Pilcrow Page 22

  I had the impression at that age that children were somehow automatically naked, as if it was a stage adults had grown out of. There was some sort of dividing line, and beyond that you need never be unclothed again. You might even be lucky enough to wear a uniform, but in any case being grown up would mean an end to nakedness. Till that happy day arrived, I would have to be photographed naked and childish by Mr Fisk four times a year.

  While my wheelchair-sitting skills were still in their infancy, I started attending the hospital chapel. It was only another Nissen hut, half-sized at that, but it had a wonderful atmosphere. At first I thought you couldn’t go to church unless you were able to sit up, but the monks told me that wasn’t so. They volunteered to take me in on a stretcher. I remember being pushed along the corridor to the chapel on a trolley. It was a long way to go – a bit of an expedition.

  In the little chapel I waited to hear a piano, perhaps even an organ, but there were no instruments. The singing was unaccompanied. I couldn’t see the point, for about ten seconds, but then I got it. A different sort of feeling to the music. The monks were lovely. One of them said, ‘If you can’t manage the hymn book, I’ll hold it for you.’ He sat next to me on the trolley and it was wonderful. I didn’t know whether he was really allowed to sit by me on the trolley, but I reasoned that although this was all hospital and the chapel was inside it, you could also say it was God’s House and the hospital had no say-so. God would protect the monks from worldly scolding.

  Invisible stubby quills

  The monks were Benedictines, wearing brown tunics and scapulars with hoods, based at Nashdom Abbey which was either on the estate or very near. Their heads were shaved and I wanted to touch. Once I asked if I could, and the monk didn’t answer but just bent his head down for me to explore. It was so delicious. I touched his shaven head. I stroked the consecrated scalp. To the eye the surface was smooth but to the hand it was nothing but tiny prickles. It wasn’t a polished shape like a marble sculpture, it was a field of invisible stubby quills. What I saw was only a small misleading part of things. I realised that touch was probably the best guide to the world, but that was where I was most disadvantaged. I would have to navigate by other means. Only on special occasions would the truth be palpable. I’d had the courage to ask to touch once, and once was permitted, once was ordinary human curiosity. Even Weetabix had been allowed once. More than once was something that would be frowned on in the long run.

  Even so, I enjoyed the monkish tenderness and the atmosphere of contemplation. In those chapel services there was no one telling you to repent, or commit yourself, or put money in a dish. For once they didn’t dissipate the essential mystical experience. If all Christianity lived up to that depth of presence, I’d be fonder of it now.

  After its shaky start, my experience of social life on the ward could only improve, but the up-turn wasn’t sudden or steep. It would be nice to think that bullying played no part on a ward of sick and disabled children, but it was more or less the foundation of our little society. The ringleader was the girl who had pronounced me stiff and twisty the day I arrived – Wendy Keach. Physical violence wasn’t the basis of her power on the ward, but she showed that psychological torment can be just as effective. It certainly took the shine off Peter Pan for me, having such a nasty Wendy on the premises.

  Wendy’s lieutenant, the one who supposedly ate children, was Ivy Horrocks. How desperately we tried to be in good with the two of them! Otherwise we’d be on their list of victims. Neutrality was never an option. When I say ‘we’ I should really come clean and say ‘I’. Not everyone was so cowardly.

  There was a television on the ward, but it was only turned on for about half an hour a day. I remember seeing Bill and Ben, and a programme about the Abominable Snowman which scared me good and proper. There was a lot of talk among us about where the words on the screen went when they disappeared. The most popular answer was that ‘little men’ wound them round from the back of the set. Little men did a lot of odd jobs. Little men must also be responsible for cutting our poo into those little sausage lengths, though the idea of men living inside people’s bottoms took a little getting used to. Nobody told us different. Little-man theory prevailed by default.

  The thing I liked best of all about television was the way the image collapsed, when the set was turned off, into a mystical dot which hung there for a surprisingly long time. To date, the behaviour of the valves touched me more deeply than any programme.

