Pilcrow Page 4

  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.

  Butter Melon Cauliflower

  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.

  Fairy cabbages

  As for food, I didn’t have anything that could be called an appetite, and Mum had to coax me to swallow every mouthful. Even before I was ill, I’d been a fussy eater. Meat in particular I instinctively disliked. The idea of chewing it disgusted me, so I would spit it out, politely if possible, if not, not. This was the heyday of the British Sunday joint, with leftovers in various forms being made to last much of the week, but if I hated the theme then I could only hate the variations on it. It was still hateful meat, however behashed or enrissoled.

  It wasn’t likely that I would work up an appetite while I was lying still all day, so Mum became expert at working one up for me, using presentation as much as the promise of flavour. She learned not to put too much on the plate, which was sure to put me off. I could eat maybe a quarter of a boiled egg and a single finger of toast, a solitary soldier cut off from the company. Half an egg on a good day. An egg was a special thing in the domestic economy so soon after rationing, but I didn’t know that, and its aura wasn’t enough in itself to stimulate my appetite. An ice lolly, though, was a tremendous treat, well worth the trouble of licking. I couldn’t bear anything heavy – a little mouthful of sponge pudding and custard would be the most I could manage. Mum learned to tempt rather than scold, and to resist turning the whole subject of eating into a psychological minefield by striking too many bargains (if you finish your egg I’ll brush your hair – that sort of thing). She told me Brussels sprouts were ‘fairy cabbages’, knowing that the nick name would draw me to that disregarded vegetable. She was like an advertising executive, trying to crack a one-child market.

  Mum would put a Mars Bar in the ’fridge to
chill, and then cut it into thin slices. That worked pretty well. It wooed me. I could usually manage two or three of those little slices, and the daintiness of the presentation was a pleasure in itself – its elfin picnic aspect. Or its laboratory overtone, I suppose. Mum made meticulous cross-sections of those Mars bars as if she was a lab assistant preparing slides for the microscope. She even took the trouble to chill the saucer she served it on, so that the slices didn’t warm up too quickly, and lose their satisfying firmness of texture before they entered the cavern of my mouth.

  Mum was enough of a traditional housewife to bake cakes, but I took no notice of them. They all went down Dad’s throat. I loved to eat the scrapings from the bowl, but I set my face against the finished cakes. Cakes were fine until they went into the oven, as far as I was concerned, and then they were spoiled for good, done for.

  Theory of eating

  I had pretty much given up on the practice of eating, but Mum didn’t stop educating me in the theory. She explained that the correct and best way of eating, which didn’t apply to me for the time being because of my hands and so on, was to sum up the whole meal in each mouthful. So: suppose I was going to eat 1) Sausage, 2) Yorkshire Pudding, 3) Roast Potato, 4) Garden Peas and 5) Gravy, first I would have to survey my plateful, assessing the elements at my disposal. The gentle art of eating started with the setting aside of a building area on the plate. This was why it was never correct to fill a guest’s entire plate. Although it would not actually be wrong to assign the centre of the plate for this job, this course of action was less than ideal. A blank sector to one side of the plate was a better choice.

  Then the job was to build an entire miniature meal on the convex side of the fork. Convex, not concave. If some of the food was awkward, for example peas, then a little mild mashing was allowed, but only as much as was needed to help the peas to stay in place while mouthful-building was completed. ‘Why?’ I asked. Why go to so much trouble? Because the delight of mixing is to take place in your mouth – as long as you don’t open it for all the world to see.

  Mum gave a demonstration, and it was fascinating to watch her at work. First she mashed and moulded a tiny piece of potato onto the rounded side of the fork. I guessed that this was to be her foundation, a moderately squashy substrate for the cornerstone of sausage which would still leave room for the addition of Yorkshire pudding in a small but unprocessed chunk. There must be room left for a bonnet of lightly crushed pea. I was fascinated to watch the whole edifice grow, tottering a little but never in serious danger of falling.

  Finally it was time to crown the forkful with gravy. This was the moment of truth, a test of the cook as well as the diner. Mum carefully rested her loaded fork on the plate. A suitable puddle of gravy would be waiting to one side of the perfectly balanced forkful. Providing the gravy was properly viscous, she could coax it with a swoop of the knife against the urgings of gravity so that it ended up on the top of the potato-sausage-pudding-pea amalgamation as a savoury varnish.

  ‘With practice it soon becomes possible’, she told me, ‘for one to have an intelligent conversation about something entirely different at the same time. While working in this way it should never appear that any particular effort is required. Food must always be incidental to the pleasures of conversation.’ In this way her atomic theory of the forkful melted into a fantasy of gracious dining. In fact the whole little demonstration of microcosmic eating may have been the only meal I ever saw her eat without anxiety.

  Mum had a cunning way of serving bananas. It wasn’t so very long since bananas had become available again at all, and those with memories of rationing greatly prized the yellow fruit. Mum could hardly believe it when I showed no interest in a fruit so rare and distinctive, so curved to the eye and creamy on the tongue. There was no trace of the excitement I had shown before I was ill, snug in Dad’s arms and seeing the yellow hands hanging from their hooks.

  Then one day Mum tried again. She would never give up. She waved a banana in front of me and when I said I wasn’t hungry, she said, ‘This one is different. This is a special banana.’

