Pilcrow Read online

  I shut my eyes as tight as I could and prayed for everything to end all at once, even if it meant I was back in my room in Bathford, but when I opened them again, everything was still there – and Mum was folding the bedsheet back and sliding her right hand under my shoulders and her left hand under my legs. She was preparing to lift me up and take me on the worst journey of my life.

  I made the worst fuss I could possibly imagine, and I had some talent in this line. I made quite a commotion. I couldn’t prevail over Mum’s superior strength, and Gandhi wouldn’t have recognised my demented squirming as passive resistance. He would have disowned me. Soon Mum realised that it just isn’t possible to carry a seriously ill child, one who is determined to wriggle and cry out, any distance along a train corridor. She put me back down on the bed and covered me up again, looking very thoughtful.

  What I want to be when I grow up

  When she spoke again it was in a bright cheerful tone which immediately made me suspicious.

  ‘JJ,’ she said. ‘Do you remember what fun we used to have reading the What I Want to Be When I Grow Up book?’

  ‘Ye-es …’ I said rather warily, wondering if she could really have changed her mind so completely about making me go to the train loo.

  ‘Well, do you remember which of the jobs you liked best?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ I said defiantly, still on my binge of misbehaviour. ‘Why will you never listen!’ I was close to angry tears. ‘I’ve told you I want to be either a doctor, or a priest, or a scientist! I’ve told you time and time again!’

  ‘Oh yes, so you have!’ said Mum calmly. ‘So why don’t we talk about which of those jobs you could probably do?’

  I needed to have that tuppenny more than ever. I couldn’t make out why the subject had shifted to the career I wasn’t going to have. The pressure on my insides was fierce, and it was hard to think of anything else. It was making me wince. ‘Any of those jobs would suit me.’ I tried to think of a proper grown-up phrase. ‘Suit me down to the ground.’

  ‘Well let’s see,’ said Mum. ‘If you’re a doctor, you have to be able to do operations and go round and visit sick people and give them medicine to make them better, and unless you can get completely better yourself, that doesn’t sound very likely, does it?’

  Looking at my fused left wrist and ankylosed elbow, it was hard to deny the force of what was being said. But I did my best. ‘If you’re ill yourself you know what it’s like. Some things make you feel better and some things don’t do any good at all. There could be junior doctors sent round to visit the sick people and then they would come to me and tell me what was wrong. I would think what was best and then say what the treatment should be. I could do it all from my bed …’ My voice trailed away as I tried and failed to visualise this scene. If I couldn’t convince myself I wasn’t going to convince anyone else.

  Mum saw her moment. ‘I think it’s a bit the same with priests. Priests can’t deliver sermons from their sick-beds, they have to be in a pulpit where everyone can see them. Climbing the steps up to the pulpit is actually part of the job.’

  So that just left being a scientist.

  ‘What was the other career, JJ?’

  If she went on telling me about things I’d never be able to do, I would do a great fat tuppenny right where I was, and then Mum would be sorry that she hadn’t brought out the kidney dish the moment I’d asked her for it.

  ‘Scientist,’ I said sulkily.

  ‘Mmm. That might be a problem too. The pieces of laboratory equipment are so big and heavy, you see, and the scientists need to be able to move them around.’ Then perhaps she took pity on the desolation her words were making in my mind. ‘But by the time you grow up, JJ, I’m sure modern science will be carried out with very small pieces of equipment. Scientists will be able to conduct experiments with only a little movement of their fingers. But JJ … Remember that the real scientific work is carried out in your head. You can’t be a scientist on the outside, without being a scientist on the inside as well.’

  ‘But I am a scientist on the inside!’ I said. ‘That’s just what I’ve been telling you. You know how I always want to know how things work!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mum, ‘I do know that. But you see, darling, it just isn’t enough to want to know how things work. First you have to learn how things work, and after that you have to think of ways of making them work better. You have to think of it all by yourself, and if you’re that type of scientist, you become what is called an inventor.’