  The school was much harder to find on those premises than the hospital. This was a school in the fifth dimension, a shy and fugitive institution. The hospital was sure of itself while the school was tentative in the extreme. The hospital advanced to meet you, the school melted away at a moment’s notice, abandoning its weaker claims. I wasn’t well up on Broadway musicals – I knew only the one song from Annie Get Your Gun. Otherwise I might have been reminded of Brigadoon, and the village in the Highlands which appears for a single day every hundred years. Still, if there was no sign yet of school, there was plenty to learn. There was Ansell and ‘The illness has raged’, and there were other early lessons. I learned that I was something called Posh. My accent betrayed me to Wendy, but so did my choice of words. I said ‘lavatory’ for toilet. I soon learned to roughen up my vocabulary and even my accent.

  I learned to use words like ‘shit’ and ‘bum’ instead of tuppenny and BTM. There’s something to be said for the direct approach, after all. And of course tuppenny is only rhyming slang, isn’t it? ‘Tuppenny bit’ equals ‘shit’. I wonder if Mum and Dad even realised the vulgar roots of their genteel expression. Although it does add up in a way, the idea of spending-a-penny doubled.

  Even after ‘lavatory’ had gone down the pan, Wendy found other ammunition. She never ran short. If for instance you have developed the charming notion, as a child beginning to speak, that the holes in your nose are called ‘snorts’ rather than nostrils, and if your parents have indulged your delightfulness by adopting the word themselves on the rare occasions when nostrils must be talked of, and if you then experience a drastic shift of company, forgetting that home words must stay in the home, then you will very quickly learn your mistake. Wendy snorted with derisive laughter, till the snot almost ran out of her nose-holes.

  Régime of terror

  With the meagre materials to hand Wendy ran quite a little régime of terror. She was sly in extracting secrets she might use to her advantage. She was convinced that I had a middle name, despite my denials, and that it would be a goldmine of mockable ore when I was finally made to reveal it. She tricked me by claiming to have an embarrassing middle name herself – mine could hardly be worse than Buttercup, could it?

  I felt almost sorry for her, in my folly, and I gave up my secret. I tried to give it some historical context by referring knowingly to the bouncing bomb, but I needn’t have bothered. ‘Wallis’ became ‘Wally’, and that was what she called me from then on. Wally Snorts. Wally did not then mean ‘idiot’ as it does now, but still I flinched every time. I tried calling her ‘Buttercup’, though my heart wasn’t in it, and she simply said, ‘Did I say Buttercup? My mistake. My middle name is Jane. It’s a rotten sort of name, isn’t it?’

  Somehow she heard about my meeting with the matron of the whole hospital, the empress in purple. She told me I was a poshie and a sissy and that I was ‘sucking up to Matron’, when I would never have thought of such a thing. It was an impossibility. It would have been like sucking up to God. After that she sometimes called me Little Lord Fauntleroy and sometimes Archie Andrews after a ventriloquist’s dummy very popular on radio at the time.

  That tells you all you need to know about the 1950s, really, that millions of listeners would tune in to a programme in which a man they couldn’t see pretended to make his voice emerge from a dummy that was likewise invisible. Julie Andrews played the dummy’s girlfriend, Beryl Reid his catty friend Monica. In the heyday of Educating Archie there was a whole little industry making souvenir mugs
, ties, soap, confectionery and scarves. When clothes were still rationed,

  Archie had been given an allowance of 50 coupons a year to acknowledge the contribution he made to national morale. Archie and his manipulator, Peter Brough, even performed privately for the late King and the princesses. After the show they asked him to take Archie’s head off so that they could see how it worked. Later the King remarked that there had only been one beheading in his whole reign, and his daughters had insisted on watching the whole thing.

  When the show made the logical transition to a visual medium, to television, it wasn’t nearly so successful. People preferred the imaginary illusion to the real one. And they say the British have no taste for mysticism!

