Maeve's Times (25 page)

‘Is there anything you’d like to ask?’ he said politely.

‘Might I die of a heart attack without your noticing what with being a bit on the plump side?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.

They’d notice and stop me dying of a heart attack. They had a machine that told them that sort of thing. I lay in the dark and thought about people who have much worse things and wondered how they could bear them and I thought of all the bravery in the world. And big, sad tears came down my face. The night nurse who can hear silent tears at a hundred yards came in.

‘I know you won’t believe me. I was caring about other people,’ I said.

‘I know you were, aren’t you a grand, kind thing,’ she said.

And I told her that I now understood immediately why men married their nurses and if things had been different I would propose to her there and then, and we both said wasn’t it great that I only had a silly old knee and not something awful and I went to sleep while she was talking to me.

They gave you three Valium next day to space you out and so of course I didn’t know where I was but I was very, very happy. Unfortunately what often happens is that the schedule takes longer than they think. Some operation they think is simple turns out to be long and complicated then the lovely floaty Valium wears off and you know only too well where you are. And you can’t keep asking to be topped up because that would be bad for you to tank you out of your mind.

So I remember the journey on the trolley passing ordinary people doing ordinary things. They had washed, or scrubbed I think it’s called, my right knee so much I thought it wasn’t going to survive it.

‘I must admit I don’t normally wash my knees that much,’ I said humbly in case my own native filth was responsible for all the pain and we could now call the whole thing off, and put the pain in my leg down to common dirt.

They explained that they didn’t either but this was to make it nice and sterile. Then they put gauze on it and a sort of red flag. I didn’t like the red flag.

‘Is that so he’ll know which one to do?’ I said in mounting panic, every story about people amputating the wrong limbs coming back to me in a line.

No, apparently, it was to keep it warm and sterile, they said. I wonder, but anyway it’s not something you’d fault them on. And then to be honest I really don’t remember much more. I have to rely on other people for what went on.

They say I asked the serious surgeon how old he was, which I might well have because it was something I had been speculating about. And he had said, ‘guess’ and I had guessed right, which had pleased the semi-conscious me enormously and horrified the acolytes who wouldn’t have dreamed of asking a consultant surgeon anything at all. And apparently I had forgotten all about my knee and wouldn’t listen when they tried to tell me what was wrong with it. Instead of listening I paid flowery compliments to everyone I met. ‘How very courteous of you to come in and see me,’ I said to one greatly loved sister who had been sitting there like a lamb waiting till I woke up. I used to say this to her graciously each time I woke up. She must have loved her vigil. When my other greatly loved sister came in I said it was extraordinarily courteous of her to have taken so much time off work even though this was the middle of the night and she’d had to fly home early from a conference in order to receive this level of conversation.

I had refused to allow my husband to come anywhere near me for the whole business, because he had a big broadcasting job in London that day and I couldn’t have borne to think of him sitting in the corridor not understanding nuns and holy pictures and maybe thinking that I’d snuffed it. But I made an ill-timed attempt to ring him. He had been on the phone many times and quite unlike myself now knew what was wrong with me.

‘Isn’t it great?’ he said.

‘Isn’t it great?’ I said, miffed. My voice sounded as if I had drunk an entire bottle of some spirituous liquor ten minutes previously.

‘But isn’t it great what they found?’ he said, happily determined not to be put off by this sporting drunk ready to fight with her shadow.

‘I don’t think they found anything,’ I slurred. ‘I forgot to ask.’

‘You were full of Foreign Bodies. They got them all out,’ he said happily.

‘I think Gordon is very drunk,’ I said, and hung up. Fortunately the angelic sisters got him back on the line and then I agreed to look at a jar full of ridiculous things, bits of bone, bits of cartilage, like the kind of jar a child might take home from a day on the beach.

‘They were never in my knee,’ I said. And then I looked at them with pride. Not everyone goes round carrying that kind of stuff in a knee; it reminded me of space debris. I was delighted with it, and then to be honest all was semi-oblivion for a couple of days.

