Pilcrow (4 page)

A clean break was prescribed as the least distressing procedure. It avoided the heart-ache of protracted leave-takings – tears, pleading. It prevented Scenes, and Scenes never did anyone any good. Better for the children in the other beds, certainly, if Mum walked off without a word, as if she couldn’t wait to be shot of me.

There are things, though, which clean-break theory ignores. A child who imagines himself delivered into the hands of cruel strangers, for no fixed term, has an altered body chemistry. In his sleep he breathes out dismal vapour – spiritual carbon monoxide. Better for my ward-mates to have witnessed a scene of squalid sorrow, with me howling and begging Mum to stay, than to have taken into their lungs the low fog of desolation and abandonment which I exhaled that first night.

Mum tried to cheer me up. Did I like it here? No I didn’t. I wanted to go home. Children cried in the night. I didn’t like the cereal. There was only Corn Flakes for breakfast and fried bread, which I hated. Why couldn’t I go home, where there was Weetabix?

The third day she brought along some Weetabix, to give me a taste of home. A little bit of continuity between my new life and the old. When she asked a nurse for a bowl and some milk she was told that Weetabix wasn’t allowed.

Mum argued the toss and made a little headway. It was agreed that it would be all right for me to have some Weetabix just this once, but it wouldn’t be right to make a habit of it. There were other children being looked after in the hospital who didn’t have mummies to bring them in Weetabix. It wouldn’t be fair on them. There was socialism of some punitive sort evident in the hospital’s thinking about cereal.

Manor Hospital doesn’t get many marks from me, as a giver of care. Some of the procedures they subjected me to may have been medically sensible, but as no one explained anything they were humanly degrading. They kept putting swabs down my throat, looking for streptococcus, I suppose. Before the swab came the spatula. The
spatula
was horrible because it made me retch. I remember the feeling of being about to be sick, and also trying to work out how far back in my throat the spatula went to produce that hideous sensation. So I took the straw they gave me with a glass of water and practised taking it into my mouth as far as possible. When the sick feeling came I learned to overcome it. It was a sort of game. Soon it was easy.

The doctor didn’t play along, though. When he came in again, I didn’t retch, or even flinch, when he got to what had previously been the point of my gagging reflex. He gave me a funny look, as if he
didn’t
enjoy being outsmarted, and pushed the spatula further in, until he got the painful, humiliating reflex he seemed to want so much.

It was a useful discovery, that there were other factors in the world of doctors and hospitals than the welfare of the patient. However much I trained myself to accommodate his probings, this particular doctor would keep on pushing until he got the desired paroxysms. Other children on the ward gagged the moment the spatula entered their mouths, and the doctor was perfectly satisfied. If I’d had any sense I’d have done the same, from the beginning. As it was, by the time he came to scrape his swab against the back of my throat, the
tissues
were so tender it felt as if he was trying to strike a match there, to set my throat alight.

There was another doctor who came in at one point to carry out the same procedure. His hands smelled of the same soap, but they
followed
a different code. They were gentle. His voice and manner were full of love. His spatula wasn’t pushed any further than the
minimum
, and my body reacted as if it was a different organism entirely. My throat opened like a flower to his swab.

There were also bone biopsies, which no doctor could have made painless. They involved scraping the bone of the conscious patient with an instrument that had a little hook attached to it, to gouge out a sample. It’s hard to describe pain, even to compare one pain with another mentally, all you can say is pain or no pain. This was pain. The scraping was deep inside me. I cried out for ‘Suzie’ and the nurse asked, ‘Is that your sister, dear?’ No, Suzie was a straw dog, given to me by my Uncle Roy for my first birthday.

Many years later, reading accounts of tortures used on political prisoners in South America, I came across a very similar technique, which went by the grimly poetic name of ‘tickling the bone’. If I’d known that what the doctors were doing was a form of torture, though carried out in my own best interests, I might have tried
confessing
my meagre sins, crying out, ‘I ate a red Spangle that I knew was dirty! I saved up my tuppennies and did them in the bath! I wanted to see them float!’

I was as incidental to what was being done to my body as the abductees on television programmes, when aliens probe and scrape. No one is actively drilling for pain, in the hospital, on the mother ship, but it spouts from its bottomless wells. Perhaps the writers of those shows had hospital experience as infants, and are using fantasy to work through their traumas. Good luck to them. I find such things hard to watch. I find such things hard to turn off.

