Slowing Down (4 page)

I didn’t include this in the article Miss Day admired, but I told her on my return and she was quite tickled.

Now and then Dr Fry would see me. He admitted I had hardly, if indeed at all, improved. I asked him if there was a possible cure (the Dead Sea the exception) and he said no; the trouble being, he explained with mildly cynical resignation, that psoriasis was not a killer, just a burden.

Eventually Miss Day began to lose her grip. The time I spent in the Tardis varied wildly from a few minutes to longer than the statutory half hour. She started to forget our names. Her time was surely drawing to a close. Dr Fry got to know this. I didn’t tell him, I was too fond of her to sneak, but somebody did. He had recently acquired an assistant, a gentle and charming Asian girl, and he sent her down to ‘help’ Miss Day. Miss Day was the opposite of co-operative, let alone grateful, and the girl might as well not have been there. She was not allowed to touch the time switches or address the patients. I suspect, perhaps correctly, that Miss Day saw her as a spy.

One day, after a gap when I revisited Kenya for another newspaper, I came up in the lift to find Miss Day, her plant and radio, gone. Shortly afterwards Dr Fry told me he had
insisted
, and I don’t suppose it was an easy confrontation, that her time was up.

Later, Dr Fry announced that in recognition of long and in recent years voluntary service, they were going to give her a champagne party and a new television set. She had indeed told me some time before that her set was very old and she suspected it might be dangerous. In consequence she never switched it on, but now and then, when passing, would pat it as though it were a dog. They gave her a catalogue and Dr Fry said, with mild irritation, she had chosen the most expensive. I felt, but didn’t say, that she was justified in doing this.

I was very touched to be asked (I half hoped at Miss Day’s request) to her final thrash. It was to be held in a large and fairly new hotel in Marylebone Road shortly after the termination of the West Way and opposite the Western Eye Hospital, a branch of, although separate from, St Mary’s Paddington, and which is later to play an important role in this story. The hotel, its exterior quite impressive in the late-Victorian/Edwardian manner, was, I understood, built as the railways union’s headquarters. Inside it was even more imposing, with huge corridors, an impressive staircase, and a vast lounge with no ceiling but an open prospect right up to the glass dome.

I was not too surprised to be told that it had been a union building because I had visited another branch in Crewe which, while smaller, was equally grand, with elaborately carved wood and stained-glass windows in the Burne Jones
tradition. This conspicious spending is quite explicable, not solely because at the time they were built the railwaymen were considered the aristocrats of the union movement, but also as a case of keeping up with the bosses. This helps explain too why African chiefs, however poor their subjects, are always driven about in huge and expensive cars. There are alas few Gandhis in this world.

There we all gathered, Dr Fry, his wife, various other medicos and of course Miss Day herself. The corks popped, speeches were made, canapés eaten. The very expensive TV wasn’t handed over then because it had already been delivered to the flat in Victoria. Miss Day responded to the speeches and was both brief (always a blessing) and totally without emotion. I felt that even Dr Fry had been proved, by dismissing her, to have feet of clay. She gave the impression that, champagne or no champagne, TV or no TV, she’d much sooner be up in her eyrie asking people when they last had a bath. It was a slightly downbeat affair all round.

Quite soon Dr Fry himself retired and a Dr Powles, a very friendly woman, replaced him.

Not long after that I was crossing Praed Street following a check-up in one department or another en route to a pub, the Fountains Abbey, which conveniently faces the main gates of the hospital, when a cheerful man stopped me. He told me he’d seen me in the psoriasis room in the past. Did I know, there was now a pill which had completely cleared his up? I said I didn’t, but would mention it on my next visit. Dr Powles admitted there was such a pill but was reluctant to prescribe it, as it was very strong and could have serious side effects affecting both the kidneys and the liver.
I told her I was fully prepared to put myself at risk. She said all right – on my own liver and kidneys be it. Dr Powles laid down a condition before prescribing the little yellow pills – frequent blood tests. It’s a tiny price to pay as the skin disease disappeared as if by magic. To date my kidneys and liver are unaffected, although my own doctor, who knows I drink and have drunk all my life, is quite perplexed as to the latter. She says I’m a medical freak.

