sausages

CHAPTER 23

SAUSAGES

FLAT#2

It was a Saturday morning, I had been in work until mid-day, so I popped into Bridgend before I intended going home, Bridgend was in the opposite direction from where i lived in Pontycmmer, but I needed to kill sometime before I went down to Wick and then onto the plough later.

I arrived in Bridgend and pulled the bike up behind the back of Wobble and Fat Mike’s flat in Nolton street and parked the bike up near the bike workshop where PJ and Mike Keen worked behind the flat.

I called into the upstairs flat just to drop off my helmet and gloves etc, so I would not have to carry them needlessly around town.

( Photo 1) . The flat at the top of Nolton street Bridgend with the bay window overlooking the main road, the photo was taken in 2018 apart from the post office being turned into a kebab shop, not much has changed.

I knocked on the door, I could hear someone inside no-one answered, so I kept knocking and after what seemed like an age, Mike finally opened the door.

Mike said “ come in, wobbles not here, I think he is still in work “.

Mike walked off in the direction of the kitchenette area and left me standing by the door, and he said “ I’m going to make some food “ as he walked away from me.

I told him I’m not stopping and that I was going to have a wander around town for an hour or so and then I was going back home.

Mike said “ no worries, I’m starving, I’m going to see if wobbles has left any food in the fridge “.

I followed him into the kitchen area, which took around 6 steps in the small flat.

This kitchen was more of a short corridor with a cooker and a fridge with a short Formica table-top covering the top of the fridge, the kitchen looked a bit like a very small narrow box room where you would store everyday stuff you don't normally use, it had a large curtain that you could pull across the front,

if you wanted to hide it from the rest of the room, there was one small window which faced the alleyway and left little natural light in.

I was talking to mike while he was rummaging around in the fridge, there was not of lot choice in there and then, to his surprise he found something tucked right up out of the way at the back.

From the deep dark hidden places of the fridge mike pulled out a pack of sausages that had been open for quite a while and by the looks of them they had seen better days.

I was about to leave and head down town when I noticed the sausages in mikes hand.

( Photo 2 ) . Mike sitting on my Honda CB 550 with John Hawkins standing next to him with Wobble in the background, the photo was taken in 1980 behind the flat in Nolton street.

I said “ mike, you can't eat them, they are not supposed to look that colour, and they all have white furry stuff all over them “.

Mike said “ I’m going to eat them “ and then he proceeded to wash them under the cold tap.

I said mike “ you can't eat them, you’ll have food poisoning, they will make you ill “.

Half the sausages were a totally different colour to the other half, one side were a pinky colour, the other half were like a pastel red shade.

Mike said “ their ok, they don't smell that bad “ and then he went to bite the end off one of the raw sausages.

I said “ for fuck’s sake they are raw, you can't eat them looking like that “, as I said this, I reached out my hand to stop him putting the raw discoloured sausage in his mouth.

To be honest, they did look a lot better after he had washed off the white fury stuff.

Mike said “ Frog, I’m hungry, I’m going to eat them, I’ve got no money to buy any food, they will have to do “.

Not that anyone realised it at the time, but mike was in a dark place, he had not long been made redundant from where he worked at Brog Warner on the Kenfig Industrial Estate.

He did have a redundancy payment which he used up very quickly.

Mike had gotten into the habit of after he was made redundant to ride down to the little Chef Café on the Porthcawl road, just outside laleston village on his Honda CB 550 and buying a cooked breakfast.

The little chef café was a roadside café on the road to Porthcawl there he would buy a full breakfast every morning and at most times this would last him all day until the late evening and then if he was hungry he would buy a Chinese takeaway or pie and chips down at the local fish and chip shop the Ranch, also in the evening he would buy and drink a bottle of rum, his drink was normally a large 1 LTR bottle of Tropicana White Rum which he would wash the food down with, doing this every day with no other income, his money soon disappeared, he also had to find his share of the rent for the flat.

So now, he was living from day to day, and I’m sorry to say we were all to busy to notice at the time.

Mike was a private person and none of us back then would have even realised that mike was getting depressed, not that we knew the signs or even knew there was such a thing.

