Summer of Savile – Day 27: Exeunt Omnes

Cliff Richard. Colostomy bag.

Paul McCartney.  Dead.

Lady Gaga. Sausage and donut.

Marc Almond. Jizz-swelled guts.

Richard Gere. Rodent using anus as funfair.

Jimmy Savile.

.

Jimmy. Savile.

.

Talking one day, to the consultant in our casualty department at Leeds Infirmary (I’d not been doing voluntary work there long), he spoke briefly on a phone. ‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you some real tragedy.’

And so we skip the Danse Macabre.

At Stoke Mandeville hospital, when I help the lads on nights and wheel away the dead bodies from the wards of the older patients, I look down at them and wonder. What had these lovely old folks, who have just done with life, learned from it?

Let us pray they are finished learning, and these thoughts aren’t a prelude to some sort of metaphorical adult learning biology lesson at the Sir Jimmy Savile University of Post-Life.

Another case of complete misunderstanding was in a hospital mortuary.

“Now then, now then. ‘Honestly officer,’ says I, ‘as dear Jim explained the last fifty times…”

I’ve nothing against dead bodies,’ quoth the sparks, ‘it’s just that I don’t want to get inside with them.’

Quoth the (braying, cigar-stinking, straw-haired albino) raven, nevermore.

Within minutes of getting into the hospital there came a job to move a dead body from a ward to the mortuary. “I’ll do it,” says I, and set off with a colleague porter.

Rumours that he has a flashing batphone style emergency hotline straight to the mortuary admissions desk are, well, probably true.

For sure-fire confirmation of just how much Jim loves to tool around with corpses, bearing in mind how we’ve established time and again that he’d turn down a parachute on a crashing plane before he’d turn down a fuck…

To emphasize the wide variety of my happenings a husband once said he admired the work I did so much, would I like to make love to his wife of less than a year? This I declined, but at the other end of the spectrum, at a hospital I just called in at, I was asked by the short-sighted head porter if I could lay out the remains of an old man who had been burned to death and his next of kin were coming within the next hour. This job I accepted because after these years in the hospital world I am now quite good at this sort of thing.

Jimmy Savile is not a man who can do anything in half-measures, and sometimes, the Grim Reaper can’t swing that scythe quickly enough to keep up with the demand, forcing Jim to take matters into his own hands. Although the method of snuffing (Savile, in the kitchen with a libido) may be of no surprise.

To round off this, not the happiest of subjects, I once went into an old folks’ home run by the nuns. Great was the excitement and the kissing. In the middle of all this, one of the old ladies had a heart attack and took a mortal swoon in our midst. I was terribly upset and the Mother Superior, in an effort to placate me, made the quote of all time. ‘Never mind Jimmy, we were very overcrowded anyway.’

And there we have it. It’s only fitting that I leave the final words to the man himself. Dear Jim’ll, take it away.

“The House of Commons and a mortuary. In both cases I was completely innocent of any villainy but, as usual, picked up the blame.”

~ by Stuart on October 30, 2009.