They stuck sharp things into my bottom and they pushed blunt ones up it. The sharp things were the needles that administered
injections
of iron, and the blunt ones were enema nozzles. I squealed as the funnel was inserted and the liquid began to flow. I remember the smell of the rubberised sheet beneath me mixed with the smell of my opened bowels. There was someone at each corner of the sheet holding it up, so as to prevent my helpless slurry from spilling onto the bed or the floor. Not quite the four angels, one at each bed-corner, that I had been encouraged to visualise in infant prayers, who were to guard me as I slept. The slurry formed a shallow pool with me at the centre. The whole event was shaming, with no explanation given. Why was I being made to go to the lavatory in bed? ‘It’s only soapy water!’ said a nurse in a rather cross tone, as if there had never been such a fuss made over nothing. And as if the exact composition of the warm liquid that was being driven into me, reversing the proper direction of travel, was something I could be expected to know. I was baffled as well as
humiliated
. Holding on was a relatively recent achievement for me, and now the right and clever thing seemed to be letting go. I just wished they’d make up their minds.

The only good thing to come out of my Manor Hospital days had nothing directly to do with medicine. From my bed I could see a chimney on one of the hospital buildings which was pouring out black smoke. It was a windy day. A gust of wind suddenly snatched the smoke and whisked it past my window. I knew I was stuck where I was, but the smoke rushing past the window produced an optical illusion – as if the whole ward was moving at speed in the opposite direction. Objectivity went on the slide, just as it does when the train next to yours starts moving, and for a while you don’t realise that your own is still waiting at the platform. I lost my bearings in a way which amounted to revelation.

This was a glimpse that stayed with me, a mystical inkling. One suggestive thing about the experience was that its materials were so humble. It wasn’t frankincense taking on a meaning beyond itself, only smoke from incinerated hospital refuse. A sense of the meaning of life can be constructed from any material however unpromising, from whatever lies to hand. Perhaps burning was a necessary aspect of the experience, from the point of view of getting my attention, since I’ve always been so attuned to combustion.

I don’t know how long they looked after me at Manor Hospital. It was long enough for Mum to bring me Suzie the straw dog
eventually
, who gave me some comfort. When I came home I was no better but I had a diagnosis attached to me: rheumatic fever. It wasn’t an uncommon condition in those days, a side-effect of streptococcus infection. Three per cent of individuals with untreated streptococcus go on to develop acute rheumatic fever, when antibodies are generated which attack the membranes in joints – the synovial linings. It was thought that I might have had streptococcus without any noticeable symptoms. So perhaps there was a reason for them to be so keen on pushing swabs down my throat.

At three I was well below the usual age of onset for the disease (six to fifteen), and the arthritic pains I was experiencing didn’t really fit the definition of ‘migratory’. They seemed pretty stubbornly resident. New areas were beginning to be inflamed, but not because old
troubles
were clearing up. There were squatters in my knees wrecking the premises, and they showed no signs of moving on. In fact somehow they were inviting their cronies to join the party, to occupy my hips and elbows, ankles, wrists and shoulders, until there was a general involvement of the joints in misery, pain and swelling.

I had my diagnosis, or rather Mum and Dad did. But diagnosis without cure or even treatment is cold comfort. There was nothing to be done for me. To be more accurate: nothing was to be done by me. I was to do nothing. In rheumatic fever it is the heart that gives
concern
. Permanent damage can be done to it. Additional strain must be avoided.

If you’re a patient who isn’t positively going to die, so that sooner or later your condition is likely to improve, then the chances are you’ll be on the receiving end of whatever treatment is currently the
fashion
. In the seventeenth century I would have been bled. In the 1950s the prevailing wisdom required no special equipment. I was simply put to bed. Bed with no supper was a punishment. Until you say you’re sorry. Bed rest till you’re better was doctor’s orders, however long it took.

My bedroom wallpaper was yellow roses. I turned my face to the wall and I stared at the yellow roses.

Every joint was swollen, and pain came in leisurely waves and
sudden
spasms, the spasms riding on the waves. I couldn’t endure the contact of the bedclothes, even a single sheet on a warm night. Mum had trained as a nurse, even if she didn’t have anything you could call a career, and she knew about things like cradles devised to take the pressure off skin that couldn’t bear to be touched. She improvised one by fetching the fire-guard and putting it over my legs. Then she draped the bedclothes over the fire-guard. It had the right curved shape, and provided a good gap above my legs. The gap had to be small enough for the volume of air underneath to be heated by my legs relatively quickly, so they didn’t get cold.

