Pilcrow (37 page)

Sarah had been very kind to me after Mary died. She told me once about guardian angels, and how we all had one. She was sure that Mary had been made a guardian angel, but it would be selfish to want to know whose.

In fact if I had a guardian angel on those premises it was Sarah
herself
. She watched over me and helped me protect myself when my home-conditioned reflexes let me down. At home Mum sometimes let me have one of her favourite chocolates as a special treat. At CRX similar sweets turned up in the communal confectionery hoard. When I was asked which ones I wanted, I said, ‘I’d like some nougat, please,’ pronouncing it ‘noo-gah’. Almost before I had said it Sarah made a warning hiss and muttered urgently from the side of her mouth, ‘You say
nugget
here,’ before Wendy could get wind of my
latest
poshie blunder.

As we all grew up, Wendy’s weak points became easier to notice. She was invincibly ignorant – not stupid by any means, but very badly informed. She thought, for instance, that the sun was only as big as it looked. Which meant it was as big as a farthing. I knew from Arthur Mee’s book that the sun was 93 million miles away, and I made my case in the strongest terms. I also moved a coin away from her and asked how big it looked now.

Wendy didn’t exactly cave in, but she changed her story. She
maintained
that you couldn’t possibly see something that was so far off, but she did allow the sun a little discreet expansion. The sun was now as big as Ward Two – not Ward One, but as big as Ward Two. Which was, admittedly, the larger of the two wards. But not of cosmic dimensions. I wished that I could bring
The World We Live In
into the ward, to have Arthur Mee back me up, but I didn’t trust anyone, patients or nurses, with anything precious.

Sex was another area of intellectual vulnerability for Wendy. Wendy was adamant that when a lady had a baby it came out of her belly button. There was consistency to her theory, since she thought a man made a baby by putting his willy ‘in a lady’s belly button’ in the first place, but I had an eloquent supporter on my side. I didn’t even need to go into detail, because Sarah Morrison had a book. Muzzie must have been very advanced to supply such a thing. Sarah didn’t contradict Wendy directly, she was too politic for that. Instead she just read aloud from her book: ‘When humans mate, they lie on their sides facing each other …’ Funny that there was no leeway in her book for missionaries and their positions.

It was sweet enough that Wendy was too dim to know about tailies and pockets. Even better that the street arab of the ward, our resident guttersnipe, had fallen back on the word ‘lady’. She went all posh
herself
, when she was threatened and flustered.

What would life have been like if Wendy had been better informed about the universe and the marriage bed, if there hadn’t been a
necessary
limit to her tyranny? It was a question that used to haunt me, my scaled-down equivalent of the one that could still make people of my parents’ generation shiver: what if Hitler hadn’t attacked Russia?

I also wondered from time to time what life at CRX would have been like without Sarah. One day she told me that she was
unfortunately
unable to propose to me, since that task fell to the man. I immediately proposed, and she accepted. Sarah told Muzzie, I broke the news to Mum and everybody was delighted. I held Sarah’s hand and Muzzie and Mum, surprisingly emotional, gave each other a hug and a kiss. When I went to do the same to Sarah she said, blushing slightly, ‘We mustn’t get any closer than this until the day.’ Muzzie and Mum clapped their hands and burst out in peals of laughter. I didn’t quite know why.

Sarah and I would have our own house, made a bit smaller just for us – but not too small, so our parents and other visitors wouldn’t bump their heads. Sarah could develop her talent for charity work, and we would work away like beavers for the PDSA (not the RSPCA). We would probably form our own Hive. Then I’d have a much better chance of getting a proper mention in the
Busy Bee News
, though my resentment of Sarah’s greater success in such matters had evaporated long ago.

I could just see it. There we would be in our own sweet little house, and organising a Grand Fête. I would be phoning up design firms and explaining to the manager, for the sixth time that morning, exactly what a circumflex was (a recent discovery of my own).

‘Think of it as a word meaning F-E-S-T-I-I-I-I-I-V-I-T-Y,’ I explained, tired but delighted I’d learned to put a warble into the word to bring it to life. ‘It used to be “Feste”, but that’s not too easy to say so they dropped the awkward “s”. The circumflex is just a reminder that it used to be there.’

