Pilcrow (36 page)

The first time Miss Krüger held me under the water, I shut my eyes. The second time, I kept them open and tried to read her
expression
, hoping to see something recognisably human. I imagine people being bitten in half by a shark have the same need to look in the
creature’s
eyes while the jaws grind shut, simply hoping to see a feeling on that face that they can imagine sharing. Wanting the reassurance of knowing that for the shark, too, this is an emotional experience.

In this respect Miss Krüger had more to offer than a shark would. She smiled – her face was quite lively. She even wrinkled her nose in a way which on someone else I might have found adorable. I think she must have liked her victims to keep their eyes open. It made the
experience
more intense for her, though there was nothing that she let show. I say ‘her victims’ although I don’t know in a definite way that I wasn’t the only one to get that treatment in the hydrotherapy pool. But I don’t flatter myself. I wasn’t special. I didn’t talk about it, and I didn’t ask anyone else, but I’m sure my case was not isolated.

Assuming that I wasn’t singled out in the pool, then perhaps it was part of Miss Krüger’s pleasure that our group should both know and not know what was going on. The child being smiled down on in the pool, fighting the urge to thrash in a way that would do no good and be painful in its own right, could be in no doubt about the nature of what was happening. The children in the walking group, going up on pointes one after the other – ‘Ups-a-daisy, try again’ – knew how much it hurt, but not that it was the opposite of therapy. After all, the occupational therapist wasn’t feeding off our pain when she told us that remedial shoes had to hurt if they were to do us any good (I give her the benefit of the doubt). Miss Krüger was something else entirely. Individually, in the pool, we all knew we were being
tortured
. As a group, made to walk without support on chronically inflamed joints, we had no idea. Walking was the fetish and
watch-word
of the place. It always hurt. Miss Krüger’s exercises didn’t seem as obviously insane as they should have.

Physical punishment wasn’t part of the régime at CRX, but it wasn’t easy to tell. This was because the régime itself subscribed so fervently to an agenda which forced children to fit in with an
able-bodied
world at whatever cost. Pain wasn’t administered with specific intention, but it was certainly part of daily life. There was a certain amount of incompetence too, perhaps. The lady who fitted us with built-up shoes, grudgingly stuffing them with cotton wool if we went on complaining, might not have dared to say in Dr Ansell’s hearing that they were meant to hurt, but we weren’t sensitive to these
crosscurrents
of hospital culture. We didn’t know that there were two schools of thought at the time, one of them less severe.

Tough love, love so toughened as hardly to be recognisable as such, was part of the mission of the hospital from its foundation. Those
converted
Nissen huts were impregnated with a tradition of untender tending. Nancy Astor herself, mistress of Cliveden, was very much present in the early days of the hospital, in that first War. Her
speciality
was the unsympathetic handling of those, desperately scarred or damaged, who couldn’t be rallied by the conventional means. They were at death’s door. She merely held the door open and bowed
ironically
, hoping to shame them.
After you
. She thought of it as ‘gingering them up’.

It may be that the nursing staff had reservations about this approach, which strayed rather far from Nightingale principles. If so, they were hardly likely to say anything. Not only was Nancy Astor their landlady, she was their employer. Nancy and her husband Waldorf paid the wages of the Medical Officers, nurses and orderlies. They were stuck with her, this lay matron who came alive around the dying.

Her bedside routine regularly included unstrapping her watch and placing it on a patient’s bedside table. ‘I bet you this watch’, she’d say, ‘that you’ll be dead this time tomorrow. You’ve pretty much thrown in the towel. I’ll leave it with you for now – it’s a nice little watch. I don’t know if you’re hungry. Probably not. Still, they say a
condemned
man is allowed a last meal, so order anything you like from the kitchens. I’ll make sure you get it. And I’ll be back for my watch this time tomorrow.’

Her style was harder than Heel’s, her method more paradoxical. Instead of withholding permission to die, she gave it freely, so as to goad the moribund into defying her.

