A DAY IN THE LIFE DATE 1959:
It was a fairly cold year the much of it I can remember, heck was it ever warm in those places?. But then in those gulags it seemed to be always cold. We all had runny noses, anyone remember the chilblains and the way the tops of your fingers started to swell? The ringworm was fucking awful, not the fact that you had it but the solution these nuns used to come up with, and solution is the important word here as they used to fill them white ceramic buckets (remember them?) with a brown iodine solution and use a sweeping brush to scrub your body. It was awful, believe me. So much for ringworm. What about the stomach worms that used to crawl out of you anus?
You had to get a friend to help you pull them out, and you's do it for your friend too. One day I snuck into the bath house to warm my hands near the furnace, it had an aperture where the nuns would put in coal or turf or what ever. We were barred from going in there of course, it was out of bounds - - - remember that phrase? - - - we weren't barred for our safety or anything like that, this was another rule devised to dominate us as warm children are talkative children.
But I got into the bath house and was warming my hands at this furnace, remember I was only 6 years old going on seven at this time, when this fat nun came in. She screamed at me to get away and shouted at me "What are you doing here?", I answered that I was warming my hands. She replied "I'll warm your hands for you." She proceeded to place my hands into the aperature. The aperture was made of metal and when the skin on the back of my hands touched the hot metal the skin melted. The skin was like that cellophane used to wrap sandwiches as it came away from the furnace. They say that when you receive a huge shock to your system your senses shut down so that you don't feel much pain, don't believe it, I was in agony. I screamed like I never screamed before or since - - - not true that - - I still scream some nights when the nightmare of that pain impinges on my sleep.
My hands now are quite livid, particularly in cold weather, purple as a skin colour has more varieties than those forty shades of green they used to make us sing. It's a fairly cold winter this year at times and those nightmares are less and less now thank goodness.
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