‘Well, now you put it that way, Guv,’ the design manager would say, ‘I think I shall remember the word “Fête” for the rest of my life. The way you put it, Sir, seems to make it stick in my mind somehow. Wish I’d ’ad a teacher like you when I was a kid, Sir.’

During all this Sarah would be answering the phone on the other line. I’d spotted that Heel had two phones in her office and coveted this nerve centre of modern communications. To the caller she’d say: ‘Just one moment please, I shall have to ask my husband,’ and then to me, putting her hand over the mouthpiece, ‘M’dear …’ (I would have quickly weaned her off such gooeyness as ‘Darling’), ‘It’s Mr Millthorpe from Cookham Dean. Submissions for stalls closed
yesterday
, of course, but he has a family of performing voles – in fact a whole vole vaudeville, or so it seems.’

I would make a delighted face and give a thumbs-up, as this was just what I had been looking for, but then I would change it to a frown and make a wavy signal with my hand instead. Sarah,
experienced
in our business and perfectly attuned to my little ways, would take the cue and say, ‘Well, I’m afraid your application is in late, Sir, and we are absolutely chock-a-blocko, but I’ve put in a word with my husband and he
thinks
he can manage to squeeze you in somehow, even if he has to stay up all night working out the details.’ I would yawn at the very thought of it, and then (yawns being so very
contagious
) Sarah would yawn too, apologising to the grateful caller as she signed off with, ‘We’ll see you on the day.’ I would remind her about the importance of proper supervision for the queues. Mum had once seen Ken Dodd jump the queue for the fortune teller at a CRX fête. She sometimes laughed at his jokes even after that, but lost all respect for him as a person.

Sarah and I would soon work out that all this taily stuff really
wasn’t
practical or necessary. Dad had shown me books about the animal kingdom, and I had learned that there were methods of carrying on the species much more appealing to me personally than putting tailies in ladies’ holes. Newts, for instance, simply swam up-stream of their ladies and dropped off a parcel for them to collect! I wanted the physical side of marriage to be run on a similar, postal basis, otherwise I wouldn’t have any part of it.

Our beds would be close enough for us to hold hands before going to sleep. For babies we had plenty of options. By the time we were grown up, everybody would probably be doing it all by packages and parcels. Besides, Mary had become an angel by now, and she would help us. She was far above feelings of jealousy and being left out. She would probably be a senior angel by then, so we were well connected. We would be high on the waiting list.

All I had to do to link up with this marvellous future was to
survive
my solo sessions in the pool with Miss Krüger. I was scared, of course, though there were weeks when nothing happened – either because she was adding psychological torture to the mix, until I was almost longing for the drowning to start, so that it would be over for the week and I could think of something else, or because there were other staff around and she couldn’t get up to her tricks. I had enough sense to know that she was risking her job, German or no German, if she actually drowned someone.

Then suddenly, from one day to the next, Miss Krüger was gone, and she didn’t even drown anybody! Gone under a cloud, a pink fluffy angora cloud, disgrace raining down on her head. It wasn’t her
perversion
that got her dismissed, the sessions of ankylosis ballet when no one else was around, the drowning therapy in the pool. It was
pilfering
that was her downfall. She had stolen three balls of pink angora wool from another nurse. They were found in her locker. And she
didn’t
even knit! So perhaps it was simple spite. If she’d stuck with sadism and not been tempted by spite, she would have been more secure. She would have kept her position.

I suppose it’s possible that the theft was only a pretext for
dismissing
her, to prevent uglier things coming to light, and the real reason was some cruelty that had been witnessed or reported. If so I think even in the ’fifties we’d have been asked about her ideas of treatment. What she’d done. Unless the principle of Least Said Soonest Mended which ruled our house so fiercely held sway on the ward also. And perhaps in this case it actually was for the best. I was very happy to know that I would never see Miss Krüger again.

