Pilcrow (24 page)

Perhaps there was an extra factor at work. Sometimes it happens that a mundane communication taps into a deeper source of meaning. A buried spiritual charge turns ordinary lower-case sentences into commands blazing with capitals and italics, all the curlicues of
presence
, so that a debatable proposition is instantly proven. Not that Dr Duckett was necessarily a spiritually commanding figure. The guru is a dispersed function as well as a real presence. The guru can
requisition
any tongue, speak out of any mouth at any time. And so Mum had followed Dr Duckett’s directions, even though my immediate and seeming health relapsed dramatically as a result of her obedience.

My dreams of pushing Peter over, of being punished, of not wanting to go to bed in case I never got out again, all these were memories of a real period of two weeks when I was five. It’s just that it was so unlike the experience of what came before and after that I meekly
relegated
it to the category of the nightly unreal.

Guru or no guru, Dr Duckett was a religious man, which in a strange way may explain his resistance to the wonder drug of the era, even when he saw its effects at first hand. Rather than actually
restoring
people to health perhaps he saw himself as ministering to the sick. He had the pessimism I have often noticed in practitioners of
conventional
medicine.

While I was in the hospital at Taplow he gave me a Bible. I had a Bible-cull a few years ago, when I was feeling particularly got at by the local Christians, and it’s the only Christian book to have escaped. A whole box of holy tomes was lugged down to the charity shop, but this one survived the purge.

Only when I looked again at the book, at the time of that cull, did I see that my doctor’s name was actually Ducat. Ducat like the money in Shakespeare. Ducat like the middle part of
educate
. His name was imprinted on my mind for all those years, yes, but misprinted.

And there were other misprints involved with this phase of my
history
. He had dated his gift – 14th May 1957 – and written simply ‘Psalm 37:5’. I looked up the passage referred to, rather dreading that it might be that old chestnut, ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’ which despite its rather withering Old Testament feel comes from the Sermon on the Mount. In my judgement it’s only later that the Sermon hits its stride, with the idea that we should take no thought for the morrow – one of those moments when Jesus was really on to something.

Dr Ducat’s passage was a little different. Psalm 37:5 reads:
¶ Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass
. Inspirational too in its own way, I suppose, and certainly more tactful. Nice use of the semi-colon, too. I always loved the
Gothic-looking
backwards P which started the verse. I imagined it as a way of writing down the blast of a trumpet or ram’s horn, to announce
Hear ye the Word of the Lord
. Typographical shawms or sackbuts – instruments made even more potent by the fact of my not knowing what they sounded (or even looked) like.

I was surprised to see, on the flyleaf under Dr Ducat’s writing, two citations in my own sub-standard hand: ‘Mark XII: 7’ and ‘Luke VI: 20’. I looked them up, wondering what it was about those passages that had so struck me. I didn’t remember being particularly
enraptured
by the Bible at the time, even the pretty bits, and these seemed quite ordinary verses. Then I realised that it was misprints I was
noting
down: ‘our’s’ and ‘your’s’, both with apostrophes. Shame on Eyre and shame on Spottiswoode. Shame on Eyre & Spottiswoode both. Even at that age I was literal-minded, always on the lookout for typos. I couldn’t help myself. It was a strongly rooted instinct. Blessed are the proofreaders, for they shall seek sense. They will read everything twice.

¶In fact in those days what I most enjoyed about the Bible was the richly plain typography and the layout of the verses. ¶I never lost my love for the little sign that introduced a new section. It seemed holy in itself. I was quite shocked the first time I saw it in an ordinary secular book, as if I had bumped into a bishop in full fig at the supermarket.

On the cortisone question, as it happens, I think Duckett (I can’t get used to ‘Ducat’) was absolutely right. Cortisone betrayed my
generation
of Still’s Disease patients. It stole their minds while it was supposed to be helping their bodies. One of the girls on the ward had a lively intelligence, a mental age of ten before she reached that
birthday
. Cortisone wore her away inside and out. When she was thirty she still had a mental age of ten, and she died before she got to thirty-one.

I don’t regret my distinction, among Still’s patients of my age, in being free of steroids except for those two hallucinatory weeks. I had a lucky escape. On that basis I have to be grateful, too, for the
misdiagnosis 
of rheumatic fever, without which I would have been put on cortisone as a matter of course, to keep my bones soft. Nowadays the wisdom is to administer steroids for short periods only. They relieve symptoms without getting involved with underlying causes.

If I’d been prescribed the stuff at three, I’d have been on it for the duration, and I think cortisone would have done to me what it was doing to so many of the children on Wards One and Two at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital. It was giving them moon faces and weakening their resistance to other infections. By affecting the pituitary gland, which regulates growth, it kept them small and I’m convinced it stunted their mental growth also.

You’ll never read it stated in black and white that cortisone was the guilty party. I know because I’ve looked in all the right places. To me, though, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that John Cromer, the one who missed out on the wonder drug, was the one who did some
definite
growing, and didn’t have his mental age stolen by the same thief that took the pain away.

