20/10/2011

Confession - Put The Boot In

Dear Simon, Mother superior and listeners.

This confession is written in the hope of lifting from my shoulders a terrible weight I have carried for too many years.

It was 1979, Margaret Thatcher was coming to power and the tractor
industry was thriving. I was a young agricultural engineering attending a college which was sited in a wonderful old building which when I drove past recently, I discovered has since become an executive housing development. I think it is now at last safe to release the awful truth as all records of my existence there must have been erased.

I was one of 2 young students, each of whom were renting a room in the
house of a landlady called Mrs Winterbottom, a rather fearsome woman who
could destroy you at 50 paces with the power of her tongue. Mrs Winterbottom's biggest rule in the house was that we were NEVER, EVER, EVER EVER to come into her house (our digs, but very clearly her house, and her carpets, which we shall come to....) wearing the safety boots we had
to wear in the workshops of the college. These boots inevitably became
covered in oil and grease and would make terrible and extremely
difficult- to- remove stains on her expensive carpet. This quite
reasonable message was put clearly and with some force to me and my student peer Dan.

In those days students would sometimes have ‘liquid dinners’ in the pub
on the way home and not actually get back to their place of abode
until quite late. It was after one such evening, that I’d managed to
find the correct house I was staying in (unlike yesterday’s Confessor), found the door key and managed to stumble halfway up the stairs before I realised I still had my forbidden boots on, which were indeed soaked in oil and grease of the type used by agricultural machinery of the day.

At this stage of the evening, the call to my bed was strong, so strong
it was irresistable, and yet, even in my ‘tired condition’ from my time
in the pub, the realisation of what my actions were going to result in
were clear, as Mrs Winterbottom was going to go nuts. I stopped in my tracks, looked around, and could see an incriminating series of dark boot
prints coming up the stairs behind me to where I stood. My fate was
sealed, unless I could come up with some way to lead the evidence away
from me, otherwise I was going to be toast.

In a surprisingly quick moment given my state, and without too much reflection, I walked up to the door of Dan’s room, took off my boots and
carried them into my own room, where I enjoyed a sleepful night. I left
early the next morning for college, as I had urgent things to attend
to there, and in the process happened to avoid Mrs Winterbottom and Dan
from across the corridor.

Nursing a sore head, and with a full days’ learning about agricultural
machinery in my head, by lunch time I had forgotten all about the
previous evening and when I returned to my digs that evening I
happened to bump into Dan, who was looking visibly shocked. He had,
it seemed, received a terrible dressing down from our landlady, who’d
had to spend many hours on her knees trying to remove grease and
oil stains from her precious carpet, and had vented her full complex of pent up frustration on Dan’s return from his studies. "But what I can't
understand" said Dan, rather pathetically, and with a trace of a tear in the the corner of his eye, "Is that I didn't wear any boots yesterday, my shoes were clean and I took them off when I came in, or I think I did, but perhaps I didn't, because Mrs Winterbottom said the footprints came right up to my door".

I looked surprised, and said I hoped he would try to make REALLY sure he didn't wear boots in the future. I denied any knowledge of the event and quickly retired to my room, eager to catch up with the concept of axial flow combine harvesters.

Whilst it didn't weigh on me heavily at the time, over the years the
memory of the event has grown like a millstone around my neck, and now
some 31 years later, I have moved back to the area and the weight
is even heavier. I hereby confess and ask for forgiveness

Yours

Mark