When I was five years old I was ‘lucky ‘to be sent you a boarding school then situated in the Phoenix Park in Dublin , an annexe to Mount Sackville the well known girls school. The place was run by a stout red faced English woman Mother Elizabeth and was run more or less on military lines with a classical education. The uniform of Blue blazer white shirt and tie ,short grey trousers and knee high grey socks black shoes was examined as often as ones knowledge of Algebra and Latin.
The nuns themselves were wrapped as I later got know mummy style layer upon layer of sacred bandages of one sort or another all white ,quite a shock for a 7 yr old having stumbled into Mother Elizabeth’s cubicle one evening on my way to the loo while she was in the process of decloaking , a such complex process that I was unnoticed ,over which they wore black billowing skirts and black billowing veils .I say billowing as I think they weren’t allowed to stop and were in nearly a state of perpetual motion going thither or praying, constant forward velocity.
Trust me when I tell you that ‘Freddie’ holds less fear for me today. Mother Elizabeth was relentless and ruthless for she truly believed that God had called on her to beat every child in the school at least once a term,On the occasions she really lost it she would pray while she beat you….. ‘Hail Holy Queen,Mother of mercy ,our life, our sweetness and our hope’,she would begin ,one boy that I recall David T she beat every morning as he wet the bed needless to say on a nightly basis after which he would be made to wash the stain out of the sheet and bring in to the laundry room. The laundry room was run by a Mother Celeste who I am reliably informed was George Lucas’s inspiration for Darth Vader( picked her out of a photo line up of nuns at Lourdes).She was also a lurker a silent lurker in the maze of grey corridors that connected the whole place up,and like Darth Vader could appear from nowhere, for a while I thought the reason you couldn’t hear her coming was that she did not wear shoes I now believe it was that she had no feet.Her eyes were black as coal and and her voice monotonic and forbidding .Among the crimes one could commit that she particularly kept watch for was that you were seen with your socks (knee high grey) down around your ankle. the punishment for this was a caning on the backs of the calves. From here comes the expression ‘Keep your socks up’ and so the beginnings of a life time habit which includes a disproportionate dislike of buying socks and so I have established a routine of buying 24 pairs at a time. normally this gives me about 2 yrs between event horizons given that 1 in 9 socks in a laundry bag dematerializes. Only the fittest and toughest socks survive to their replacement date.
About two and half years ago I started having trouble with my feet stiffness at first then pain ,pain in the bones and joints and so I hobbled off to see my G.P and after examining me declared ‘it might just be that you are getting older’ He is a good sort , I am not absolutely sure what he knows about medicine but he is very well connected to those that do and a phone call from his office can get you in front of the right man in a day or two and that’s the principal reason I go to him. So within a blink my Consultant Endocrinologist and his two lovely assistants were caressing my feet and so forth,Lab technicians worked feverishly. nothing could be found. the Endocrinologist took me off my minute dose of neo mercazole which underpinned my sanity in case it was an adverse reaction. Several visits to a chiropractor a cheerful Canadian man who eventually proclaimed ‘Beats me’ did little to help. I even found myself in front of a man in Stillorgan with several degrees in electrical engineering who wired me up to a Barberella type machine before producing several bottles of medicine which had to be stored in the dark . The eminent Gastroenterologist consulted did so without charge exclaiming ‘No idea how you ended up here’. And so the prescription for painkillers from my G.P. slid across the desk into my hand ‘Eat a little food each time you take one’ was his advice and still is three years later as he leads me to the door ,pay downstairs.
I digress ,too much twitter : ) about 10 evenings ago as I retired for bed as I was taking my socks off I noticed corrugated ridges from my ankle to below my calf ,Ho Hum ,I thought time to go for a couple of dozen as by now the 24 had become only 6 but 6 of the toughest.Momentarily I thought I heard a remembered ghostly whoosh that would signal the arrival of Darth Vader all those years ago and those black beady eyes that chilled one to the core but decided it was Bear @billionairedog having a crafty fart.
As I settled into bed I found myself thinking … I wonder could tight socks affect the circulation of the blood in any appreciable way and resolved to go sock less for a couple of days before falling asleep. Three weeks later not even a twinge of pain remains in my feet. So if you know someone who knew Darth Vader when she was only a nun ……….Pass It On……..Pass it On c 2010