This chapter is the last for the moment to centre on St Mary’s Hospital. Only for the moment, though. At my age I am like a prisoner on remand.

As a coda, here is the list of the various doctors and surgeons who prod and poke at me at longer or shorter intervals for various possible or proven physical weaknesses. What’s odd though is that most of the time I feel pretty well, even optimistic.

There’s no need to study this list in detail. It’s just to prove I’m not malingering.

Dr Soucer – hearing
Prof. Johnston – endocrinology
Dr Kohn/Elkin – chest and allergy clinic
Dr Mitchell – ditto
Prof. Peters – cardiology
Dr Robinson – hepatology
Prof. Wickramesinghe (Wicks) – haematology.

3. A Fair Cop

‘We’ll overlook it this time, sir,’ said a young policeman with that unique accent a friend of mine has identified as that (although not uniquely so) of Hendon Police College.

I had to admit that it had been ‘a fair cop’ (‘archaic’, surely). I’d been caught pissing up against a wall in a fairly dark alley off the Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush. Knowing I had a card up my sleeve, I was prepared to admit all, including the awareness that I could be charged and fined.

And here I’ll freeze the frame just as the young policeman asks me, ‘And what are we doing here, sir?’ his torch-beam catching the stream of golden urine which surely made his question superfluous.

‘All is not gold that glisters,’ said the monkey as he pissed in the sun.

But why stop the film at this point? Well, it’s not simply to create tension, a sometimes effective device, especially in the cinema, but to own up to a distressing tendency of us old and ageing: a belief that one’s youth was golden, a way to impress anyone under forty. Scornful of this when young oneself, now it’s our turn to bore our younger friends’ children. ‘A night out in the West End including Marie Lloyd cost a halfpenny less than half-a-crown.’ Fade and replace the old Edwardian barrow-boy with me (same pub, same stool). ‘You may not believe this but in the fifties you could have half a dozen oysters in Wheelers, a grilled sole,
cheese and a bottle of house wine for around five pounds.’ Some of my young listeners express, as we did, polite incredulity, masking the acquisition, I suspect, of useful material for future mockery.

The old can be very touching. On television, veterans of the First World War, and the occasional insertion of a faded snapshot of them in uniform at eighteen, can bring a tear to the most cynical eye, but an endless general banging on about past financial advantages (the comparative increase in average wages is seldom brought up) is to be avoided. I pledge here to try to stick to the format under discussion or that, if I find myself wandering off down a side path, this must be fully justified by the relevance of the incident or anecdote. Me and whose army?

On a TV programme the other night we assorted ageing talking heads were meant to reveal what we would have done differently if we’d known at twenty what we know now. It was heavily edited but not unfascinating. Mo Mowlam spoke a lot of good sense, but for me the star of the show was Tony Benn. He came across as consistently honest, even though his views are nationally unpopular, and what’s more he strongly advised us, his contemporaries, not to rub the noses of the young in our ‘glorious past’ – Aldermaston and all that. An admirable piece of counsel.

Joan Rivers was perhaps, on this showing, the antithesis of the ex-pipe-smoking, ex-titled aristocrat. She spoke up in favour of extreme ‘vanity surgery’ without qualification, and in her case with considerable justification.

‘She’s had so many face-lifts, she has to cross her legs to smile.’
Old joke

But her view, insofar as I could judge, was that maintaining youth under the knife attracted money. It would seem to have worked in her case, and she and her rich plain husband fell in love and were happy until he died. As someone pointed out, it’s unfair that men tend to become more attractive in middle age; lines and wrinkles seem to have an aphrodisiace effect. With women it’s the reverse.

