Distant Voices (48 page)

Take John's piece written from his hospital bed.
⁴⁶
Those who read it will not, I believe, easily forget it. In a sense, it was a typical Merritt investigation, in which he rooted out truths about two areas of medical care in Britain: the Bristol Cancer Help Centre, where complementary methods of cancer treatment have been pioneered; and a general medical ward at Hammersmith Hospital in London, with its overworked nurses and junior doctors, its drug addicts with collapsed veins, its alcoholics from the streets and its cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

John was one of the latter group. He had leukaemia: and the quotations from his diary written in a Hammersmith ward last autumn – written, I hasten to say, with none of the self-indulgence he accused himself of – ought to be read by every member of the government directly responsible for dismantling the NHS. Here are a few extracts:

Wednesday, 7 November
: ‘Hooked up' to chemo and antibiotics for 18 hours. Shaky, emaciated old lunatic, Mr Moody, in bed opposite takes his pyjamas off and pees over floor, hobbles towards me and tries to climb in my bed . . . Night-time: Mr Moody is swearing and
yelling, ‘They are trying to kill me.' Man in bed behind is being sick. Old man in next bed is sitting on his bed, covered in excrement. The smell is appalling. This is a madhouse . . .

Wednesday, 14 November
: 2am: My curtains are torn apart and semi-clad lunatic, like King Lear, crashes on my bed, yelling, ‘Why won't you help me? I haven't done anything wrong.' Nurse takes him away. 2.30am: Old man tries to get in my bed, says I'm his father. 3am: Old man who has dirtied himself comes through my curtains; he is going to urinate on my bed; he pulls my chemotherapy stand over. I grab him by the throat and tell him I will kill him if he comes back. He starts to cry.

John described in the piece how he was first told that he would develop leukaemia ‘sooner or later . . . A professor called Goldstone told me, “Don't torture yourself with any ideas of self-help; it will only make things worse.” He was not only arrogant, he was dead wrong.' John turned to the Bristol Cancer Help Centre where cancer patients are treated very differently and where he found decency, calm and hope. Much of his
Observer
article was devoted to answering distorted criticism of the centre, whose existence has been threatened by falsehoods recycled in the media.

John was 33. When we met for lunch the other day we talked about the swimming and sunshine that are balm to us both. He told me he had decided to stop chemotherapy and take a more holistic approach to fighting his cancer. His wife, Lindsay, supports him in all of this. Leukaemia sufferers become anaemic and vulnerable to infections and the risk of bleeding. In many cases this can be stopped by chemotherapy, but John is one of those for whom a bone marrow transplant is the only hope. Chemotherapy can force the leukaemia into remission, but side-effects are often extremely unpleasant and can undermine the quality of everyday life.

John described his decision to stop chemotherapy as no
more than realistic. It was typical of the man that he asked that anything I write about him had a wider focus. John was one of a little-known group of people who go about their lives as normally as they can while awaiting a life-saving bone marrow transplant. For many, the odds are against them finding a perfect tissue-type match. This was especially true of John, whose tissue-type was extremely rare. However, someone, somewhere, had John's tissue-type; and the search for that person, and for people with all the other combinations of tissue-types, was made by the Anthony Nolan Research Centre, based at London's Royal Free Hospital, which has the second largest register of potential bone marrow donors in the world.

The centre was established in 1974 and named after Anthony Nolan, then aged two, who was born in Australia and whose parents brought him to Britain in search of a bone marrow transplant. No tissue-type match was found; and Anthony died at the age of seven. The centre gets no support from the government; in 1989, a grant of £11,000 – one technician's wages – was abolished. In the age of cutbacks, resources in this field of medicine are severely limited. One transplant costs an estimated £80,000. Last year, 341 transplants were carried out in Britain, compared with 537 in France, where the government takes all responsibility for funding. There is a smaller NHS-funded donor scheme, which is tied to the National Blood Transfusion Service; unlike the Anthony Nolan Centre, its ‘search' for tissue-types does not extend abroad.