  I stayed silent just as long as I could, but curiosity was spreading over my body like a rash, as Mum had known it would. ‘What’s so special about it?’

  ‘It’s a magic banana.’

  She had me. This was irresistible. ‘What makes it magic?’

  ‘What makes it magic, John, is that it’s already in slices. Inside the skin. Just open it and you’ll see.’

  Already in slices inside its skin? Now I was in the palm of her hand. She held the banana where I could see it close up, and revolved it slowly so that I could see that there was no blemish on it of any kind. Finally, with me still watching very closely and ready to halt the operation if I saw anything at all fishy, she tugged on the hard stalk on the top of the banana until it broke open with an alarmingly definite noise. It was as if she had snapped the neck of a sleeping yellow bird. Then she peeled back a strip of skin, far enough to show me that she was telling the truth. The flesh was cut into even discs. I was baffled and thrilled. Impossible for the skin to have been peeled and then put back in place.

  ‘Where did you get it? How did you do that?’

  ‘Eat it and perhaps I’ll tell you.’

  ‘I won’t eat it unless you tell me.’

  ‘You’ll have a long wait. Patience is a virtue,’ Mum chanted, presumably re-hashing one of the many bitter lessons of her childhood, ‘Virtue is a Grace. Grace is a little girl – who never washed her face.’

  The prestige of the magic banana was so great that Mum won an argument at last. I ate it. From then on magic bananas appeared at regular intervals, when my indifference to food became actively alarming. Mum knew how to keep the magic going, too. Sometimes she would produce a banana and I would ask, ‘Is it a magic banana?’ And she would say, ‘I’m afraid not, John. This is just an ordinary banana. There weren’t any magic ones in the shops. It’s a very short season, you see.’ And it sometimes happened, since human nature is perverse, that I would eat the ordinary banana anyway.

  It was years before I learned how she did the slicing, and how she discovered the method in the first place. While I was in bed I obviously didn’t attend parties, and my own birthday celebrations were muted to the point of inaudibility. But Mum had heard from a neighbour about a magician who performed at children’s parties and had amazed everyone – the adults perhaps more than the children – with the banana trick. Mum managed to get his address and sent off a letter begging to be told the secret. She enclosed a ten-shilling note. A letter came back sharing the secret, but also returning the ten-shilling note. With all the heart-rending details she included in the letter, the return of the money was practically certain. Sometimes there are worse ways of getting what you want than her life-long technique of milking the world for the sympathy it contains.

  The secret was laughably simple. All you need is a pin (needle, miniature bodkin). What you do – what Mum did – is to push the pin into the banana at one of the seams of the peel, and then work it back and forth until the improvised lever, pivoting where it enters the tougher tissue of the peel, has carved a slice through the flesh. Withdraw the pin, leaving no more trace than a pinprick, and repeat at intervals along the fuselage of the fruit. Abracadabra! Magic banana.

  So much for food. Mum’s training as a nurse helped her to deal resourcefully with a number of other difficulties. I couldn’t use the lavatory, but the bedpan was a non-starter. I had to lift my bum from the horizontal to use it, and this was agony, so Mum devised a different method. She taught me to ‘go’ on my side, sissing into a bottle, tuppennying onto a kidney dish. Our teamwork improved, until every drop went into the bottle. The bladder-hooliganism of my earlier days had been properly tamed.

  For a short time it was actually thrilling to be a baby again, praised and rewarded for a level of dependence that would have brought stern looks and impatient words only weeks before. But regression is an unstable pleasure, all
the more so when no choice is involved.

  The head of the bed was by the window, so I couldn’t see outside, though I could hear things. Nature filtered in, but not in any form I could interpret. I could hear birds scuffling on my window-sill in the mornings. I thought of them as wrens, because of the farthing ashtray which I was sometimes allowed to hold and explore with my eyes. In ornithological fact they were almost certainly tits. Sometimes I would hear a big galumphing noise which could only be a stork depositing a baby under the gooseberry bush at the bottom of our garden, the little girl Mum had always wanted to make the family complete.

  From a distance in time it’s easy to say that Mum and Dad could have turned the bed round, the moment an indefinite sentence was passed on me, so that I could at least see out of the window, though my view from that angle would have been only sky. It wasn’t even the bed that needed turning round, just the bedclothes. It wasn’t a major engineering project. It could have been done in five minutes. Even so, I understand quite well why they didn’t. Every adjustment to my new state was a step backwards for them. Turning the bed round would have made it harder to pretend that I was going to get up any time soon. I only had my situation. They had something much worse – knowledge of my situation. I was not their son in the way I had been, and there was nothing they could do to re-connect me with what they had lost.

  If Dad was at home then of course the radio was his preserve. No one questioned his need to hear the news whenever it was on. If he was away, Mum would sometimes lug it in and set it up in my room. I liked listening to the Billy Cotton Band Show, though Mum thought Billy himself was very vulgar, and his opening cry of ‘WAKEY WAKEY!’ really got on her nerves. It was the pronunciation that got her goat particularly. What Billy Cotton shouted was actually ‘WHYky– WHY– KEE!!’ and he stretched out the second ‘WHY’ so that it seemed to last for ever. I wonder if Mum guessed how much I loved it.