  The Archie Andrews nick-name was particularly galling because I thought of myself as one of nature’s ventriloquists rather than one of her dummies. I had pined for the teach-yourself-voice-throwing book advertised in the Ellisdons catalogue, but finally been stern with myself. It didn’t fit my requirement that everything I sent off actually did something, preferably something spectacular, when it arrived.

  Normal blue ink

  When Mum wrote to me, she had a particular way of writing the address. She would use normal blue ink to write ‘Ward 1’ on the envelope, and then instead of ‘Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital’, she would write ‘Canadian + Memorial Hospital’. But she’d change to red ink for the ‘+’. A red cross instead of ‘Red Cross’. That was her special way of writing the hospital’s name. She made it into a sort of game between us.

  There was no guarantee that so wayward a variation of the address would be accepted by Her Majesty’s postal service. It could easily have been returned. The Post Office were sticklers to a man, in those days before postcodes, after which stickling became more idiosyncratic, but they colluded with her little flight of fancy.

  I learned to say ‘C.R.C.M.H.’, even to think it that way, always with capitals and the right pronunciation. C full stop R full stop C full stop M full stop H full stop. Then one day I was wheeled to an office in the hospital, where a clerk needed to fill in a form on my behalf. He asked me about my previous addresses, and then where I lived now.

  Proud of knowing the right answer, I said ‘C.R.C.M.H.,’ complete with all stops. I looked up at the man, waiting for my pat on the back. Well done John! You’ve shown you’re not hopelessly volatile but are able to listen gravely. Instead he said, ‘That’s rather a mouthful, don’t you think, John? I’ll let you in on a little secret. Up here we just write “CRX”. Much easier, isn’t it?’ ‘Affirmative,’ I said, using Dad’s forces form of words, which Mum found so exasperating (‘Why can’t you just say “Yes”?’).

  To tell the truth I was rather crestfallen to be corrected after so much brain-washing, but the clerk made it up to me by saying, ‘Keep quiet about it, though – don’t go telling the other kids on the ward.’

  It wasn’t altogether clear whether CRX, as I allowed myself to call it in my mind, was in Buckinghamshire or Berkshire. I badgered people to be definite. I didn’t enjoy living with uncertainty in those days, and it didn’t seem too much to hope that there was a definite answer in this case. But there wasn’t. Letters could be sent to me either on ‘Ward 1, Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow, Bucks’ or ‘Ward 1, Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow nr Maidenhead, Berks’. Post could be sorted in either place. In effect I spent several years of my life in a place with an indeterminate location. My first feeling was that I had a right to a definite answer, one way or the other, but then I came to enjoy the fact that things weren’t so simple.

  I liked the idea that I could go on holiday without moving. When I started writing a letter, I could ask myself, ‘Where do I want to be today?’ before I wrote the return address. The ‘Bucks’ form usually seemed clearer and more direct than the ‘Berks’ one, but my mood could change. Depending on which form of the address I used (always assuming my correspondent respected it), the letter of reply would pass through one sorting office or another. Action at a distance, always an attractive idea. The letter would pass under the eyes and hands of a different set of Post Office employees. One lot might process it more quickly than the other, but even if they didn’t I would know the letter had come a different way. There was an extra edge of pleasure in the wait for the postman. Even at my most megalomaniac I had to concede that it was the same postman making the delivery, whichever route I had decreed for the letter to use.

  There was a doubleness, too, about the name of the estate, or at least its pronunciation. There were two versions racked with class nuance, both of them at odds with the spelling. Mum said only suburban people said ‘Cleeve-den’. Upper people always said ‘Clivv-den’ (just as Mum always said ‘upper people’). The only thing both parties would have agreed on was that the name wasn’t pronounced ‘Cliveden’, the way it was written, and they would have joined in laughing at anyone who knew no better.

  In fact I remember Ansell saying ‘Cleeve-den’, which meant she was probably suburban, but then again she could be absolutely terrifying. I knew that suburban people were characteristically shy and uncertain (like Mum, deep down, with her longing to know what was right). So I began to realise that as long as you used enough force of character, you could be as suburban as you liked.

