure from my nappy it started to grow. The only way mum could water it was using an enema kit. I complained. Mum came up with the idea of filling the kitchen sink with plant nutrients and floating me face down. I was the worlds first 'hydroponics' baby. When the plant had grown about five foot long, mum would put me in a baby bouncer and hang me upside down in the airing cupboard for a week. It wasn't until later in life that I found out children didn't have tails.
At bedtime, mum would put me and the cot up in the loft. Up there were hundreds of other cots with Christmas tree parasols. Mum, knowing I was frightened of the dark would switch on the rows of strip lighting, which glowed a warm orange colour through the night. It got very hot up there. My mum knew this and every hour during the night, overhead fans would come on to cool me down.
It was like living in a jungle, surrounded by Triffids that seemed to grow bigger every night. Some mornings I would wake up looking like a miniture Incredible Hulk. I would be covered in aphids and greenfly until the overhead sprinkler system came on, showered me and washed them off.
My uncle Leroy once worked for the Forestry Commission. His profession, which he put down as seasonal wood cutter on his unemployment benefit claim form would come and work in the loft to get the Christmas trees ready for market, in February.
I thought people liked big Christmas trees. Uncle Leroy said that mum and him specialized in Bonsai trees, which, after drying them out, he would cut up and put in little resealable plastic bags. I asked him if he exported them to Japan. He said he left that decision to the wholasaler in Brixton. I helped him by rolling the flowers from the trees, around in my hands. When he scraped, what I called 'Marmite' from my hands, he pressed it into little blocks and sold it as 'silly putty'.
As much as I'd like to tell you more, I'm having to cut this story short, as I've had a delivery of Christmas trees. since mum and Leroy have retired from the business I've taken over. I don't know how they managed to make all the money they did. I don't bother with the wooden trees and all the growing and watering. I specialize in the plastic kind. it's cleaner.
COPYRIGHT 2005: MEPL.
(This post was edited by Latcough on Oct 6, 2006, 4:16 PM)
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