Horace.

Here's a little tale – it came to me; some of it's true but it's laced with a bit of imagination: it's a character I have been playing with – see if you like it; I must have written it about ten years ago and never progressed.

Horace Melia had one fifth of his sight in his right eye and his left eye had no sight at all; he needed a hearing aid as his hearing was bad too. If he watched television he would have to sit next fo the set and watch from a distance of two or three inches, just to the side so as not to block his wife’s view; the sound on the television had to be on maximum volume and his neighbours learned to know his favourite programmes. They didn’t like to complain as they knew he had no choice. He also listened to the radio at full blast and had been an avid fan of ‘The Archers’ since they started in the nineteen fifties.

His neighbours bought a walkman radio for him so that he could listen on head phones but his wife complained that she wanted to listen to it with 'her Lol,' as she called him; in any case he couldn’t hear properly on the head phones as he said when he put them on he couldn’t get them close enough to his ears; one of the neighbours tried to get a walkman radio with an attachment that would plug straight into his hearing aid but Horace couldn’t work it out.

The hearing aid Horace used was the old fashioned kind which had a device with wires which went to his ears.

The young children loved Mister Melia, as they called him, because he was a very good conjurer; once in a while, if any one visited him with children, Ada Melia, his wife of fifty three years, would ask her Lol to do a few tricks.

He had one trick which involved a handkerchief and a match: he would take a match, wrap his dirty handkerchief around it, break the match and when he opened the handkerchief again, lo and behold the match was still in one piece. His handkerchief was usually dirty because he would shine the brass door knocker every time he went in and came out of his front door even though he could hardly see it.

Another thing he used to do was throw a coin into the air and find it behind a child’s ear. It was easier when pennies were in circulation but with decimalization in nineteen seventy one Horace had to practice his tricks with smaller coins and eventually the pound piece; Horace would always give the coin to the child at the end of the trick so decimalization made his tricks more expensive.

He would rise very early and clean out the fire place; then he would put the ashes in a special metal bin and go back in to the house and light the fire. He did this the old fashioned way with loads of newspaper, a few fire lighters, bits of wood and coal. Sometimes when the fire was burning in the grate he would throw on a few chopped logs.

Ada had the habit of sitting too close to the fire and, consequently, her legs were permanently red.

As the pipes, which came from the water boiler at the back of the fireplace, spread their heat through the walls to the bathroom upstairs and the kitchen downstairs the house got hotter; so from about eight thirty onwards the fire would blaze in the fireplace and warm the whole home.

This is when Ada would wake up.

Every one in the village knew when Ada woke up: they would hear her call to Horace:

“Lol!”

No answer – don’t forget Horace was deaf.

A little louder:

“Lol!”

That one had two syllables – Lo – ol.

Still no answer – he’s still deaf.

Now again but a little louder:

“Horace!”

Then almost at once:
”Horace.”

Horace would be sitting at the table with a magnifying glass trying to read the newspaper.

“Horace! Horace!”

Then she would lean out of bed, pick up Horace’s spare white stick and bang the floor – bang bang bang bang!

Horace would hear this; it happened every day so he would be expecting it; then he would go to the foot of the stairs and call up:

“Yes, my love.”

“I’ll have a nice cup of tea,” she would say “two slices of toast and marmalade . .”

And then she would roar:

“And don’t burn the bloody toast!”

Everybody in the cul-de-sac heard this; they heard it every day. The cul-de-sac consisted of ten houses and apart from the ends of the blocks they were joined together.

Horace and Ada had lived in the house since it was built in nineteen fifty and they had lived alone for twenty five years since their only son, Ralph, had moved to San Francisco upon his marriage to Jill, an American girl he had met on his first holiday abroad. Not only was the trip to Spain Ralph’s first holiday abroad, it was the first time any one in the cul-de-sac had ever travelled out of the country; but he never came back.