You have to remember this was the 1980s all we did was ride bikes, mental health never came up in anything we did back then, to us anyone who was referred to has having mental health problems was someone who ended up in Glanrhyd mental hospital.

We didn’t know any better.

( Photo 3 ) . The Ranch, Fish and Chip Shop Nolton street Bridgend, this was basically Mikes and Wobbles kitchen, they bought more food from here then they did in any supermarket.

If you were feeling down or sad, you were feeling down or sad, nothing less and nothing more, we all have our ups and downs in our lives where things are not going as we think they should and this does make you feel sad and are not the best times in your life, let's face it, we have all been there for some reason, but there are many levels to sadness and I think Mike was deeply sad, but looking back on how mike behaved for a short period of time, it was more than just feeling low and feeling sorry for himself.

While mike was off work his lifestyle changed dramatically from having an everyday routine of getting up for work and partying on the weekend and from seeing his friends down the pub in the evenings to being tired from working all day.

After leaving his job and spending all his money, mike just woke up at around mid-day, then sat around for the rest of the day and then went to bed again, this routine was repeated every day.

We all worked, some of us had day jobs, others like myself, Wobble and Brian had shift work, so apart from weekends and maybe a couple of nights in the week no-one really seen each other, but this is how it was then and maybe it's no different now, everyone is always to busy with their own lives to notice change’s in other peoples lives.

It is very surprising how your life can alter with only one simple change in your everyday routine, mike losing his job turned his life upside down.

There was suddenly a gap in mikes life that he had not seen coming, this was most likely why he went down to the little chef café just to see someone in the daytime.

i don't know this for sure.

This is me just guessing.

i never had a conversation with mike about how he was feeling, things like heart-to-heart chats on how you are feeling today, never happened with any of us, we got on with things that happened in our life’s, it was how it was, it must have been very quiet on his own in the flat in the daytime and maybe this gave him too much time to think.

And anyway most people I knew back then would have be regarded as nuts or mental, odd behavior was a normal everyday thing, you had to be there to really understand, but some of the stuff we got up too was without doubt very questionable and would have looked very odd to the average citizen of Wales, if you don't believe me you should have ridden with them and witnessed it yourself, and you would know what i mean, maybe the drugs didn't help.

But, I’m no expert and that is just my opinion.

There was another time that makes me feel that mike was in a dark place, I called at the flat just like I did on a regular basis and the flat door was unlocked and slightly ajar, I walked straight in calling out hello, and mike was sitting on the settee with a razor blade in his hand.

I looked at him, I could only see the back of his head so i walked up to him, he stayed sitting not bothering to turn his head or answer me, then I noticed the razor blade in his hand I said “ what you doing with that mike “.

He answered “ I don’t know, just thinking “.

I said “ let me have the blade “.

He did not hand the blade to me, so I took the razor blade off him.

He didn’t resist.

He didn't protest in any way and then I placed it on top of one of the loudspeakers that was sitting on the mantle piece above what can be described as a fireplace.

The fireplace was more like a garden wall built inside a room, it stood around 3 foot off the floor, and ran the complete length of one wall with a small cavity at the center to put some kind of fire in at the middle to make it look like a fireplace and it was painted Smurf blue.

I was not sure how to handle this situation.

So I decided to go down town and just leave mike to it, it does sound a little harsh, but that’s what I did, i didn't feel at the time that mike was going to do anything stupid, i know he had a blade in his hand and there were some red marks on his wrist where he had run the blade over his skin, but you needed to know mike and how he was with his moods, i just felt that he would not do anything stupid like actually cut his wrist, because if he was going to do it, he would have done it already.

A little later wobble came back to the flat, he had just finished an afternoon shift which he would have finished at 22:00 and mike was still sitting there where I had left him.

He had the blade that I had taken off him earlier in his hand, and he was running it along the back of his wrist, he looked at wobble and said “ it's blunt it won't cut “.

All the blade did was leave red marks across his wrist.

The razor was a scalpel blade that we used to cut out engine gaskets shapes, most of us did our own maintenance on the bikes, we only went to real trained bike mechanics only if we did not have the right tools for the job or the knowledge to fix it our self’s.

