Pilcrow (27 page)

Jim Shaeffer’s two presents from the long-ago Christmas of fear and giving (of course the candy had been scoffed in short order) were invaluable in this new setting. They provided vital cross-bracing to my identity. The gramophone sat on the cupboard next to my bed, though I was strict about when it could be used – the nurses tended to brush against it and make the needle jump. I used to adore playing Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Gambling Man’ but it tempted the staff to jive about. Some of them had such a heavy tread that they could make the needle skip just by galumphing nearby. ‘You’re not supposed to do that!’ I told them, but it didn’t do any good.

The Relide watch also enhanced my status. The boys and girls on the ward said it was ‘Illuminous’, but then the nurses called it that too. I tried for a while to correct them but it was much easier just to let them get on with being wrong. Radium was lovely because it glowed on its own. At any time of night. Staring at it during periods of sleeplessness was a great consolation.

I loved the fact that the watch was supposed to be serviced every thousand days – it was so precise and scientific an interval, but also like something out of a fairy tale. A princess might fall into a deep sleep for a thousand days, while a forest (or at least a herb garden) grew up around her. After the prescribed interval Dad took it to Maidenhead for servicing. When he brought it back I found that the dial had been replaced and I wanted to know why. Dad said it was nothing to worry about, but they’d had to change it because we weren’t allowed to use radium any more.

‘It’s just the same, chicken,’ he said, ‘it’s still your watch.’ But it wasn’t. He always called me chicken when he was being extra nice or when he felt in the wrong.

The numerals and hands on the new dial had to be charged by holding them close to a light, and even so the effect didn’t last long. You couldn’t see anything at all, later on in the night. The old dial had actually made its own light. The radium markings were a kind of mind that could think its pale-green thoughts to the very end of the darkness. The new dial was only a memory, and not a very good one. It was in decline from the moment it was charged, fully informed with light. It could dimly remember the brightness from earlier on, but only for a little while. So it wasn’t at all the same thing. In the darkest watches of the night my watch deserted me and went dark itself. I felt that some of Jim Shaeffer’s gift had been filched from me. As if Dad was jealous, and trying to spoil things somehow.

There were some aspects of the running of the ward that were sociable, and even inspired. For instance: when it was someone’s birthday there was jelly and ice cream for the whole ward, not just the lucky girl or boy, so we didn’t resent each other’s festivals.

Mum brought me squash for my locker. Though sweets must be shared, soft drinks could legitimately be hoarded. At breakfast there was a choice of cereals, so there was no direct repetition of the Weetabix trauma. In any case my taste had shifted by now to Rice Krispies. I particularly liked the three elves on the packet. I wanted to have elves like that, to keep as pets. Snap, Crackle and Pop would be useful little helpers for me, running errands and carrying
messages
, turning the pages of books. The other reason I wanted a little retinue of elves was so that I could pinch them very hard and make them cry out.

Behind the scenes Ansell must have been busy trying to solve the problem of my walking. Walking was an absolute passion and
obsession
of the establishment. In that respect also I’m sure it was of its time. Walking was more than encouraged, walking was absolutely insisted on. Not to walk qualified as a surrender to disability, a moral defect, but it was no good telling that to my joints.

One day Ansell proudly produced something that was supposed to help me with my walking. The first I heard of them was this
tremendous
clattering coming down the corridor. I thought this must be some sort of music class, a free-for-all percussion parade. What I was hearing seemed to be an unholy cross between drums and cymbals.

Then Ansell came into the ward brandishing a pair of bizarre devices. They were like sticks with tripod bases for extra stability. The effect was of very narrow pyramids with handles on the top. The tripods had an aluminium cladding which was what made all the noise, acting as a sort of amplifying chamber. Slowly it dawned on me that they weren’t percussion instruments at all but intended as part of my rehabilitation. I hated them. I wouldn’t even try them. It was bad enough being assigned the triangle or tambourine in music classes, without being made to advertise my sub-standard walking all over the premises with a one-man marching – tottering – band.

If I’d been taken to a room and quietly shown the tripods, and had their advantages explained, I might have approached them with an open mind. They had been made thin and light for my benefit, and the cladding was an ingenious way of bracing flimsy metal that would have been impossibly bendy otherwise. But when Ansell tried to show me how to use them, the din went all over the ward. I couldn’t contemplate making all that noise. Imagine what it would have been like if I had ventured with those pyramids into that quarter-mile
corridor
! I couldn’t afford having one more negative distinction being attached to me, on top of being Wally Snorts the Posh and having beautiful sucking-up manners. I’d given Wendy and her gang enough hostages already. The clanking which preceded the tall pyramids down the corridor had ruled them out as walking aids before I’d even set eyes on them.

Ansell wasn’t best pleased to have her ingenious tailor-made
John-supports
rejected out of hand, and she told me I was spoilt, which was a bit of a slap in the face. I couldn’t be expected to realise that these hateful objects were the end products of a careful design process, and were dreamed up specifically to meet my needs. Someone in a Workshop somewhere was probably very proud of his resourcefulness, and Ansell was certainly glowing with job satisfaction before I refused point blank to use those deafening devices.

I never heard that Ansell went on winter sports holidays, though of course it’s possible. We on the ward were incapable of speculating about the life of the staff when they were off the premises. I wonder if Ansell wasn’t doing a boisterous mime of skiing, using the pyramids as her poles, dashing them merrily against the lino, as she came
rejoicing
down the corridor to have her thoughtfulness turned down flat.

