Writing for Fun
February 2019
Mr Fix It - Jeff Kebbell
I went to John Ritty’s grave a little while ago with my son, James. John Fixit Ritty had died of cancer over 50 years ago and this was the first time I had visited it. His wife and children had left him to die and all that remained was a flower bed with a dead rose bush amongst others in a row in its centre. When he had needed me I wasn’t around. I felt ashamed that I hadn’t been his friend and I wept. My son put his arm round me.
Fixit Ritty was an expert on motorbikes. When I bought a Panther 650 from the 1930s for £7 and rebuilt it, he tuned it up to nearly do the ton (100 mph). It was probably the only Panther motor bike ever to achieve that.
One day a valve spring broke and shot up into Fixit’s eye. He ended up at Moorfields where the surgeons removed the bits and gave him a glass eye – National Health brown. Fixit’s eyes were blue. As luck would have it as he was looking for a bus stop to get a bus home, a car crashed into a wall nearby and broke into pieces killing the driver. While the police and ambulance were discussing whose body it was, Fixit noticed that the driver had blue eyes like himself and remembered the surgeon saying if ever he had an eye from a man who had died recently he could replace Fixit’s eye and the transplant might work. The surgeon later went to America with his ideas and made a fortune.
Fixit went to the garage owner where the car remains had been taken. He borrowed a cup and washed it carefully, washed his hands and went over to the dead driver. In doing Ju-Jitsu for a number of years I knew how to gouge someone’s eye out and had told Mr Fixit how to, over a drink one evening. Mr Fixit, using the back of his thumb, had applied my technique and it worked and he found himself with a blue eye like the one missing and the muscle and nerve endings in the cup. Replacing his brown eye in the socket he rushed back and caught the surgeon about to go home and showed him his find.
I don’t ask you to necessarily believe this but l remembered John with the brown glass eye and later with a perfectly good blue one.
Well, the surgeon did the transplant and joined the nerve endings as best he could and a couple of days later Fixit went home with two good eyes. He told me later that the smashed car was a souped up version of his own and a little later he drove to the garage and asked if he could buy some parts from them. The garage owner said, ‘Help yourself,’ and John took the turbo-charger and carburettor and was about to leave when the owner called him over.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘the police are completely baffled by that accident the other week. They cannot understand how that man drove from Manchester to London with two glass eyes.’
I swear this story’s true.