Patched Up and Celebrity Voyeurs

This follows on from A Shot of ’64 where Micky got shot in the leg in 1964.

The ambulance took Micky to St Leonard’s Hospital on Kingsland Road where he lay on a bed for a few weeks while the pieces of shot got picked out of his leg and his wound healed. He recovered well enough. A few nightmares afterwards now and again.

Friends visited Micky in hospital. I went most days. We stood or sat by his bed and smoked cigarettes. It was a ward of perhaps thirty beds in rows of fifteen along the walls on both sides of the room. During the prescribed hour for visiting, visitors would smoke cigarettes while they chatted among themselves or to the person they had come to see. Seems incredible now.

After Micky came out of hospital our group of friends were in the pub, The Edinburgh, where we went most Sunday lunchtimes. The Edinburgh at Sunday midday was busy, always busy. ‘Hello Micky, how are you, doing all right?’ People stopped by to make contact.

‘And what’s the old bill doing here trying to look inconspicuous? Must be checking up on you Micky!’ A man in a grubby white trenchcoat, standing by the wall holding a half pint to his chest. So archetypically a caricature of a policeman that he couldn’t have been really could he? Could he?

He could have been, but he might have been just a bloke, or equally likely he was a celebrity voyeur. He periodically glanced our way.

Celebrity voyeurs. Micky received a letter from the USA, addressed simply to Michael Dadd, London. It had found his home – that must have been as a result of the publicity in the newspapers. A girl saying she had seen his picture in the paper and thought he looked lovely and could they make contact. His picture had at that point never been in the paper, but he wrote back anyway, intrigued.

The exchange of letters became increasingly suggestive and obscene; expletives and sexual innuendo, from innuendo to outright invitation, until Micky stopped the correspondence. I think it was his dad, Lenny, who gently but firmly suggested that it was not wise to continue. And was it really a girl? Could have been. Though probably not, probably the pre-social-media version of a troll, stalker, or groomer.

You have to be so careful, when your name gets in the papers. And at the time we were so much less clued up to this than many would be now. But good old Lenny. Always had his head screwed on, did Lenny, and still does, in 2015 still alert in his nineties.

Dave