  ‘But I do try to think of ways of getting things to work better! You know I do! Why are you being so horrid?’

  ‘Oh it’s not really being horrid,’ she said, very offhand. ‘It’s more a question of being brave and going to take a look at things that scare you, things that work well but ought to work much better.’ She made a pause, letting her words sink in. ‘Like lavatories on trains, for instance.’

  I saw the trap but couldn’t help myself. ‘How can lavatories on trains work better than they already do?’

  ‘Well when you have a tuppenny and pull the handle afterwards, the lavatory just drops it onto the rail. It’s a very dirty system, I’m afraid, and one day somebody is going to have to come up with an idea to stop the tuppenny dropping onto the ground. But that idea can only come from a scientist, a proper inventor, who isn’t afraid of going and looking at it.’

  ‘But I’m not afraid!’ The words were out of my mouth before I could do anything about it. I had painted myself into a corner. I was caught good and proper. But that hardly mattered. The idea of a lavatory on a speeding train dropping a tuppenny onto the rails was a boy’s dream come true. It was fascinating and disgusting and funny. I’ve been stool-minded all my life, and Mum got me off to a good start when she talked about barium meals and scrambled eggs. How to improve the working of toilets on trains, so that the tracks don’t get covered with tuppenny? As Mum had so wisely said, you can only solve a problem if you can observe it with your own eyes.

  The crusts of its fellows

  I began to think I would have a good chance of solving the problem. At that moment I could think of little else. My mind didn’t go in for modulation much. One obsession simply displaced another, even one with the opposite polarity.

  Mum’s problems went rapidly into reverse. Instead of being faced with a furious child refusing to go to the toilet on the train, now she had one who was mad with impatience to go. A whole trainful of kidney dishes offered to my throbbing botty wouldn’t have persuaded me to stay in the compartment to which I had clung so desperately a few moments before. I still hadn’t altogether regained my faith in Mum. To insure myself against further treachery I made her promise me something. She must solemnly swear. If I went to the loo on the train, she must promise to let me see the tuppenny dropping onto the tracks. When she swore her oath, I was ready to set off. I simply gritted my teeth against any discomfort which might follow. It was in the interests of science, after all. I could endure it. And I did just happen to have a mum who knew exactly how to carry me. Deftly she picked me up. She hung back for a moment at the edge of the concertina and then committed us to our passage across the metal waves. We picked our way safely through the groaning tunnel and from there to the lavatory.

  Mum wanted to wipe the lavatory seat clean before she helped me sit down on it, but I over-ruled her. Scientists must accept the world as it is. I also reminded her that I needed to see the inside of the lavatory before I made my contribution to science. She propped me up so that I could see down the broad pipe to where a stained metal plate, held by a feeble spring, clanked and wobbled over the speeding rails. Then I gave the signal that she could sit me down now, to do my tuppenny.

  I wanted to see what I had done even before I let her wipe me clean. I dare say we passed through some pretty countryside that day, and countryside was something I had hardly ever seen. But my enthusiasm was all for looking down the foetid funnel of the lavatory, as my tuppenny, escorted by a feebl
e shower of water that could hardly qualify as a flush, went to join the crusts of its fellows on the trackbed of the Great Western Railway.

  Permission to Die

  The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow, wasn’t built as a hospital, any more than it was built as a school. It was built as a grand country house – or rather it occupied converted buildings in the grounds of what was a country house. On the first day of the Great War, its owners had offered it to the army for use as a military hospital. The authorities had taken a quick look round and decided it wouldn’t do. The house would require too much conversion to be immediately useful. They don’t seem to have considered the offer very imaginatively. They looked at it, saw it wasn’t actually a hospital as yet – no beds installed, no operating theatre – and more or less washed their hands of it.