I had no visitors only family and nurses so I felt safe in saying I love you to everyone who approached my bed. The paper lady was surprised but tolerant. And then came the dull bit, the bit where you think you’re well but you keel over if you get out of bed, where you ache for visitors but after five minutes the room is spinning and you want to go to sleep. And in the end the only thing you yearn for is television.

And you won’t believe this but just as I was sitting up and saying I’m going to have a whole night of telly and I won’t look at one documentary or one serious analysis, I’ll look at rubbish until they come and tuck me up, the entire television reception disappeared from the place. I joke you not – Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, we lay like mad bats in our beds, no Gaybo, no
Gone with the Wind
, no
Three Days of the Condor
that I once queued for an hour and a half in Fulham to see. I was purple with rage. Oh there were explanations, none of them made any sense to invalids. I wondered would I get a rebellion going and get us all to march on our crutches up to Phoenix Relays or to sister somebody and beat them all about the heads. You have no idea how awful it is lying there when you think you’re going to have
Remington Steele
and instead you have your own thoughts. A fearsome fury descended on me and I staggered out of bed and tried to push the television out into the corridor. A nun tried to restrain me. She had been explaining yet again why the hospital had been five days without television. I wouldn’t listen.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, filled with this new excessive politeness which seems to have been injected with the anaesthetic. ‘I am moving this out to the corridor; if I do not have a room with a television, why do we keep up the pretence that I have?’

They told me people would fall over it in the corridor so instead I hung my dressing gown over it and went to sleep in a monstrous sulk.

I started to walk round the room. My leg was nearly straight. I had a frightening series of encounters with what calls itself the physiotherapy department but is actually a troupe of circus trapeze artists and acrobats who got stranded in Vincent’s. They think you can lift your heel while you keep the back of your knee flat on the bed or the ground. Try it. No one can do it. They can do it of course because they are all the Flying Firenzes or something in real life and are just doing physio as a power trip. They also were one nicer than the other … and in the days when I was like a weasel with no television and no concentration, I couldn’t even finish the
Evening Herald
… I couldn’t find a fault with a physio. And then they said I could go.

I had heard awful stories that the bill was pinned by a dagger to your chest when you woke up from the operation but this was not so. It wasn’t mentioned until the last day and delivered discreetly. And the nurses of the Third Floor all came and said goodbye and lyingly told Gordon that I had been as good as gold, which he didn’t believe for two seconds, and in an odd way I knew I’d miss them, and I hoped whoever would be sleeping in my room that night would get well and strong like I did. And I cried to think of the people who hadn’t been as lucky as I was with just Foreign Bodies.

Then I cheered up again and was the life and soul of the car until I saw Dalkey, when I started to bawl again, and most people there must think I have a wretchedly unhappy home life.

And then I came back to London which is where I am meant to be living though as people often say to me you’d never know it. And I asked Aer Lingus would they mind me having a wheelchair because that’s a long haul on a weak leg uphill when you get off the lurching bus. They said there was no problem, and honestly, not that I’d wish a day’s illness or incapacity on anyone, a wheelchair is your only man at an airport.

First a car into the gate, not a lurching bus, and then a great fellow called Joe who was from Limerick and off we went. Joe said that he’d have to take a bit of a run at the ramp if I didn’t mind. Mind? I adored it. Imagine racing up past executives and eager, earnest walkers. I was crazed with power. I waved like the Queen Mother at everyone I knew and everyone I didn’t, the latter being much the larger percentage. In fact I would have happily done a tour of all the terminals but the luggage arrived and Joe wheeled me to a taxi and Gordon packed in all the unread books and the typewriter and the tomes of evergreens and
The Art of Calligraphy
and soon we were home.