So I have every reason to thank Dr Duckett for his withdrawing of the wonder drug, whether his cavils were amplified by a mystical principle or not. Yes, I know, I hardly seem worth God’s trouble. There has always been a small voice, when I think along these lines, asking the question internally, where on earth do you get the nerve to assume you qualify for divine intervention? Luckily there’s also always been an internal voice, somewhat louder, asking me where on earth I would get the nerve to assume I don’t.

At Taplow Dr Ansell became part of my daily, or at least my weekly life. She was strict, but then no one in hospitals was anything else in those days. She didn’t tolerate nonsense, but there was no one there who did, and most of the things which excited my imagination received the label of nonsense. Still, Ansell was a definite force for good. She would say quite cheerfully, ‘I know they all say “Here comes Old Bossyboots” when I come onto the ward,’ which was
perfectly
true, though she wasn’t old, not much older than Mum. And she was loved as well as feared.

I’m sure that if Ansell had witnessed my bedpan torments she might have come up with a solution, but of course I wouldn’t be
bed-panned
while she was doing her rounds. I suppose I could even have told her about it, but I didn’t think of that.

The only thing I didn’t like about Ansell was the way she would talk nicely to me, asking how I felt and being completely friendly, and then she turned to the other members of the medical staff and started murmuring long words to them. I wanted to hear what the words were, and what they meant. If they were long and hard to
pronounce
, if they bristled with ‘æ’ and ‘œ’s, then all the better as far as I was concerned. Difficulty was an enticement not an obstacle. The easy things in life were hard for me, so why shouldn’t the hard ones be easy? I longed to be an initiate. An initiate of what? That was less important at the time. The need precedes the object it selects.

It was my bad luck that it was a point of principle back then, in medical circles, not to listen to the patient. It was virtually a
sub-clause
of the Hippocratic Oath.

I had the most violent nosebleeds in those early days at Taplow, abrupt cataracts of the vital essence. I connected them in my mind with the pills I was given, and asked the doctors if they might be the cause. They just laughed and said, ‘Don’t be so silly, John, it’s only aspirin!’

This didn’t stop me feeling that my body was registering
objections
on the cellular level every time I had a dose of aspirin. When enough signatures had been gathered, those objections issued as a petition, in the form of blood from my nose. And still nobody paid the blindest bit of notice.

Nowadays the rare reaction to aspirin in childhood is an
acknowledged
fact. It’s called Reye’s Syndrome. Back then its only name was ‘John being silly’. Eventually they stopped giving me aspirin and the nosebleeds stopped also, but either nobody made the connection, or they didn’t want me to know I had been cheeky enough to be right all along about what was going on in my body.

The nurse in charge of Ward One, including the side ward where I was kept for the time being, was Sister Heel. She had introduced
herself
to me, and I had noticed that her skin was creased and cracked like worn leather, like the brown shoes that Mum didn’t wear for best. I hadn’t really met her, though, in the sense of becoming acquainted with her personality. I didn’t meet her in her essential form until she was out of the room, and I heard her giving a thorough scolding to one of her underlings.

In fact what I heard was a series of crashing noises, and Sister Heel’s voice baying over everything. At first I thought that some poor trainee nurse was so terrified of Sister that she had simply dropped a tray of tea things, but it wasn’t that at all. It was Sister Heel doing the smashing, with a fierce relish. The noise it all made would make a wedding party in a Greek restaurant seem quite muted in
comparison
. After a bit I could make out the words. What she was saying was, ‘I’ve told you TIME and TIME and TIME AGAIN!’ and each
emphasised
word coincided with a loud ceramic smash.

She was telling them that cracked cups were worse than useless and should be broken outright. ‘A crack in a cup’, she crowed, ‘is an open invitation to germs.’ Not that germs would dare to multiply in her presence, her very voice would sterilise them. ‘If you wish to drink from unhygienic crockery, then you will do so in your own time and from your own dirty cups. No patient of mine will be exposed to infection because of the laxness of the staff. Is that understood?’

A voice hardly audible. ‘Yes, Sister.’

‘I couldn’t hear that.’

‘Yes, Sister!’

‘Now clear up this mess and know better in future.’

The country might be on its knees after a heroic, self-sacrificial war, the National Health Service still struggling to be born out of the ashes of a vanished prosperity, but there was no excuse for a hospital cup having a crack in it.

In fact the economic aspects of the place were oddly unpredictable. We slept between linen sheets as a matter of course, like royalty, sheets washed and ironed in the hospital’s own laundry. Ansell insisted on this extravagance – we were children, after all, who spent more than the usual amount of time in bed. The linen even had a wholesome taste against the tongue.

The discrepancy between the smoothness of the sheets we slept between and the roughness of the ones that were scraped against our tender little bums was part of the mystery of the place. In an
institution
where we had to have our bottoms wiped for us, by nurses whose tenderness was very variable, soft tissue would have made quite a
difference
, taking the abrasion factor out of the brusquer wipings.