Wobble said to mike “ hang on that’s no good and gave him a brand new very sharp razor “.

He said “ here try this one “.

Mike had the old blade that I had taken off him and still held onto it.

There was a brand-new blade under the loudspeaker and wobble gave him that one to use.

Wobble knew mike was just making a point after all he had shared a flat with him for a while, and he knew mikes moods, and he knew mike would have not used it.

Wobble told me at a later date, if mike was serious about cutting his wrists he would have done it before he finished work and before he came back to the flat.

Wobble said to mike, something like “ pull your self together mike and I'll buy you a bottle of Tropicana rum tomorrow when i get paid “.

At this promise of white rum by wobble, mike left the blade on the arm of the settee and decided to go to bed, and without saying a word he simply went to bed. Well it is obvious to me now, that mike was calling for help and us being us either didn’t see it or we just ignored it, to be honest it was a long time ago and I really can’t remember why we did what we did, but it was a completely different world back then.

Well anyway mike did not use the razor, and he climbed out of his pit of despair and became the old mike we all knew again including his very dry humour.

Sometime later after this happened, wobble moved flats and had a flat down in Southerndown, a small village right on the coast just a few miles outside Bridgend, Bridgeman shared the flat with him this time and mike moved down with them at a later date.

It all ended well, which is always a good thing.

Back to the Sausages.

I said to mike “ I'll make a deal with you, you give me the sausages and I’ll buy you and me, Clark's minced pie and chips from the Ranch Chip Shop , it will only take me a few minutes”.

It was the only thing I could think of, to stop him eating the sausages.

Mike said “ if you get them right now, yes “.

I answered “ ok, I’ll get them now before I go down town “.

Mike replied “if you get them right away, you can take the sausages “.

So I took the now wet fur free sausages off him and left the flat with the decaying lumps of meat, i wrapped them up in an old Glamorgan Gazette newspaper, just to make sure he didn’t eat them while I was down at the ranch getting the food.

The ranch was only a few hundred yards down the road on the same street has the flat.

( Photo 4 ) . Mike in the flat in Nolton street Bridgend, with the blue fireplace in front of him.

As I walked down to the ranch, a flatbed lorry displaying the sign of a local builders merchant ( PAUL’S BUILDERS MERCHANTS ) drove past, so I took the opportunity to toss the sausages into the back of the moving lorry as it rumbled passed me at the side of the road.

I didn’t want to leave the sausages behind because the way Mike’s mind was working, it would not have surprised me if he had cooked and eaten them before I got back to the flat with the pie and chips .

I had to queue in the ranch, it was always busy at around lunchtime.

The chip shop was called the Ranch because they used to spread saw-dust on the floor of the waiting area at the front of the shop.

When I arrived back at the flat, we both sat in the bay window that overlooked the main road, we both had our legs dangling over the edge of the window, we watched bikers we knew pulling up outside the bike shop ( Two Wheels Service ) opposite, we were shouting and throwing chips at them and at some of the people who we didn’t know, who were walking beneath the window, they were passing under the first floor window and were easy targets, they had a couple of greasy chips bounce off their heads, it was funny when they were looking all around to see where the chips had come from, while we hid behind the curtains in the flat.

Well it was funny at the time.

I didn’t eat all my chips, mike said he would eat them later, and he wrapped them up in the paper that came with them and put them in the fridge while they were still warm.

He said, “ he will eat them later “.

I answered “ the chips are still warm, don't put them in the fridge “.

Mike` didn't say anything, he just shrugged his shoulders and put them in the fridge.

He did eat the chips three days later.

God knows what they tasted like.

He must have had a cast iron stomach, eating out of date food never seemed to make him ill in any way.

With the chips and pies finished, I popped down the town center and then went home to change out of my work clothes and I ended the night up the plough.

This was just a normal day in mikes life.

Sadly mike as now passed on a few years ago.

But, things Mike did and some of the stuff, he used to say always made me laugh.

( Photo 5 ) . Myself and Mike on the Pendine run in 1979.