  Then the Canadian armed forces were made the same offer, and they saw the potential that had been missed by their British counterparts. The great house wasn’t flexible, no, but it would serve perfectly well as a convalescent home. The surrounding buildings were much more promising. There were covered tennis courts, there was a bowling alley. These were large internal spaces that could accommodate hundreds of the wounded of the War.

  At the end of the War, the family took possession again and the hospital melted back into outbuildings. When another war broke out, the hospital rematerialised, and this time it survived the end of hostilities. It was made over permanently as a hospital, as part of an ambitious restructuring of the estate, not entirely philanthropic since the post-war government was bearing down hard on the landed gentry. The house itself was gifted to the National Trust, though the family remained in residence. An early example of an arrangement that became commonplace, the rich divesting themselves of their assets but managing to stay in the saddle somehow.

  That was the history of the place. As for the geography: it was essentially one enormous corridor. The house may have been a grand one, but our part of the estate wasn’t exactly plush. All the wards were Nissen huts. Even the chapel was a Nissen hut, a half-sized one.

  The quarter-mile corridor started with Ward One, which was at the farthest and lowest end, and finished after Ward Twenty-Two. The main entrance was somewhere between Ward Fifteen and Ward Eighteen. The entire corridor sloped gently upwards in the direction of the main entrance. I think it was supposed to be evenly sloped, but there were little level bits outside each ward. The builders or designers made mistakes in the calculations somehow, because near the main entrance they must have realised they had to take the thing up quite a lot, but had almost run out of space to do it in. So there was a sudden, violent upheave as you came from the Ward One end. That part of the corridor was more like a ramp. Porters would have to put on a burst of speed to get a trolley up it. It made me feel a bit sick the first time I was jounced up the ramp, but then I learned to find it fun. Coming the other way, of course, the porters would have to dig their heels in to keep control of what they were pushing. Left to themselves, wheelchairs would tend to roll downhill to the end of the corridor, as if they were curious to find the exit there and to explore the grounds in their own right.

  Immobility had been the mystical goal of my bed-rest years. As long as I stayed perfectly still in my garden of yellow roses, sooner or later the unicorn of perfect health would find me and lay its trusting muzzle in my lap. Of course immobility wasn’t the Holy Grail but a poisoned chalice, or simply a cracked cup through which the last of my health drained away.

  Staying perfectly still was no longer an obligation. So there was no obvious reason for me being put to bed in a side ward the moment I arrived at the hospital, in a sort of visual quarantine. Perhaps after years of seeing so little happen I fell into the category of a starving person, who must be prevented from stuffing himself with bread to protect a digestive system that might simply explode from the shock of nourishment. The digestive system in this case being my mind.

  Mum and I had an early encounter with the nursing staff which gave notice of things to come. Along with my modest luggage she had brought along the fire-guard which had kept the bedclothes off my legs for so long. She was relying on maternal eloquence and her nursing background to make this improvised item acceptable to the hospital. It wasn’t enough. She was listened to in stony silence, then told it was out of the question.

  Mum’s briskness always had a tremor in it, but even Granny might have struggled to impose herself on the nursing staff of my new home. I learned soon enough that Mum was right about the superiority of the fire-guard to the adult-sized cradles issued there. They were hopeless. The volume of air they enclosed was so large that in any weather conditions short of the tropical my legs took ages to get warm. No reason was given for the unacceptability of the fire-guard, but I expect it was Manor Hospital all over again, a silent re-statement of the Weetabix Protocol. They’ll all want one. We can’t have that. As if it would be a bad thing for sick children to discover, that between warm ankylosed legs and cold ankylosed legs they had a preference.

  When she went home, Mum left the fire-guard behind in case some independent-minded member of the nursing staff saw its clear superiority for the intended purpose, and brought it back into service. None did. Perhaps none existed. The establishment regarded initiative as a symptom of organisational disease.