  Cheese on toast

  The third Norn in the welcoming committee, besides Wendy and Ivy, was Sarah Morrison – an entirely different character. She had been curious about me, like the others, and had joined their sortie but most of the time she went her own way. She was largely immune to the pressures of the Wendy gang.

  I didn’t find this out for a little while. We were cut off by illness from playing together, and from the natural mechanisms of community-building. Receiving hydrotherapy in the same pool, for instance, isn’t necessarily a social opportunity, though in the right circumstances it can be. It was there that Sarah Morrison made friends with me, while we were waiting for our turn in the pool, by whispering that if you blew off under the water and took a good sniff, it was just like cheese on toast. When we were waiting to be taken out of the pool, she urged me to try it. She shuffled up next to me and then we both did blow-offs and politely took turns to have a sniff. The best part was feeling the bubbles of gas percolating through my trunks and tickling my spine as they rose to the surface. I couldn’t bend over to get a proper noseful but I got an adequate sample. I didn’t think the resemblance to cheese on toast was close, myself, but I wasn’t going to spoil a friendly conversation, even one carried on in an up-draught of digestive gas. It was a rite of passage. I had always wanted a blood brother, though the ritual of cutting frightened me, but for the time being I was content with a blow-off sister.

  There was another enthusiastic reader on the ward, little Mary Finch. She was the single most straightforward person I have ever met. She came from Rutland, the smallest county in Great Britain, which seemed exactly right somehow. That this small and perfect person should come from a county not much bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Of course Still’s Disease distorted her body, and steroids added a layer of blurring, but her character remained intact and in proportion.

  Mary and I shared a passion for the Famous Five stories of Enid Blyton. Better than that, we had the same preferences in terms of the characters. Julian our top favourite, then Dick. Mary introduced me to the Pookie books – the adventures of a little winged rabbit. Pookie in Search of a Home. Pookie Sets the World Right. Pookie and the Gipsies. She had the lot. We never ran out of things to talk about. Having Mary on the ward took the solitariness out of reading. I was always saying to myself, as I read, ‘Wait till Mary hears about this!’

  We on Wards One and Two had nothing in common except the diagnosis we shared, so we negotiated our status by way of self-portraits with only a couple of characteristics, simplified identities. Wendy, for instance, characterised herself as a plain-speaking Northerner who had an older brother who would thump us so that we stayed thumped. It was hard to imagine h
im being able to add anything to Wendy’s reign of terror. This brother who was the ace up her sleeve could hardly be more daunting than the aces she played every day.

  It was some time before I realised that not all of us on those wards were in fact ill in the same way. I had noticed how few boys there were, and I hadn’t succeeded in identifying any kindred spirits. There was one boy who seemed even less able to move than I did, as if he had been condemned in his turn to the bed rest I had escaped, keeping the horizontal population of England constant. His condition, though, seemed to be extreme weakness, rather than locked joints. To the extent that he could move at all he could move every part of himself. I would have been tempted to make overtures, though I would have needed help from the staff to approach him, if he wasn’t always whispering the same thing to himself. I couldn’t see him properly, but I could hear him whispering, ‘Lamb … lamb … lamb.’

  It was Mary who told me what was really going on. He had arranged an army of toy soldiers on the bed, and he spent his time feebly knocking them over with the flick of a feeble finger, one after another, whispering the whole time, ‘Blam … blam … blam.’ I took against him over that, and not just because of my dislike of war games. I had the feeling that he was punishing his men for their inability to move, the moulded joints they couldn’t help any more than I could help mine. Inevitably, Mary was more sympathetic. ‘Poor boy,’ she said. ‘He’s really very ill.’

  Wendy was reliably more Gothic: ‘He’s done for. He’s a goner. He’s in the Death Bed. No one who sleeps in that bed lasts for long.’