Somehow Sister Heel was so terrifying she shot off the scale and blew back in at the other end, as a hurricane of reassurance. It made me feel better to know that she had the staff running round in small circles. She didn’t have anything that corresponded to the modern term ‘people skills’. She just shouted at the world until it fell into line, usually sooner rather than later.

Sister Heel wanted our ‘bowels opened’ daily. She would come round with Senokot for those whose bowels hadn’t been shrewd enough to take the hint. So we learned to lie, to say we’d opened them even if we hadn’t. This might work for a single day, but no longer. Then it was Senokot in a double dose. I wondered if this was the same as the castor oil which Mum remembered with such revulsion. Perhaps they’d just changed the name. Then I realised that if I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t do tuppennies, however much Senokot I was given, and I was very tempted to go without. No tuppennies – no bedpan torture.

It was extraordinary to learn that there was an authority even higher than Sister Heel. Matron was over and above everything, over all the sisters and nurses. She also seemed to have established a sort of dominance over the doctors. I heard that even Ansell went rather quiet when she approached. Matron was to Heel as Granny was to Mum. I could hardly imagine a person so formidable.

One day from my side ward I heard a cadet nurse sobbing in the
little
corridor, then a voice of familiar huskiness.

‘Just learn to pull yourself together, my girl!’ Heel was telling her roughly. ‘I have no control over thermometer stock here. When you break one, you have to report to Matron to get a new one. Yes, of course you’ll get a scolding. You will indeed. As did we all!’

That word ‘scolding’ was full of fascination for me. Mum had told me about what happened when hot liquid fell on the skin, about scalding and the rawness and blistering that followed. Bad scaldings never really healed. It stood to reason that a scolding was a verbal scalding, when someone else’s mind boiled over on you, like milk on top of a stove. If ever I became too cocky, too knowing, too plain happy, I’d get a scolding. Someone would be sure to say, ‘You’re
getting
too big for your boots.’ That’s to say, too big for my built-up shoes. ‘You need to be taken down a peg or two.’ I was always being told about pride going before a fall. I didn’t know why that proverb seemed to have my name on it.

It was thrilling to imagine Heel as a cadet herself, trembling before the mighty Matron. Interesting too that Heel, while informing the poor cadet about hospital procedure, was also delivering a scolding of her own. A scolding about a scolding, a scolding to tell her about the scolding she’d get from Matron. How fascinating! I reasoned that if Heel could scold the ward, and Matron could scold the hospital, then there must be someone who had the power to scold Matron, and
calculated
that there must be some kind of Super-Matron of all England who had the power to scold any matron in any hospital in the
country
. But who would have the power to scold her? My mind just
naturally
lost itself in such cosmological labyrinths.

So when I was told Matron was doing her rounds and would be
visiting
me in my side ward, I was distinctly nervous. It made sense that she would be completely terrifying. I hoped she would just take a quick look at me and go out again. I didn’t think I could stand being on the receiving end of Matron’s rough tongue. When Heel licked cadet nurses into shape, after all, they might sob for hours.

Then when Matron swept in at the head of a train of attendants it was a delicious surprise. She wore a purple uniform, which I
immediately
loved, and a starched hat which fitted tightly round her head, splaying out in a pleated fan around her shoulders like a peacock’s tail upside-down. The world went very still when she came in. This
wasn’t
an enforced or punitive silence but a rapt stillness, hushed and attentive.

‘Good morning, John,’ she said.

‘Good morning, Matron,’ I replied.

‘Sister Heel tells me you were admitted last week, so I want to say how sorry I am that I have not visited you earlier. I hope all the nurses have been making you feel comfortable and At Home?’

They hadn’t, or not all of them had, but Matron was so nice I
wasn’t
going to squeal on the ones who wiped my bottom harshly. It would have made more sense to appeal for an improvement in the quality of the paper itself, but I didn’t think of that.

‘It’s a little strange here,’ I said, ‘but I’m starting to get used to it. I’m very happy to meet you, Matron.’

‘It’s entirely my pleasure, John,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that I am very busy at the moment, but I shall make time soon to pay a longer visit and get to know you better.’

‘I would like that very much, Matron.’

‘I hope you feel, John, that if anything is worrying you, or even if there is anything you do not understand – I hope you will send word to me any time you want. Say you have my express permission. Can you remember that, John? “Express permission”?’

‘Yes, Matron,’ I whispered. ‘“Express permission from Matron”. Thank you very much.’ I was really beginning to understand the phrase ‘angel of mercy’. As the purple vision withdrew from my side ward with her retinue, I heard her murmur, ‘What
beautiful
manners! Such a treat in this day and age. If only we could …’ But then the end of the sentence was swallowed up by the sounds of the ward.

This was the longest conversation I had had with anyone in Taplow – and it had been with Matron! It was balm, it was soul-ointment, and I basked in the glow of it. I began to think that the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital might be the right place for me after all.