Linda Hartwell, manager of the Anthony Nolan Centre's operations department told me,

We are linked to registers in the United States, Australia, France and Germany; and this will soon be conducted by computer. Owing to the hundreds of thousands of combinations of tissue-types, we constantly need to add donors to our register. At present, we urgently need new donors. We are able to tissue-type 500 new donors every week. In spite of the publicity from time to time,
many people are still unaware of the form of treatment. Some believe only the dead can donate. But that's not so. You can live
and
give life to someone else. It's wonderful.

Andy Burgess, an engineer from Redhill in Surrey, literally saved the life of Lloyd Scott, an Essex fireman. Bank manager Neil Singleton gave bone marrow tissue that matched with a patient in Denmark. Sarah Furber did the same for an American girl. The centre has a large file of such stories; in the haystack there are many needles that
are
found.

No more than a drop of blood can start the process of saving a life; a routine blood test is enough to indicate the bone marrow type of a potential donor. If a match is found, the donor undergoes a straightforward surgical procedure lasting about an hour and a half. There is no incision, no stitching: the marrow is taken from the hip bone using hollow needles. Apart from the temporary effects of a general anaesthetic, a healthy person should suffer no after-effects. I recommend it, for the sake of those like John, for whom a ‘match' was not found in time.
^fn1

July 29, 1991

^fn1
As a potential donor you need to be between 18 and 40 (unless you are already on the list). By writing to, or phoning, the Anthony Nolan Centre, you will receive an information pack. After you have completed the registration form and returned it, you will be sent a simple blood sample kit. You take this to your GP, give a sample and post it back. This is where you write or phone: The Anthony Nolan Research Centre, PO Box 1767, London NW3 4YR. Telephone: (071) 284 1234.

THERE IS A
scene in my favourite movie,
The Blues Brothers
, in which lovable muso-crooks Jake and Elwood finally reach the centre of Chicago on their ‘mission from God'. Pursued by hordes of police cars and a posse of vicious Country and Western types, the pair manage to stay ahead of the game (and play some great rhythm and blues along the way) thanks to the Bluesmobile, a 1970s former police car, which can turn cartwheels and, if necessary, fly.

On reaching Chicago, however, the Bluesmobile dies. The tyres deflate, the doors and bumpers fall off, the mighty V8 engine gives one last gasp. No matter the approaching sirens, Jake and Elwood stand, heads bowed, in tribute to a faithful friend. Behind those sunglasses there are tears.

Such a moment happened to me the other day. Having been driven at indecent speed all its life and most of mine, my thirty-year-old Baby Hermes typewriter died. Well, almost. This is a sad story with a happy ending.

First, let me describe the machine. It is about twelve inches square, light green and made of steel. Whatever has been said uncharitably about the Swiss, I maintain a respect for those mountain folk, for they made it. Moreover, it has unique features. It has every letter of the alphabet, except ‘k', which fell off in Phnom Penh. It has both pound and dollar sign keys (an exciting innovation at the time) and an exclamation mark (unheard of in a portable). It also has a ‘Sh' key. I don't know what ‘Sh' is, and this is the first time I have hit that key in thirty years. And it has a lid, like a steel trap. Getting the lid off is often impossible due to a dent
received when it was thrown downstairs during a riot at Richard Nixon's nomination in Miami in 1972.

Here I should explain that in the world of technology, I am an alien. I have only just mastered a banker's card. My fax is in the local sweet shop. The owner, Mr Mohammed Afzal, rings me when a fax arrives; we are a smooth team. The truth is I have an affection for ancient belongings and am inclined to venerate them. If belongings define the person, this is a bit worrying. My own Bluesmobile, for example, has been described as the ‘last of the sit-up-and-beg cars' by one of its regular passengers; and while I concede it is a Zephyr of rust, a Zephyr it is. But I digress.

The other day, having completed the ritual shaking in order to get my typewriter's lid off,
everything
came off: the back, the sides, the roller. Every screw popped. This had never happened before.

It had not happened at the Allenby Bridge crossing between Jordan and Israel when an Israeli customs official, having cheerfully snapped each of my cigars and squeezed my toothpaste, ordered me to ‘open that!' When I couldn't, and he couldn't, he picked it up and threw it down on the floor. If he suspected it of being a dangerous device, this was eccentric behaviour. Still, it worked; the lid came off, and not a screw stirred.