  Junior Norns

  After Mum left, I must have had a short sleep in my side ward. When I opened my eyes again, I was looking up at a little deputation of children. There were three of them. My new friends. They must have sneaked between the screens. ‘Hello!’ I said cheerfully, though I was already disappointed by what I saw. They were all girls, when I was counting on having some male company. I told myself that perhaps the boys here were shyer than the girls, though it didn’t seem likely, or promising if true.

  None of the girls returned my greeting or spoke to me in any way. They looked at me entirely expressionlessly. My stock of culture was not large. I had few tools for interpreting the world beyond the beloved Snowflake, some Beatrix Potter, a little Andersen and Grimm. My little supply of templates would not fit. I would need a broader swathe of knowledge to find a parallel for these girls – Scandinavian mythology, or Greek. I was facing a tribunal of junior Norns. These were the precocious Fates of the institution, who would spin me out, weave me and cut me off.

  The girl in the middle spoke at last. She announced, ‘He’s not pale and floppy – he’s very stiff and twisty,’ and as if this bulletin gave them all they needed to know, they turned and began to move off. Their movement was ragged, I was pleased to notice, and I thought I could see the welcome gleam of a crutch.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ I called after them. After so long without contemporaries, I wasn’t going to let them go without some attempt at communication. What they most looked like to me at that moment was an audience. I must entertain them. I decided that I would sing them a song, a special song.

  This wasn’t entirely an exhibitionist impulse. The last time I had been in a room with this many children, it had been the carol singers that Christmas time. Then they had sung to me, now it was my turn to return the favour. My turn. Fair dos. I started to sing, croakily at first, and then with more confidence. I knew from listening to ‘Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better’ that you don’t have to have a sweet voice to make a song come alive. In fact I would have sung that song, itself, except that hearing one voice do both sides of the musical barney would have been too confusing.

  The girls loomed back into my narrow field of vision. ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats,’ I began, and went on through the whole cryptic but satisfying animal-dietetic saga. There was no sign of appreciation when I finished, so I explained what the words really meant. I switched from a sort of Ethel Merman impersonation to a version of Professor Joad on the Brains Trust. ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats … Do you see?’ All silence was deadly to me just then, and I didn’t notice any peculiarly fatal quality to this one. When I got to ‘a kiddley divey too’ I not only glosse
d the line as ‘a kid will eat ivy too’, but explained that a kid was a young goat. I didn’t want to lose my hold on the audience by assuming too much knowledge.

  I was just getting started on the natural history of ivy when the girl who had said I wasn’t pale interrupted. ‘We know the song, stupid. Uncle Mac plays it on the ruddy radio all the time. And this’, she said, indicating the one on her right, ‘is Ivy. I’m Wendy and she’s Ivy. You’d better watch out for her. ’Cos you’ve got it the wrong way round. She eats kids.’ The girl called Ivy, who wore thick glasses, bared her teeth and snapped at me, and the three of them laughed. Then they receded from my view in a slow collective hobble. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I squeaked after them. My voice trailed away before I could finish with, ‘I’m sure we’re going to be great friends.’ Skilled as I was in looking on the bright side, I couldn’t persuade myself that we’d got off to much of a start.

  After that first visitation I was left alone by the other patients. Every now and then nurses popped through the door to check on me, but otherwise I was left to my thoughts. I felt better if I thought about the earlier part of the day, before I actually arrived in the hospital, rather than my recent disappointments. From the years I had spent in the room with yellow roses on the wallpaper I had acquired some skill in controlling my mental activity. In replaying the day I concentrated on the train journey, my little adventure between confinements, and above all the ambulance ride that had started the journey in such style.

  I felt there were important lessons for me to learn from what had gone on between the two men in the ambulance. I was determined to work it out. It was the word ‘mate’ that really struck me. ‘Mate’, as I’d learned from Mum, was what budgies did to make a chick and what a man did to a lady when he wanted to give her a baby, but this was clearly impossible here. Martin and Mikey were both men, and there was no taily-hole in either of them, so nowhere that a baby could be put in. But still, it seemed, they mated.