Green View

Old Bill ambled into the lounge of the Green View old folks' home.
Not the old bill; an old man. Called Bill. He was a retired policeman,
and that was how his name changed from William around his sixty-fifth
birthday, but this is incidental. It's trivial. It's extremely small
fry. The lounge was pretty good for a place like Green View: the chairs
were plush, not fluid-proof; the view was green, not grey; and the
biscuits were chocolate, if you wanted it, instead of plain old
digestive. Old Bill was happy enough there. His wife had died seven
years ago, but he'd got over that and got into Playboy. His room was
comfortable, the carers were pretty, he was fit enough for his age, and
he had a few friends. He wandered over to one of the free seats.

"Alright, Ivy?"

"Can't complain, Bill."

"No, you never do, do you, eh?" She didn't either. Ninety-three years
old, getting down to about four and a half foot tall on account of her
dodgy back, she could hardly move from her room. She made the journey
to the lounge every day, though. She wanted company and endless cups of
tea and she was quite prepared to slog it out for twenty minutes with
her Zimmer frame to get them. An amazing woman, just very slow.

"How about you, Jean? Alright?"

Jean was not alright. She was never alright. She moaned and whinged at
everyone about her bones, her heart, her fingers, her ears, her
haircut, her hairdresser, the carers, the home, the facilities, the
weather, the youth of today, the morals of the generations of the
future, the things they put on television, the price of soap in this
day and age?

"They've put sugar in my tea. You know I don't like sugar. I told them:
milk and no sugar, but do they listen? No."

"Give it 'ere, then," said Bill, "Save me 'aving to go up and get me
own."

"Get your hands off, Bill Harrison. This is mine. You're not having
it."

"Alright, alright. Just pass us a biscuit, then, will ya?" Old Bill
raised his eyebrows at Ivy, who smiled back conspiratorially. He looked
round the room at the same familiar scenes, nodded at some of the folk
he knew best, took a bite of rich tea. And as he settled back into his
chair, cartoonish pandemonium suddenly broke out.

The round, red bell on the wall behind them kicked into action for the
first time ever, unbelievably loudly. It was joined after a second by
the sound of a distant siren in another part of the building. Ivy
jumped, Bill looked shocked, Jean adjusted her hearing aid the wrong
way, turning a trill into painful noise. Everyone knew what it meant,
and nobody knew what to do. Fire drills in Green View were, quite
simply, impractical: to get thirty old, immobile and often confused
residents out of the building in less than two minutes would be
impossible. So this was frightening. This alarm meant real, momentous,
in-your-face business. Everyone panicked, even and especially the
staff.

"Oh my God!" muttered one carer to the tea-lady before trying to retain
a calm face in public. "Get out!" she screamed. "Get out as quickly as
you can! It's a fire!"

This didn't really help to defuse the situation. Even the densest of
the residents had grasped this, and the carer's lack of composure
spread - like wildfire, ironically enough - among the OAPs. They began
to rouse themselves.

Bill was one of the first up, but he ignored the general instruction to
scarper. He was Old Bill, formerly of the old bill, and he was going to
help and direct and wait until all the women and children (there were
no children, but old clich?s die hard) had got out before him.
Chivalrous to the last, it looked very much as if this old-fashioned
steadfastness would cause him to die. "Come on, Bill!" urged a carer.
"Get out while you can." But he ignored her easily as she breezed off
to the other side of the room, offering his hand to Ivy. She was moving
as quickly as she could, but in twenty seconds had only shifted to the
edge of her seat. As Bill pulled on her arm he noticed Jean heading
towards the front door, blithely ignoring the queue of pensioners in
the other direction.

"Through the kitchen, Jean," he shouted above the noise of the bell,
"It's closer." But she wandered off independently. She knew what she
was doing; everyone else had got it wrong.

As she exited the lounge it looked like she might have had a point. A
lady who had been sitting right next to the kitchen door was having
similar problems to Ivy. She'd made it to her feet, grasped her Zimmer,
and she was off, incredibly, torturously slowly. She was in the
doorway, and no-one could get past. Two of the uniformed staff were
trying to pull her along, but they didn't seem to be helping. They were
in the way, in truth, and they knew it. There was no option but to
break down and quit the job; only then could responsibility of the old
fools be relinquished.

"Sod this!" cried a young, black man who had been treated with
suspicion and racist insults for the whole three months he had been at
Green View. "No more! I'm off, and I'm not waiting for you lot to sort
yourselves out!"

"Good call," echoed his work partner, "I'm not going to die for this
place." Then she started shouting on her way towards the front door:
"Get out! Save yourselves! You've got two minutes or you're going to
burn, so it's everyone for themselves! You're spitroast, people! You're
char-grilled burgers! Don't you wish you were young again?" And she
disappeared, flushed with the impressiveness of her on-the-spot
monologue, followed swiftly by "that negro boy", as he was
affectionately referred to by most of those left behind.

Two queues formed then: some bet their lives on the hasty removal of
the Zimmer door-block, while others followed Jean and the ex-carers,
now without a caree in the world. The ringing continued, just to add to
the bewilderment, just to make it harder to think clearly.

And then the firemen burst in, wondering where the fire was. "Where's
the fire?" yelled one, new to the job and not yet tired of this lightly
comic witticism. No-one was getting anything right at Green View that
particular morning, and a bad joke was about as inappropriate as
possible.

"Not here," said Bill helpfully, but the firemen were gone; apparently
they'd already noticed. They raced around the building, dodging the
slowly escaping pensioners, splitting up into groups, searching for the
blaze that didn't seem to be anywhere. One group climbed the stairs in
a couple of energetic jumps, forgoing the lift provided for the less
mobile, and the cheeky rookie got to the top first. To his right, a
thin trail of smoke flowed along the ceiling, passing, stroking,
caressing the smoke detector which had evidently alerted the whole home
to this miasmic harassment. He traced its path back to the top of a
closed door and entered as swiftly as possible. From the corner of the
room an old lady looked round at him angrily through the wispy
fumes.

"What do you think you're doing?" she snapped. "Go back out and knock.
And who are you anyway? Eh? Well, don't just stand there; get out and
come back in when you've learned some manners."

The fireman did nothing. He stood still, stuck to the plush Green View
carpet with embarrassment, too dumbfounded to speak. Two fellow
officers poked their heads over his shoulders to see why he wasn't
moving, why the fire was still burning. They looked on at Rosemary
Robinson, dressed in only her underwear and a blanket held round her
shoulders, and shivering in the corner over a flaming waste paper bin.
"Shut that bloody door!" she said. "You're causing a draught and it's
cold enough in here already." So they did, but only after they'd
squirted the fire with an extinguisher and covered her up with an extra
duvet.

They went in search of someone to dress the goose-pimpled old crone -
some responsible, caring member of staff, someone who knew how to turn
the alarm off. But no-one seemed to be about. In five minutes of
searching, the only people they came across who were still in the
building were Ivy and Old Bill. They'd nearly made the front door, but
there wasn't any point in them carrying on, despite the still-ringing
bell. "Fire's out," the scamp informed them, "You can go back to the
lounge now." So they turned round, again infinitely slowly, and started
back towards their cold tea and biscuits. Chocolate ones after all
that, they agreed. Definitely chocolate ones.