When I was young, we never went to the doctor or the chemist to get any medicines or tablets. If any of us kids had a sore throat, or a cough, or a cold, Dad would give us a spoonful of sugar with a few drops of kerosene on it. That's all we ever got to treat a cold. Dad used kero to cure a lot of things. He put it on cuts and scrapes, too. One time he had a cut on his finger and it got infected. So he wrapped it up in a lump of kerosene-soaked rag. He sat up in bed to have a smoke and lit his pipe, but he caught this kerosene rag alight, too. He come flying out of the bedroom yelling, “I’m alight! I’m alight!” and bloody flames were shooting off his finger. I’m buggered if I know how he put it out now, 'cause we were laughing so much. He never had any pants on, just his shirt.
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