Mr Nice: an autobiography Read Online Free PDF

who were seething with hate and developing murderous intentions of their own. He has never hit me since.
    The incident did not turn me into an animal lover (though I do like cats best), but it has made me very hesitant of consciously inflicting pain on any creatures. Even cockroaches in prison cells do not have to worry for their lives (except in Louisiana). And if I do have to admit to any religion, I risk the hot flames of a Christian hell and say I’m a Buddhist, especially in Bangkok.
    Although most inhabitants of the South Wales coalfield spoke Dylan Thomas English rather than Welsh, my mother was an exception. Her mother hailed from the Druidic wilds of West Wales. For the first five years of my life, I spoke only Welsh. The next five years, I attended an English-speaking primary school in Kenfig Hill, the small Glamorganshire mining village where I was born. Apart from my sister, Linda (a few years my junior), I had just one real friend, Marty Langford, whose father not only owned the local ice-cream shop but also had won a nationwide competition for the best ice-cream. Marty and I were bright infants and most of the time could hold our own in schoolyard scraps.
    While waiting for my 11-plus results, I decided to fall ill. I was very bored with school and needed some attention and sympathy. I had previously discovered that the mercury in a regular clinical thermometer could be flicked up almost as easily as it could be flicked down. So long as no one was watching, I could decide what temperature to be. It’s true that near the thermometer’s bulb a gap in the mercury line was visible, but no one examines the end. Occasionally, I could not risk flicking it up without being caught, so I shamelessly fabricated symptoms such as sore throat, dizziness, nausea, and headache, while my temperature when I was unobserved would seemingly oscillate from just below normal to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
    Very few diseases produce roller-coaster temperature graphs. One is rather unimaginatively called undulant fever, although it is sometimes referred to as rock fever or even Gibraltar fever. It tended to occur in the tropics. Apparently St Paul had it. My father had certainly had it, unless he, too, was scamming. Although the local doctor was sceptical (he knew I was at it), he had little choice other than to agree with the medical specialists’ diagnosis that I, like Dad and St Paul, had contracted undulant fever. I was placed in an isolation ward in the nearest general hospital at Bridgend.
    This was great stuff. Dozens of confused and interested doctors, nurses, and students surrounded my bed and were incredibly kind and considerate to me. They gave me all sorts of dope and all sorts of tests. My temperature was taken several times a day, and, unbelievably, I would sometimes be left alone with a thermometer, so I could engineer another fever. I would also take sneaky looks at enormously bulky files labelled, rather unjustly, ‘Not to be Handled by the Patient’. I developed a genuine interest in medicine and an even more genuine interest in nurses. I suppose I must have had erections before, but I certainly hadn’t associated their onset with leering at women. Now I did, but I still had no idea that these sensations were intimately linked with the survival of the human species.
    After a few weeks of sex and drugs, I became bored again. I wanted to go home and play with my Meccano set. I stopped flicking up the thermometer and complained no more. Unfortunately, in those days hospital, like prison today, was much harder to get out of than to get into. My anxiety to leave the hospital bed took away my appetite. Accordingly, I was presenting the specialists with yet another symptom for them to log and ponder over. Eventually, by drinking gallons of Lucozade, my appetite returned, and I was discharged to undergo convalescence. My first scam was over.
    In South Wales, there were more pubs than chapels andmore coal mines than schools.