She lost that bet and that particular watch, but I wonder if there were some bets she won that we don’t hear so much about, disfigured amputees who couldn’t quite be gingered up the Nancy Astor way. Sometimes she went in for a refinement of the same approach, a sort of jingoistic shock therapy. Hearing from the nurses that a couple of young airmen with burns all over their faces and bodies had lost any will to live, she approached their bedsides and bent down so they could hear her, through the grease that kept the bandages from
touching
their war-cooked flesh. ‘You’re going to die,’ she said, ‘and so would I if it meant I didn’t have to go back to Canada.’ Sprinkling salt on their wounds, for their own ultimate good. ‘If you were a Yank or a Cockney or a Scot you’d live, because – unlike you – they’ve got guts.’

The mutilated boys tried to defend their country against these insults, as best they could through charred lips. In this way they were tricked into regaining the will to live, gingered up in spite of
themselves
. Brusqueness and an almost contemptuous mobilisation of the life force were part of the fabric of the place.

I was a veteran of pain by that time, as we all were, and had had various types of relationship with it. The best sort of relationship to have with pain is a contemplative one, when the pain itself is
constant
, and distance from it can be maintained by homespun
meditation
and yoga breathing. Then it’s easy to remember that pain is unreal, and the ‘I’ which burns underneath everything is made of a substance impervious to it.

At other times the pain pounced without warning, when for instance Mum was doing her Noh-drama rough-housing and my back clicked. Then the relationship was necessarily confrontational, until I could bring my thoughts under control. But this was the first time that a person had intruded on my relationship with pain. This was my first experience of pain with an agency. Pain with an agent: cruelty. Miss Krüger claimed an obscene intimacy, by watching us in our pain, and making us watch her watching. It hadn’t been cruel when Dad had gone on reading his paper when I fell over practising my walking – all he wanted was for me not to be in difficulties, and the closest he could get to that goal was refusing to acknowledge them, absenting himself from the scene. That wasn’t cruel, but this was. This was cruelty itself.

Miss Krüger’s solo pool sessions were mainly about power, and her group lessons were about pain, pain that was distilled and extracted from us for another person to consume. Ankylosed joints were being asked to take our weight without other means of support. It was no different from getting people with freshly broken ankles to walk on them. One day Geraldine bit quite deeply into her tongue, trying not to scream. The sight of blood seemed to sober Miss Krüger up. It may even have frightened her. It’s possible that she was squeamish – an odd characteristic in a sadist, but not unheard-of. Some of the blood got onto her smock, and she was very distressed by that, less by where it had come from, I suppose, than where it had got to. The violation of the proper order wasn’t blood dripping from a child’s chin but the same substance compromising a uniform, contaminating the wearer.

It may be, though, that there was a part of Miss Krüger which
didn’t
consent to her actions, and which was suddenly made aware that things had got out of hand. The dream of cruelty can become too real even for the person who is making it happen. For a while Krüger
certainly
watched herself. She eased up on us for a bit – she was almost like a real physio. And then she started all over again. It was stronger than her. It was the deepest part of her, and the part of her that did not consent to it was effectively smothered, or held under the surface of some interior pool until it stopped struggling.

In the pool Miss Krüger could almost have been modelling herself on the bogus priest in that rather scary film
Night of the Hunter
, who has love tattooed on the knuckles of one hand,
HATE
on the other. In Miss Krüger’s case the words appearing in phantom form on the knuckles of her clean, well-cared-for hands would have been
DROWN
and
SAVE
, perhaps with a question mark –
SAVE
? – to make the
symmetry
perfect. Even when she was pressing down on my chest with one hand, after all, she was continuing to support me with the other. Otherwise I would have sunk like a gasping stone. Perhaps the whole ritual was about her and not us at all. Perhaps it was more to do with frustration than cruelty. It may be that deep down she wanted to save me, and how could she do that without drowning me a bit first?

The other part of her programme, though, the agony ballet in group physiotherapy sessions – I can’t devise any nuanced reading of that. That was just a routine of atrocity.

And still we failed to realise we were being tortured. I’m not sure we ever really got the message, as a group. We never talked about it. We weren’t attuned to our own violation. In the culture of the time, the real danger to children wasn’t abuse but spoiling. The fear wasn’t that children might be cruelly treated but that they might not learn manners. They might cry themselves to sleep after torture by physio, but at least they would write proper thank-you letters, a minimum of three paragraphs long, to relatives they rarely saw, for presents they hadn’t liked.