There were weeks now when the phantom school’s existence within the hospital was almost continuous, weeks when that shy woodland creature hiding in the buildings seemed tame enough to come and eat out of my hand. The headmaster, Mr Turpin, known of course as Turps or Old Turpentine, began to take a closer interest in me.

I loved the smell of turpentine, and a little of that tenderness rubbed off on Mr Turpin. When Sarah did oil painting by numbers, she thinned her paints with turpentine even though everyone said you shouldn’t do that.

When he first met me Mr Turpin said doubtfully, ‘I suppose he might earn a living as some sort of clerk.’ It’s true I had a little
movement
in the elbow of my writing arm, but it was hardly something I wanted to do for eight hours a day. He said it before he had seen my hand-writing – there were only smudgy dashes where the letters should have been. ‘It’s a shame you can’t be a doctor,’ he said, rather insensitively, ‘your hand-writing would be perfect for that.’ Turps must have seen my wounded expression, because he brought in an art teacher from Ward Three, who let me be as smudgy as I liked.

She gave me a brush and some water-colours and said to try and draw a cornfield. When I’d finished, the teacher said, ‘Your painting is very like van Gogh, John!’ which made me very happy. As Art
progressed
, she gently gave me a few tips. She got me to look out of the window and see if I could spot any straight lines. ‘The moment you see any straight lines in nature, John,’ she said, ‘be sure to let me know.’ That was tactful. She suggested I watched her paint a bit, just to get a few ideas, and I lapped it all up. Two weeks later, when I’d finished another painting, she put it alongside the ‘van Gogh’ and said, ‘See how much better the new one is, John!’

When I looked at them both, the improvement was very
noticeable
. In fact the first one was awful, but my teacher hadn’t said so. She had used words of encouragement and helped me climb out of my own mess. This enlightened style of teaching was entirely new to me. There’s an old proverb that goes, ‘The harvest called learning requires the rain called tears.’ My art teacher at CRX gave me my first
indication
that the sun might get a look in from time to time.

Mr Turpin must have seen some potential for study in me. He taught me English, managing to get through the barrier of my
childishness
. His biggest challenge came the day he said, ‘Today we’re going to do some poetry.’ He gave me a book and said we were going to read ‘To Autumn’ by someone called John Keats. He’d got as far as the first two lines before I collapsed into laughter. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ he read, ‘Close bosom friend of the
maturing
sun’. I just howled. Oh what a lovely writer John Keats must have been. Bosoms bosoms bosoms. And how grown-up Mr Turpin was to be able to say ‘bosom’ without laughing.

Mr Turpin looked at me kindly and smiled. I said, ‘Is it a poem about BOSOMS, sir?’ and collapsed back into my laughter. Even before I’d come to CRX I’d known that ‘bosom’ was a real word and also a rude one, though the home word we used was ‘boozzie’. Turpin explained that ‘bosom’ was a word of many meanings. He didn’t make the mistake of any actual reference to biology. I think he repeated bosom-bosom-bosom many times in an attempt to lull me into being bored with the word, but it made no difference. It was just as funny every time. Eventually he said we’d move on, and the rest of ‘To Autumn’ got rather more of my attention than the opening lines.

I was almost totally blind to the lost songs of spring, although I thought the barrèd clouds blooming the soft dying day were great, since I learned from Turps about how you could use accents in a word to make another syllable. I decided that accents and funny letters would become a speciality for me from then on. Deep down my
pleasure
was more typographical than literary.

At home I would walk around the house saying
bosom bosom bosom
, cunningly incorporating the word into proper sentences, to see if
anyone
in the family could keep a straight face. As it happened, Mum wanted a word with me on a very similar subject. She told me that Muzzie was going to have an operation because her bosom had grown far too big. The phrase ‘Muzzie’s boozzie’ was full of giggly music, but I soon understood that this was a serious thing. I tried to pass the word to Muzzie that I couldn’t see anything wrong with her boozzie. In fact I liked it. It made her into a lovely pillowy sort of mum for Sarah, while my Mum was more a straight-up-and-down sort of mum. Muzzie was like a great walking cuddle, and I was sad that she wanted an operation to take away something that was so much part of her, as far as I was concerned.