There was another American some time back for whom, whatever
she
might think, it had been a disaster. I have forgotten why she was for a short period so often on television or in the papers, perhaps an acrimonious divorce, but she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein in a wind tunnel. The trouble is we love disasters as long as they don’t happen to us. In Terry Gilliam’s brilliant nightmare
Brazil
, there are two women, devotees of plastic surgery. For one it succeeds: she becomes younger and younger throughout the movie. The other, on the contrary, increasingly turns into a wheel-chaired freak. There is a German word,
Schadenfreude
, meaning enjoyment of other people’s mishaps and tragedies but Auden, as so often, found the perfect metaphor:

That we are always glad

When the Ugly Princess, parting the bushes, to find out why

the woodcutter’s children are happy

Disturbs a hornet’s nest…

Joan Bakewell in the ‘What would you have done differently?’ programme was a paragon of tolerance: have a face-lift if it makes you feel better (Bakewell hadn’t, and looked much the most beautiful on the screen); sow your wild oats when young; have fun etc. She is a true libertarian
and stresses that it’s
we
who must decide what we do. Like Terry Gilliam she is against all forms of thought-control, nanny-like rules, fascism in a word, from the imposition of ‘no smoking’ in restaurants, trains and soon bars (and I don’t think she even smokes) to the emergence of a leader with a little moustache and a cow’s-lick of hair. Good old Joan! You are still this ageing, impotent man’s crumpet!

The difficulty of writing about the present is that everything is in flux: one’s feelings, physical degeneration, memory, names, what, being deaf, one has taken in, or even, if one has, remembered. Writing about the past, as I have in the past, is a doddle in comparison because it’s done, it’s set, it’s in three dimensions, the dead walk and talk there. So much was possible, each day might bring a revelation.

Now I sometimes feel like tiny Alice and the animals swimming in her own gargantuan tears. If I also feel like a motherless child, it’s because I am!

Well now, I know you’ve all been straining at the leash to hear the conclusion of my confrontation with the policeman in the Uxbridge Road, W12 – or perhaps not. But still, here it is.

‘If yer wants ter know the time ask a pliceman.’
Old music-hall song suggesting the law nicked the watches from unconscious drunks

I explained to the law that every night I have to take a round white pill in order to expel the excess water from my system and this resulted in six to eight visits to the loo or the use of a hospital bottle if, in a hotel or guest-house, there was no bathroom en suite.

‘I sometimes feel like tiny Alice and the animals swimming in her own gargantuan tears’

‘You take this pill at night, sir?’ the policeman checked, glancing at the same time at his watch. It was about twenty past ten. I admitted I hadn’t taken it yet, but – I suggested he could check with his station’s saw-bones – it could act retrospectively at any time, as I believed sometimes happens with an LSD backflash.

He wasn’t prepared to give up yet, though. ‘Where have you come from?’

‘A Greek restaurant on the other side of the Uxbridge Road.’

‘How far is it?’

‘Past the church and two blocks along. It’s called the Vine Leaves.’

‘And why didn’t you make use of the toilet facilities provided by that establishment?’

‘I didn’t want to at that time. The pill’s demands are instantaneous. You have about ten seconds at most between the pressing need and its fulfilment; unless of course you prefer to wet yourself.’

He stood in thought for some time, a silhouette against the street lamps behind him. Then he passed judgement. ‘Well, sir, this time we’ll overlook it, but next time try not to choose the wall of a police station.’

4. The Oldest Living Surrealist in the World

… and can’t remember who called this morning…

Philip Larkin

He looked at us from his hospital bed, mouth gaping, eyes open so wide as to indicate both bewilderment and mild panic. From time to time he would emit a sound that was almost a word. Before his stroke he’d known us both very well. I’d always thought then that he resembled a small lizard, full of compact energy, liable at any moment to run rapidly up the wall and across the ceiling. No lizard now.