The Baby Hermes has survived many such incidents. Since I paid £12 for it in Aden – it was marked down from £15 as a ‘superseded model' – it has sat in my shoulder bag as I have made my way to places of instability and war. Eric Piper, the photographer and dear friend with whom I worked for many years, claimed it saved our skins in El Salvador.

Our car had been stopped by government troops at the foot of the Guazapa volcano. This was not uncommon and always unpleasant. With our legs and arms spread against the car, a jackboot amused himself by slamming the door on Eric's fingers, while another searched the car.

‘What is
this
?' enquired Jackboot No. 2.

‘A typewriter,' I replied.

‘
This
?' he laughed. ‘Open it!'

Eric, who knew the problem of the lid, said, ‘Christ, he'll go crazy.'

When I failed to open it, both jackboots tried and failed. One of them pounded it with his fist, as I have done on occasions. Such was the diversion caused by the mugging of my Baby Hermes, not to mention the general derision arising from the fact that this was the sole equipment of a foreign correspondent, that Eric had time to slip $50 into the palm of Jackboot No. 1; and we were on our way.

I lost it only once: in Shanghai. It was returned to me anonymously two days later in Peking, polished, with my missing laundry attached.

In Mali, in a place called Kayes, said to be the hottest on earth, it was taken hostage by Monsieur Lamez. A bulbous, stone-like figure with almost nothing to say, he was one of six Europeans left behind when the French abandoned this regional centre of their west African empire. He owned the only hotel. In the early morning, between six and seven, Monsieur Lamez would talk to his monkeys. At dusk, he would sit facing his great prison gate and stare through the bars at nothing. When it was time for me to leave, Monsieur Lamez charged me ten times the tariff posted on his wall. I objected, put the correct amount on his desk and left.

When I returned to my room to collect my things, it was empty. The Baby Hermes was missing. ‘I have put it in with the monkeys,' said Monsieur Lamez. ‘When you wish to pay me what I ask, you will get it back.' It was true: the Baby Hermes was nestling in the straw of the monkey cage, with a monkey urinating close by. The mad Lamez laughed. ‘Is my offer not reasonable?' he said. I thanked him for his reasonableness, and paid up.

My friend A. U. M. Fakhruddin loved the Baby Hermes, especially the sound it made: the marvellous resonance, as the key hit the page. (Remingtons sound similar, but not as urgent.) In 1970, Fakhruddin was cultural editor of
Chitrali
, a mass circulation weekly in what was then Dacca. I knew him during the Bengali liberation period that led to the demise of West Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh.

Journalism is a Bengali tradition. Bengali reporters are among the most tirelessly inquisitive news-gatherers in the world. Their reports have a purple eloquence whose origins might be part-Raj and part-Tagore, the Bengali Byron. They are incorrigible romantics; and brave.
Chitrali
had shouted ‘Joi Bangla!' (free Bengal) at the Punjabi occupiers, and its leading lights, like Fakhruddin, lived in constant fear of arrest, and worse. He sometimes hid in my hotel room, where I would return to find him gently tinkering on the Baby Hermes. I wanted to give it to him. The last word I had from him was a page in the roller on which he had typed this from Hamlet's soliloquy:

On the day the Baby Hermes collapsed, I was bereft. So, I'm sure, was Daisy (my cat) who sleeps in the lid as I work. I took it to Dave Smith and Don Large, who run S & L Typewriters in Raynes Park, south London, and whose fine craftsmanship keeps antiques like mine on the road. ‘You realise,' said Dave with due solemnity, ‘unless we can find another like it, its days are numbered.' I asked him to spare nothing in his search, though I could feel a major life change coming on.

For some years, I have listened to my friends and colleagues who have long been computerised. Until recently, they sounded like Moonies or Scientologists, devoted to their new cult. ‘It's so
easy
,' they say. ‘You'll
never
want to go back to (chortle)
that
.' I would point out that the occasional word had been written before Alan Sugar claimed Thatcherite sainthood by selling lots of Amstrads. But my resistance is fragile. My entry into the New Age is imminent; I have consulted a computer doctor who is used to dealing with technological primitives. Also, he runs a rhythm and blues band. Jake and Elwood would surely approve.