It wasn’t just the bedclothes. Even the lightest hug brought as much pain as comfort. In my chosen family, hugs were emergency measures, not for every day. I wasn’t used to them. I’d hardly
experienced
them, or seen them happen. Dad would say, ‘Cheerio, m’dear,’ in exactly the same way whether he was going out for five minutes or on a tour of duty which might last months. Hugs might just as well have been kept in the medicine cupboard, so as not to lose their
effectiveness
by over-use. They were like the little bottle of brandy that lived in the kitchen cupboard, dire treatment for shock, shocking in itself.

I kept myself mentally occupied for most of the first week in bed by playing my favourite game, which was quite an achievement, since it was ‘I Spy’. I must have driven Mum mad. It was a bare room. Apart from the wallpaper and the curtains (a design of vintage cars) there was no ornamentation to engage the mind. There was a wardrobe and a chest of drawers with a mirror on top of it, but there were only two objects in the room which could honestly be said to reward attention: a night-light in the form of a sailing ship and a miniature brass ashtray with a farthing set in the middle of it, which both lived on a bedside table. The sails of the night-light were made of a sort of primitive
plastic
that was textured like vellum – the bulb shone dimly through them. S for Ship, S for Sail. With my little eye. There was a little cabin, with a little low railing round the top. The ashtray must have been brought in from another room to tickle my visual palate, since
smoking
in a sick room was discouraged even then. I liked the little wren design on the farthing. A for ashtray, R for Wren.

I wasn’t allowed to feed myself – Mum had to do it for me. The only self-feeding I was allowed to do was drinking milk from a ‘feeder’. It was like a teapot with a spout and no top. Mum would bring it to me and put it on my chest, and then I could drink without having to get up. She would say, ‘Drink it all down, John, there’s a good boy,’ but I didn’t want to. I’d take a little sip, but that was all I wanted. For some reason I thought that if I drank from the feeder all the way to the bottom, the way I was supposed to, something terrible would happen. I didn’t have an idea of dying, but that was the
feeling
, of death as the dregs in the feeder. It was as if I was losing my trust in Mum. The feeder had milk or Horlicks in it. I didn’t like milk or Horlicks. What I wanted was what Mum drank, was tea, but I wasn’t allowed it.

Mum had a few hours’ domestic help every week. This was ‘the girl’. The girl who ‘came in’. She was ‘the girl who came in’ from the village. She was a teenager who came in and changed her smart shoes for some shabby ones that were all worn down at the back, then put on a housedress that must have been her mother’s.

I got these details from Mum, since the girl changed in the kitchen. I soon got used to being satisfied with second-hand information. The other sort was in short supply, although one day the girl came into my room in the act of pulling a dressing-gown cord tight round the
housecoat
, redeeming its shapelessness by giving her narrow waist some
definition
. She winked at me then. She told me her name was Polly. Mum didn’t seem to know her name – or at least she would say to her friends, ‘I have no help at all, except for a girl who comes in.’

I pleaded with the girl who came in to let me have tea, but still it wasn’t allowed. One day I was particularly upset that I was going to be made to drink from the feeder until I got to the bottom and died. The girl came in with the feeder full of hot milk. I pleaded in tears for tea, but she said in a loud voice, ‘I’m not allowed to give you any!’ This was torture, since I could hear the clink of a tea-cup in the kitchen where Mum was drinking it, though she was probably crying herself.

Then a marvellous thing happened. The girl bent down and
whispered
in my ear, ‘I’ve put a splash of tea in it, just to stop you
moaning
. But don’t say a word, or I’ll get a big telling off from your mum!’

I thought she was probably fibbing, but even so I was grateful. The little conspiracy between us did me good. It meant she was on my side, and it meant that even when I was very ill I could still make things happen just a little bit. And when I sipped from the feeder, I found Polly had been telling the truth. It was milky all right, but somewhere in it there was the tang of something else, something that must have been tea, and I drank it to the last drop.

After that the girl would give my milk a boost of tea on a regular basis. I would hum a tune to tell her what I wanted. The tune was perfect because it kept what she was doing a secret. It was just a tune, and anyone can hum a tune. The tune was ‘Polly put the kettle on’. And we’ll all have tea.

It may even have been that Mum was in on the whole thing. It’s hard to believe that she would have come down hard on a drink that was still largely milk.