Thursday, August the 19th, 2004
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Ah, the Man of Bandages was born in Ghent at the turn of the last century. His parents were impoverished but elegant. His mother had wasted her youth wandering around northern Canada looking for reindeer. His father was indecisive and crumpled, forever carrying out experiments to cross the potato with the moorhen, and failing. When the Man of Bandages was four years old, mama and papa, clutched in a passionate embrace beneath a gnarled yew, were struck by lightning and perished. The Man of Bandages spent the remainder of his childhood ferried between relatives in Europe and South America. At some point during these years, he gradually became aware of the first stirrings of his remarkable destiny.
Little else is known of the Man of Bandages until he surfaces in Totnes in 1922, sporting an unconvincing walrus moustache. A snapshot taken by Blothead of Winnipeg has been published the world over. The Man of Bandages can be seen loitering outside the post office, pallid and skeletal. In his left hand he is holding an iron hammer. He appears to be whistling. His hair is matted. Is it, as Duvalier has argued, a toupée made of wool? His clothing is cheap but serviceable. Even at this early stage, a frayed length of bandage can be seen dangling from the breast pocket of his jacket. Conspicuous by its absence from the photograph is his bicycle, which we know he had acquired by this time. Without it, the Man of Bandages is somehow incomplete, not quite the figure of legend he would later become.
Marooned on a raft in the middle of a very cold ocean, the Man of Bandages chewed a piece of coal and pondered his existence. The sky was grey, the rain poured down, and the Man of Bandages would almost certainly have frozen to death were he not wearing his home-made blubbery anorak. Later, of course, the garment was put on display in the museum at Pointy Town. But back then, the preposterous anorak with its straps, zips, chutes, pockets, twanging hoops, hinges, spindles and other festoonments kept the Man of Bandages alive. For eight months he drifted on the high seas, out of reach of the most tenacious police officer, plotting his future. This period of his life was the subject of a book by Q V Partridge, filmed in 1958 as Raft Of Hell, with Tad Brick as our hero. Brick died in mysterious circumstances the following year. He was found splayed on a lawn somewhere or other, a carton of buttermilk upended and spilled on his pantaloons.
The Man of Bandages set out for the Antarctic. He took a map, a compass, and a bag of water with which to dab at his forehead. He was deluded but indefatigable. At the coast, he built an improvised tub and had a long soak in hot water scented with cotoneaster, persimmon and henbane. He flung what coinage he still carried into the sea, muttering, muttering. He was headed south, smoking heavily, now almost covered in bandages from the neck down. He did not sleep at nights. Glazed and thinning, he had set sail for the Antarctic. His ship had eyes and ears of zinc. It ferried him to ruin.
The final years have a certain pulse, a sense of purpose, which holds a lesson for those who came after him. Holed up in a cabin in the Antarctic, the Man of Bandages shunned a world that only now was crowding round, eager for the merest glimpse of this figure of modern myth. His razor-sharp dentures tearing at raw fish through the slit in his bandaged head, the Man of Bandages spent most of his time drawing complicated diagrams. Every few years, weather stations and other outposts would report that another massive explosion had occurred somewhere out in the glacial wasteland. The Man of Bandages had found his destiny. He was snarling, jabbering, gibbering, dribbling and drooling underneath all those bandages. But ah, he was fulfilled.