Ansell felt snubbed, and she snubbed me in my turn when I said I wanted the same walking aids as the others. They used things like spider legs, but she told me rather stiffly that they were too heavy for me. She was almost sulking, unlikely though that sounds. I could just about lift one of Sarah’s spider legs, and I thought that it would give my arms good exercise to try walking with them. Anyway, she
wouldn’t
let me. ‘You’re not strong enough, John,’ she said with a sigh. ‘That’s the whole point. That’s why we tried to get you something different.’

Behind the scenes she went on trying. The built-up shoes we all wore were very uncomfortable. One of the therapists who fitted them seemed to think that was as it should be. ‘If they don’t hurt they can’t be remedial, can they?’ she said. Blisters and calluses were
commonplace
. When we complained she padded them with cotton wool, entirely the wrong material for the job. In my mind I had a picture of something that would have the right effect, a sort of squashy wood which I had seen somewhere as a tile on a wall. Surely something like that could be cut to size? When I discovered, long afterward, that cork insoles were perfectly common items I was amazed all over again at the cluelessness of CRX in certain departments.

One day Ansell had my feet properly measured in every detail. She told me there was a man in Maidenhead who was going to make me a special pair of shoes which wouldn’t pinch the way the National Health ones did. They were an incredible price, but somehow she had wangled the funding. She was a very powerful woman in the
rheumatic
field.

‘What makes these shoes special?’ I asked.

‘They’re Space Shoes, John. They’re what people will wear in space. They’re designed by scientists.’

She certainly knew how to appeal to my tastes. I was going through rather a space-travel phase at the time in terms of my reading, with a particular love of the Kemlo books (
Kemlo and the Martian Ghosts, Kemlo and the Star Men
and so on). Kemlo was a boy who had been born in space, and so he didn’t need to breathe air. I tried to train myself to do without air like him, holding my breath for longer and longer periods, just as I had learned to inhale through one nostril
during
my bed-rest years. Of course this time it wasn’t rough-and-ready
pranayama
. This time it really was John being silly.

Then the Space Shoes arrived, and I hated them. They were
comfortable
all right – it wasn’t that. They were closely moulded to the foot, and gave excellent support. But it was like the percussion tripods all over again. The man who had designed them had forgotten that I needed to look vaguely human. I wouldn’t have minded looking like a space man, but not a space monster. I refused to wear something that looked like a puffball mushroom. Wendy would show no mercy.

Ansell tried to talk me round. She even said, ‘I can just see that space boy Kemlo wearing something like these,’ which at the time I thought was simply a lucky guess. Of course it’s more likely that she’d consulted Mary in hopes of finding a way to get me to like the horrible Space Shoes.

I wouldn’t wear them. I was adamant. ‘Sometimes, John,’ said Ansell, ‘I wonder if you really want us to help you.’ I can’t blame her. For the second time she was having to put away something that had taken a lot of thought and organisation. Since the Space Shoes had been made to my exact dimensions, they couldn’t be offered to anyone else.

All in all, it looked as though I would be exempted from the painful duty of walking. Because of the virtual immobility of my hips it was obvious an ordinary wheelchair wouldn’t help me. Instead I was issued with something called a Tan-Sad, a sort of raised baby carriage with a broad foot-plate and four fixed wheels. The manufacturers were pleased with their work, and had put a little plate on the
Tan-Sad
with their name on it, and a design of a rising sun.

The Tan-Sad was indeed the dawning of a new day for me. It
didn’t
look inviting, but it was beautifully comfortable once you were in it. There were pillows and cushions aplenty. It was semi-reclining, so I could see much more of the world than when I was horizontal. I could imagine myself lying down again by tilting my mind
backwards
, or sitting up straight by tilting it forward.

It had its draw-backs, of course. I couldn’t get into it by myself, but had to be lifted in and out. Because the wheels were fixed it couldn’t go round corners without being manhandled. It was forward or backward, take your pick, but it was certainly a step up from stretchers and trolleys.

At some stage I decided that Mary and I would be getting married. Purity was the keynote of the married state as I imagined it. I was strongly influenced by one of the songs that Miss Reid used to sing. It was called ‘Silent Worship’, and I decided it was about the sort of pure person I might marry:

Mary’s hair was more mouse than gold, but still the song seemed to fit. She was the right sort of lady. If I was ever going to have a lady, it would have to be like the lady of the song, the sort of lady who would never allow a man’s taily anywhere near her. There would be none of that taily and pocket nonsense between us, but we would be great companions and we would help people by raising money for charity.

Of course the word wasn’t really ‘earlies’. At the time I heard Miss Reid sing the song, my vocabulary was lop-sided. I knew ‘quadriceps’ and ‘blue cere’, but I didn’t know ‘alley’. I wasn’t going to put my hand up (or wave it, anyway) and ask about the ‘earlies’ with Wendy ready to pounce on any weakness, so I let God tell me what they were. They were ethereal spirits who were really really early getting up. They were so gentle and so fragile that their existence was more
precarious
than a spider’s web. They could only be heard in crepuscular morning. The song of the Earlies took place between this world and the next, between darkness and daylight.

With the exception of Mary, and possibly Sarah too, the CRX kids were too low to be able to hear the Earlies. Wendy would pass boiled sweets round after her parents visited, and then when our mouths were full she announced proudly that she’d left her bum dirty earlier on and wiped the sweets against it. How would she possibly hear the Earlies? Her ears were sealed with wicked wax.

I told Mum about my plans and she looked thoughtful. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t be better suited to Sarah?’ she asked. She wasn’t seriously weighing up Sarah as a marriage prospect. It was more that she and Sarah’s mum had struck up a friendship of their own. Sarah’s mum would come to visit driving a Volkswagen. I knew about this extraordinary car, because sometimes on her visits Sarah and I would be pushed to the end of that quarter-mile corridor to sample the delights of the WVS canteen, staffed by Mrs Carpenter of the Squashy Thumbs.