So many aspects of our lives at CRX were painful or humiliating that it was hard to be sure when something had no other purpose. Being photographed naked by Mr Fisk four times a year, for instance, was something I dreaded, since no one had taken the time to explain what it had to do with being ill, or how those photographs ended up being pored over by the medical staff. My sense of dread wasn’t nuanced enough to make a real distinction between Mr Fisk and Miss Krüger. It’s just that Miss Krüger’s visitations happened more often.

The whole doctrine of walking at any cost had the effect of making us feel our pain was beneath notice, so it was hard to be aware of the difference when it was being actively cultivated, when we were being mined for the pain we could be made to yield. One of the defects of the prevailing wisdom that you had to be cruel to be kind was that it masked so well those who were being cruel to be cruel. It’s hard even now to draw a meaningful line between a régime of obtuse doctrinaire rehabilitation and straightforward abuse. This was a characteristic of the system which Miss Krüger shrewdly exploited. Even the
authorised
therapies prided themselves on ignoring the desires of the patient.

I can’t answer for anyone else, but it never occurred to me to grass Miss Krüger up to Heel. That wasn’t a thinkable option, it was strictly taboo in the culture of the hospital. Even if I had been tempted, the timing wasn’t right. Sister Heel was full of budgie love and budgie thoughts. Charlie’s loving beak was pouring endearments in her ear which would drown out any complaints.

I did worry, though, about Mary, and whether her short life had included episodes of torture in the pool. She had gone up on pointes with the rest of us in group sessions, but I didn’t know about the pool. I tried to remember if she had talked about Miss Krüger, but if she had I had already forgotten. I told myself that she couldn’t have sat there so happily, elaborating schemes for raffles, on the last day we spent together, if the pool had meant pain and horror to her, as it already did, partly, for me. She had a very forgiving nature, but
forgiving
Miss Krüger without making a protest would have been a crime against herself.

With a bona fide sadist on the premises, it seems odd that we had any fear left over for anyone else. It was Ivy who had first told me
stories
about Vera Cole. I’m certain that she believed what she was telling me. She was passing on fears that she shared, not infecting me with something to which she was immune.

Vera was a lady who killed children. The story always went that she’d been seen just lately in the hospital, looking through a list of names she held in her hands. She was very smartly dressed in a fur coat and wore gloves. She wasn’t heartless, it was just the opposite. She couldn’t bear to see children suffer. She wanted them to be out of their pain, and so she slit their throats and drank their blood. We all believed absolutely in Vera Cole. There were even a couple of cadet nurses who talked about her. Of course they seemed old to us, but cadet nurses were hardly older than children themselves.

I wonder if there was some tiny basis in truth behind the story. Perhaps there really was a Vera Cole in the newspapers at that time, or someone with a similar name, who’d been involved in a child’s death with a hint of mercy killing. I can imagine someone like Wendy embroidering a few nasty extra touches – she maintained, for instance, that it was boys that made Vera Cole so sad, and that she got into bed with them for a special kiss before she ended their pain. Still, I don’t think any of us had the imagination to make the whole thing up from scratch. The details about the clothes make me wonder if there isn’t an echo of Cruella de Vil from
101 Dalmatians
. The book, of course. The film hadn’t happened yet.

So we could talk for hours amongst ourselves about the danger we were in from Vera Cole, who had been seen in the WVS canteen only the other day, but we said nothing about the sadist into whose hands we were passed on a regular basis. It complicated things that Miss Krüger was German. I had been brought up with a strong
anti-Teutonic
reflex, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Dad was always saying that the only good German was a dead German, and hadn’t he done his bit in the War to produce exactly that improvement of
character
? But if Germans were inherently cruel and evil, then we
couldn’t
be surprised by Miss Krüger’s actions. In fact it seemed obvious that if a German physio had been hired, then it was to do precisely what Miss Krüger was doing.

We didn’t have the independence of mind to notice that certain things only happened when Miss Krüger was in sole charge of us, when no one else was in the physiotherapy room or the hydrotherapy pool. An outsider might have thought it significant that although we were competitive about our autograph books, as about everything else in our rather restricted world, none of us asked Miss Krüger to sign them, but that was the only ripple which showed even faintly on the surface.