You know when you listen to hospital requests the way all the messages seem to be a bit samey, the thanks is so fulsome and it’s always said in exactly the same words. Now I know why. There are no other words to express the relief and gratitude and amazement at the skill and kindness of people who were total strangers a couple of weeks ago, people who will hold your hand in the night and wash the back of your neck and root around for hours in a big silly knee full of Foreign Bodies. I hope they get satisfaction in their work. I really do. Because they give it. In spades.

‘T
hey would have been more interested in the arrival of the New Beaujolais than the cruise missiles if it hadn’t been for us,’ said Laura, who has been at Greenham Common for 13 months. She spoke with tears of frustration in her eyes. The peace women have been outsmarted by the US Starlifters, which touched down while the protesters were either asleep or at the other side of the airfield.

The first missiles had arrived just before nine a.m. on Monday when the women were leaving their little tents to organise breakfast. Yesterday had been widely rumoured as Arrival Day and the women had been planning a serious rehearsal of what form their protest would take. So it was with disbelief and horror that they realised about noon that the long crates which had been slid out of the back of the Starlifter had been taken under heavy guard straight to the nuclear shelters. In fact, Cruise had arrived while they slept.

Trying desperately to rally, the women insisted that the missiles might be in the base but they would never come out. Greenham is intended to be only a storage depot for cruise missiles and they could not be fired from there, claim the women. The plans to settle the missiles in various other parts of the British countryside will now be the main focus of their attention.

‘We could never have stopped planes and helicopters,’ said Lynn Jones, a long-time resident. ‘But we are not going to let them travel down our roads.’

Their candlelit vigil on Monday night was joined by many more supporters and when yesterday dawned cold and wet, the women were ready but on the wrong side of the airfield. This time the Galaxy aircraft and another Starlifter flew in accompanied by US military helicopters and guarded by British Army forces on the ground. Objects covered in tarpaulin and believed to be the actual warheads for the missiles were unloaded swiftly. Suddenly the singing and protesting women hundreds of yards away realised what was happening and ran for that corner of the fence, but too late to see the actual unloading of the weapons for which they have been waiting for over two years.

Two of the women who have been at Greenham since the beginning were sobbing openly. The two long winters, the lost springs and summers seemed to be in vain. They stood looking emptily from afar at the now unloaded planes. Their misery was like a long howl in the November afternoon.

But others reassured them and gradually got their spirits up again. So the missiles were in, but how could they get out? How could they get to their destinations if there was a massive campaign of civil disobedience? Suppose you had thousands of private cars blocking the cruise convoys? Suppose you had hundreds of pedestrians on the zebra crossings? Suppose even that you dug up the roads? It might be a crime of sorts digging up the roads with pneumatic drills, but it wasn’t killing people or blowing them to Kingdom Come.

Arms linked, tears dried, they rallied. They told the press that they were still winning because they had brought the matter to the front of people’s minds, and kept it there. The polls showed many more people objecting to the missiles now than there were in June during the election campaign. Even those who were for the missiles were jumpy about who had authority to fire them.

‘Ronald Reagan played into our hands by being such a silly twit about Grenada,’ said one tired, debby-looking girl, trying to wrest some good news from the crumbling day.

They barred the main gate again and lay down in front of it and cheered as young policemen first cautioned and then arrested over 120 of them. They don’t mind appearing in court over and over just so long as they keep it all at the front of people’s minds.

‘At least they didn’t come quietly,’ said the peace women proudly as they settled down to guard the few possessions of their colleagues, who had gone off in the dark under arrest but also under the camera lights of television crews from all over the world.

T
he only useful advice I ever got about writing was to write as you talk. I talk a bit too quickly and certainly too much, so that’s the way I write as well. I don’t know how it works for silent, thoughtful people who only speak when they have something to say. I imagine it should work rather well. Whatever they write would be worth reading. This is not artistic or literary advice, it is practical and down-to-earth … and if you are having difficulty beginning something … an article, a short story, a novel or a play … ask yourself, ‘What am I trying to say?’ Then say it aloud and nine times out of 10 you’ll have your first sentence. And once your first sentence is written down in front of you it’s much, much easier to do the next one, and so on.