Locks

Mum is a bit paranoid about doors.  She doesn’t like doors left open at night so she is not too happy down south when the outside door is left open in the evening to allow the cool area to circulate. There are three dogs (one looks like a scary alsation who of course isn’t) so if a stranger was to come into the garden and up the path, you would certainly know about it.

 

Towards the end of her stay in her own house in Scotland she had an extremely complicated way of locking the front door at night which involved numerous elastic bands and 4 separate locks (it was so complicated I worried about being able to get out quickly in a fire when I stayed there – especially when I was on crutches!)  This was because of ‘the boys’. She had a thing about ‘the boys’ breaking into her house, stealing from her and using her shower. (‘The boys’ was the term she used to use for my brothers when they were small but these boys were not my brothers).  

She would get herself into a state because she had to cook for ‘the boys’. She frequently called the local police to report ‘the boys’ banging on her door or wandering around the house. The police would dutifully come out, visit, check the premises and declare there to be no boys in the neighbourhood.  One time the police arrived and she had the gas rings on the cooker all on because she was cooking for ‘the boys’.  Consequently social work came and did something to the cooker so that she couldn’t operate it. The police must have got a bit fed up of being called out. This figment of her imagination was one of the symptoms of her Alzheimer’s.

The outside door in the apartment in Colombo needs to be locked (and the key hidden) to prevent mum’s escape if she is in one of those moods. The internal doors though definitely do not need to be locked. The problem with them is that if mum locks them there is no guarantee she can unlock them so in the flat Shamalee has stuffed most of the locks with wads of paper to prevent the locks working.  Unfortunately mum’s bedroom door slammed the other day because the balcony door in the bedroom was open and there was a gale blowing.  After this, the handle turned on the door but the snib did not react. It just stayed put.

This happened in the afternoon. By evening I had completely forgotten about it. I put mum to bed and went to watch some comedy on the TV. She got up to check I was still in the apartment and then went back to bed. I pulled the door to and instead of it being a bit stiff and stopping before it shut, like it usually did, it just pulled shut. Then of course I tried to open it. And then I remembered what had happened in the afternoon.  The handle just turned and nothing happened. 

I didn’t want to make a big deal of it as if she had realised she was locked in a room and I couldn’t open the door, she could have panicked.  Luckily I have a very understanding and practical landlord. He answered the phone on his road home from work and he must have heard the panic in my voice. He said he would go home, get his toolbox and come right over. By the time he came over an hour later I was a nervous wreck and mum was fast asleep. I had managed to remove two screws from the top of the handle but couldn’t budge the one at the bottom.  He and his helper managed to get the handle off easily. But they still couldn’t open the door. He fiddled about inside the lock and pulled out lots of little bits of it – it was all smashed inside – eventually the door opened.  Mum woke up to find me and two strange men in her bedroom taking the lock and handle off the door. She asked what we were doing, I told her, and she went back to sleep.  She now has neither lock nor handle on that door.

Strangely, when we came south that weekend and I went to give her a shower, I pushed her bedroom door shut – it is usually very stiff to close. It shut too and locked and I couldn’t get it open from the inside. Luckily someone was in the house and could get it opened from the outside.

I’m now waiting to lock her in the car as these things do tend to happen in threes.