Woody was another elderly gentleman who lived just around the corner from me. He was also a Brit in origin, proudly from the Wirral in Cheshire, a former Merchant Navy radioman from the days of WW2 and later, and more latterly worked in the paint industry.
Woody and I became friends originally because of our common British heritage. He was quite honestly something of a cantankerous old bugger but as I got to know him and his story I began to understand why he was so. Woody was one of two brothers and had a sister, His elder brother Joe had joined the Merchant Navy and had been killed in the torpedoing of a mysterious ship which it is apparent may have been carrying some secret volatile cargo off the coast of Africa during the war. Young Charles Wood Morton, then aged 16, promptly ran off to sea, lying about his age, and was himself torpedoed twice, once in the Mediterranean and once in the North Atlantic in mid winter. In the latter incident he and others were adrift in a lifeboat for 9 days before being rescued.
Some years after the war, he found himself in Calcutta and somehow met and became attached to a lady who was the daughter of a British Army General in charge of a garrison in Calcutta, probably attached to the Indian Army. He married her and they had a daughter. At some point they divorced and the daughter stayed with the Mother.
Woody ended up back in UK and left the sea and started to develop a career in the paint industry. He met a nurse who had also seen military duty in the ATS during the war. Her name was Rose and she was older than Woody. They married and I gather that they had a good life in UK as she worked nursing and he moved up in the world of paint. They had no children of their own, but at some point his daughter from his first marriage was living with them. Woody and family moved to the eastern seabord of the United States, then to Canada, then back to UK, all the time working for ICI paint division. At some point his daughter went back to her Mother and ended up living in the eastern USA, having very little contact with Woody and Rose, who themselves moved to Vancouver permanently and settled in a nice house in the West End.
Rose contracted cancer and died in the mid 1980's just after they both retired and Woody was utterly lost. He sold the house and moved into an apartment and for a long time hid out there, dealing with his sorrow.
When he was out walking, he was always dapperly dressed in Sport's Jacket and tie, polished brown shoes and neatly pressed trousers, would wave at people and say "good morning!", but he developed a local reputation of being cantankerous with people too. I began to get to know him better when we both had an interest in radio and satellite communications and he was an intinerant tinkerer with receivers and miles of wire.... I would hear that he was mad at this or that bit of equipment and so started to have him show me how these things worked, and we talked as we untangled... and thus grew a friendship.
Always interested in technology, he decided that he better get into the 20th Century before it expired and he bought himself a computer, with no idea what they did or could do, or for that matter how to access them! I became his teacher, focussing on letting him find out where the doors were and how to open them and explore behind them...which was a grand idea at first! However I quickly learned how easy it was to mess up a computer quite completely with a small application of a liberal amount of ignorance! The stories are far too many to tell, but countless times I would be summoned to "sort out this bloody machine!"
There is a limit to tolerance of this kind of repeated ineptness I suppose and it became annoying to be spending hours over at his place trying to untangle his messes, but eventually I think I caught on that it was how he got time with me. I think he found our conversations stimulating and I know that most of the time, ignoring the cantankerous nature he bore to the end, I enjoyed much of my time talking with him too.
Then one day he called me over and told me that he had met a lady. I had seen him with her a few times, sitting in the local café with her. This was his formal announcement that he was dating her! Verna was a spinster who had worked all her working life in the banking industry. She was slight to his rotundness, as quiet as a churchmouse and obviously happy to have Woody's attention. They made some trips together and spent more and more time together, but I was still "invited over to sort out the technology" a lot and Verna would remain quietly in a corner. Slowly however I managed to get Verna talking and she was friendly. I began to realise that while Woody was happy to have a girlfriend, there were times when he just wanted man company but didn't have the heart to send her home!
One time I got a call from Verna that Woody had fallen and couldn't get up, could I come over. He was heavily intoxicated on top of his many medications and was jammed in beside his bed on the floor with no room to help him up. He was in rough shape and a call to the ambulance got him lifted as I couldn't move him, but I had applied some cautionary first aid and stabilised him and got him room to breathe, his chest being pressurised by his fallen position. He spent quite a while in hospital and I visited him often. One of the nurses caught me one day on my way into the ward as he became easier to deal with and told me my Father was a real charmer with the ladies and so happy I had saved his life.....I explained that he wasn't my father, that I was just a neighbour/friend. It turned out that he was always referring to me to all concerned as "his son". I was touched. I managed use the authority of a son to insist that I remove all the booze he had been stockpiling in his place and mixing with his medications, and things seemed to settle down.
Over time Verna began to stay over at Woody's place more and more and not drive home, probably a good thing as her driving was to say the least quite scarey. She slept on the couch at Woody's place. Always on the couch. He told me "no lad, I canna get her into my bed. I've given up!"... and that is how it was with those two lovebirds. Verna, although she had her own place, slept on the couch at Woody's and she was there for months on end sometimes. Her concession was that she was allowed to bring her cat to stay with her!
Verna began to sink into early dementia, which seemed to come and go. I followed her one day driving behind her and saw her wandering all over the road. I talked to Woody about this and he was aware of the problem. Woody himself no longer drove. I was not aware of the reason, but he hadn't driven for some time. I asked him to talk to Verna about stopping driving and that conversation was in process when one morning, early on, I got a phone call from Verna. She was panicked. She had woken up on the sofa and found Woody laying on the floor beside the sofa, stone cold in his vest and underwear.
I went over there and I checked Woody and he was undeniably dead. I settled Verna down and called 911 and the entire team showed up, firemen first responders, then the life support team and they worked on Woody for what seemed like an hour. I had no idea that they are required to do that. It was obvious that he was dead. I felt awful about it because they worked hard with heart needles and drips and paddles and finally a Doctor arrived and pronounced him dead. I had been witness to all of this as had Verna. It was a very sad ending and a very traumatic day for her. I managed to get her family to come and take her to their home.
Its been over three years now since he died and I still miss Woody. Verna is still alive and seems to have stopped degrading.
But there is a postscript to Woody's story.
All along he talked about his daughter, often with some hatred. She had come to him with stories about first one thing and then another, asking for money. When he checked later he discovered that some of the stories were lies. At one time she had come to Vancouver and co-erced him into parting with a considerable amount of money to fund her education in the USA, then having the money had vanished off the scene totally again.
In his latter years he often told me some angry stories about Jane. She had written him to ask for financial help again, saying now that she had a brain tumour and needed his financial help to get surgery. He ignored her.
After Woody died I felt it was important to try to find his daughter, whose married name I did not know. I needed to tell her that her father had passed away and to send to her his family photos and the like which included many pictures of her. I found an address after much sleuthing and wrote to it. It turned out to be the address of a friend of this Jane which she had used once or twice. The news came back that Jane had died a year before Woody, of a brain tumour. He never knew. She had been married and Woody had Grandchildren he never knew about and who never knew about him. The family never told Woody his daughter was dead.
Sometimes, life is just sad.
I buried Woody's ashes beside those of his beloved Rose
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