The Orangeman

The burns unit at Suan Dork Hospital is not high on the list of tourist attractions, I thought as I donned my sterile robe and put on the sanitised flip-flops. Algernon lay with his right hand and leg suspended aloft. He told me in a surly manner that he had tried to put out a fire at his home (later I learned that he had, as usual, come home drunk, upset the candle - the only lighting - which set the house on fire). His visa had expired, he had no money and no friends. No, I was not to contact anyone in England . He grudgingly asked if I would go and see his woman and retrieve his passport and camera.

I went with Pat to the slimy slum where they lived behind Chang Puak. We stepped over puddles and piles of rubbish, were twice offered heroin and finally reached the half burned down bamboo shack where he lived with his woman - she would have felt at home in Billingsgate, seldom have I come across so awful a creature.

Finally Algernon agreed that I could approach his sister and ask for five hundred pounds to pay the hospital bill. Apparently he had come to Chiang Mai two months before to teach English. He had lost all his money and had since then been squeezing oranges for the juice which his woman sold in the Night Bazaar.

His mother rang me. She asked me to pay him one hundred pounds a month which she would send to me, not to him. She said that Algernon had made a complete mess of his marriage and his life. He was a very good artist, had studied at Byam Shaw School of Art (where Pim also went), and was the grandson of a former President of the Royal Academy .

The next thing I heard was that he had been arrested for selling orange juice without a work permit and with an expired visa. I went to see him in the police station and asked him what the conditions were like. He replied 'no worse than being in a dormitory at Marlborough '. He was deported to Malaysia but soon returned.

Over the ensuing months he visited me regularly to collect his allowance. He left his burned out woman and house and went to live with a deaf and dumb bar girl in Nong Hoi. After a time he could no longer stand the squalid conditions and noise - not presumably from his girl - and went back to his old dwelling. Only to find that a neighbour had rented it out to a heroin addict who had promptly died whereupon the police had burned the house down.

This was the last straw. He decided to go back to England . His mother sent money and, unregretted, he departed.