It was in all the papers. And everyone felt they knew old Vic because he was always in town with his little dog and his collecting cup. He liked a chat with anyone who was passing and you could often see him walking unsteadily from pitch to pitch. People sometimes bought him a Starbucks coffee or a Greggs sausage roll rather than put money in his pot (there was a bit of a moral dilemma around giving money in case it got spent on booze, drugs or fags. My view has long been that if drugs booze or fags are just what you need, then so be it ).
An irony was that when Vic’s funeral, which was very well attended, took place, the collection was cash only – not a sausage roll in sight – and it went to the homeless shelter where Vic spent the night when he could afford it.
Vic liked to tell stories, and often claimed he was a veteran of various heroic endeavours. Thing was, he told different stories to different people.
‘He told me he was wounded in Afghanistan and lost his foot there’ the woman next to me in the church told me at Vic’s funeral.
‘Oh, I thought he was injured in the line of police duty’, the man behind us contributed
Amidst anecdote and speculation, it was the vicar in charge of the funeral who put us right. In his short address he told the congregation that Vic had once been a gardener, working for the council. He was badly injured by a lawnmower and the foot in question became infected. A decision to amputate was taken and Vic was prepped for surgery. When he came round, post-surgery, it became abundantly clear that the wrong foot had been removed.
Vic was rightly upset, but found comfort in the fact that the infected foot showed signs of healing. Equipped with a prosthetic foot, he discharged himself from hospital and started to learn to stand on his own one foot.
The vicar was fulsome in his praise of Vic’s volunteering work. He had apparently helped out at the church food bank and lunch club. And he was a great storyteller with children whilst their parents had a short rest from them. What a great, all round good bloke. Even his little dog had been rescued from a negligent owner and thrived on its sausage roll diet until its sad demise.
Outside the church there was considerable unrest.
‘Why didn’t he get compensation for the medical mistake with his foot?’
‘The surgeon should be struck off for that’.
‘Why didn’t the Council find him suitable housing?’
‘Did nobody care about him?’
It seemed that a good number of people cared about Vic.
Likely folk were voicing their own expectations in the same circumstances.
He lived the life he chose to live and made the best of a distressing medical error, seemingly without blame or rancour, leaving a tenner from his ‘earning’ to the lunch club.