Life was very fine with Miss Krüger gone, until we were told that her replacement was coming. I had a dreadful thought. Maybe the new one would be German too. I had to know. I asked Heel, because I knew she would tell me the truth, and she said, ‘As a matter of fact she is, John. Miss Schmidt. Why do you ask?’

Then the sun was altogether hidden, and I went into a decline which mystified those who had charge of me. There was no one to connect my withdrawal with the impending arrival of a new
pain-choreographer
. The new physio would be a Miss Krüger with fresh tricks, that’s all. I knew it. Only this one would be smart enough to keep her thieving mitts off other people’s knitting supplies, and she’d make us dance as we’d never danced before.

I had a week of misery, unable to eat or tell anyone what the
matter
was. I was a perky little bird in the normal run of things, but the news knocked me right off my perch and I stopped singing. Also
eating
. On the ward if you didn’t open your bowels, you’d have to take Senokot, but if you didn’t eat you were just told not to be so fussy.

The day of my first session with Miss Schmidt I was back with the old Miss Krüger-pool feeling – let’s get this over with. I heard her before I saw her, because she was wearing clogs, and Mum said only people from Yorkshire wore clogs, so my first question was, ‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ even though I was fairly sure Yorkshire wasn’t in Germany, and she burst out laughing.

Within ten minutes of meeting her I was singing again. She was a jolt of joy and a living delight. Apart from anything else, she did
massage
. It was Heaven. My body wasn’t exactly being pampered, but it was being worked on in a respectful way. It was being talked to, not punished or even lectured for its failure to coöperate. Miss Schmidt started me on a whole series of love affairs. One of them was with
massage
, and another was with the language she spoke. She would
chatter
in German while she kneaded subtly away. It sounded lovely, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She said, ‘
Machst du mir Kuh Augen?
’ ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. She wouldn’t translate what she had said until I had repeated it back to her and got it by heart, and then she told me it meant, ‘Are you making at me cows’ eyes?’ Then I understood, although I told her that in English we said sheep’s eyes.

In German the look of love seems to be bovine rather than ovine. Neither image flatters the love-struck. Of course I was making cows’ eyes, sheep’s eyes, at her – take your pick. I looked at her the same way Sister Heel looked at the budgie who made life worth living, ray of feathered sunshine. If I had been Charlie I would have been displaying the posture I had taught Heel to recognise: head plumage standing up, side plumage fanned out. Eyes closed to slits. Happiness in full feather.

I had so many reasons to be thrilled and goggling. Because Miss Schmidt had a lovely clear complexion, because her hands knew how to talk to my body in a way that wasn’t any sort of scolding, because she was German and even so she wasn’t holding my head beneath the surface of the hydrotherapy pool.

I got up the nerve to ask her what her first name was. It was Gisela. She let me call her that. Adults letting children call them by their first names wasn’t common in those days anywhere. In hospitals it was as rare as undercooked vegetables.

On our second or third session, Gisela starting reciting something with a soothing, tantalising sound and rhythm. I asked her what it was. It is a poem. A nursery rhyme. And I said: ‘Teach me please!’ What I meant was for her to tell me what the poem meant, but again she did something much better. First she taught me the poem as pure sound. My favourite part sounded like ‘Gink a line’. Only later did she supply the meaning, and by then the German words had put down little radicles of their own. They had begun to be rooted. Once again it turned out that medical staff had lessons of their own to teach.

The poem went:

The meaning, when she told me, was something like:

She couldn’t have chosen a more illuminating text. I liked the image of Little Hans with his stick. I had a stick of my own, not to walk with but to point to things or nudge them towards me. Also to scratch my head where I couldn’t reach.

It became even more marvellous when Gisela explained that Hänschen was a double diminutive of John. She explained this to me with hand gestures rather than words. First she pointed at me, and said ‘Johann’. Then she put her thumb and index finger an inch apart, and said, ‘Hans’. Then she brought them so close together they were almost touching, and said, ‘Hänschen’. Hänschen was Little Johnnie. Hänschen was a Johnlet, a mini-John.