While I was in with Miss Trew, Mum took John with her to the man she called the “thyroid bloke.”
That first day at the Kent and Sussex Hospital sticks in my mind, as does recounting it to Dad, when he came home from work. I was in the dining room—we called it the “middle room” because it was the middle of the three downstairs rooms, situated between the kitchen and sitting room—curled up in an old armchair that my mother used to sit in while nursing my brother when he was a baby. It was a soft chair, one you could sink into and that seemed to envelop you with comfort if you were ill—or if your head hurt. When we arrived home, Mum had covered me with a blanket and placed a cold compress on my eyes in a half-darkness, because the curtains had been drawn and the junior aspirin was doing its best to work magic with my migraine. I liked using this new word to describe the pounding in my head. I heard Mum tell Dad that they were trying to correct my vision with exercises and I had to do them at home, too. I was to wear an eye patch at school for a while—and if that wasn’t an open invitation to my bullies, I don’t know what was. She explained that when I’d reached a certain point, Mr. Coogan would operate. That sounded bad. Then she said something about herself and radioactive iodine, followed by, “They said they’d probably have to take it out, and I told them I wasn’t having that done. Not on your life!” I heard the pressure cooker begin to hiss. “They’re not taking my effing thyroid out so I’ve got a sodding great scar on my neck.” Then the needle torpedoed from the pressure cooker and hit the ceiling.
I think it was “radioactive iodine” that really scared me. I knew what radiation was because I’d watched a science program on the telly. It was all about nuclear bombs, so I’d asked Mum if she knew about these bombs and she said they were made from radioactivity, and then told me all about a very brave woman called Marie Curie. My mum always went the whole hog when you asked her about something, so I ended up thinking that Marie Curie could help my mum with her thyroid, a word that from the start I’d never really heard properly. I called it her “rawhide” because that was a word I could say, given that Rawhide was Dad’s favorite TV show and we watched it with him every Saturday evening. Well, on Saturdays when the tube hadn’t gone.
After months of fortnightly appointments, Mum was still thin, but not losing more weight, and it soon became time for Mr. Coogan to operate on my eyes. Dad gave me a long cuddle on the Monday morning Mum, John and I set off on the early bus, with my change of clothes, pajamas, face cloth and toothbrush in a carrier bag. The night before, Mum had pulled out the tin bath and filled it with hot water from the copper at the side of the stove, so I would be “nice and clean” for the hospital. That bath came out every evening, so I was already nice and clean, as far as I was concerned. She’d even bought me a new dress, navy blue with little kick pleats just above the hem, and a white Peter Pan collar set off by a bow of thin red ribbon. I had new white socks and wore my school shoes—the only good shoes I had, because if I wasn’t at school, I only needed plimsolls, my jelly sandals or my rubber boots. I would be in the hospital until Saturday morning, and Mum had already explained that she’d see me again when she came to collect me—the fare was a lot of money to come visiting. I understood. I was an independent child so I wasn’t scared. Not really. Well, perhaps a little.
Here’s what I remember about that stay in hospital. I wasn’t put into a children’s ward, because children having eye surgery were not allowed to run about and play, and had to remain still. Despite being subject to early 1960s hospital discipline, the children’s ward could be a bit boisterous, because it was understood that play and fun could help children get better. I was put into a room with an elderly lady who was having something done to her eyelashes, which were growing into her eyes. Now that scared me—perhaps more than the radioactive iodine my mum was taking, courtesy of a woman named Marie Curie. “Never mind, love,” my dad had said to Mum. “You might save us money on the electric bill when you start to glow.” The eyelash lady would only be in the bed next to me for twenty-four hours after her operation. I had to stay for all sorts of reasons—my age, the fact that I had to keep quiet and still after they’d done whatever they were going to do to sort out my vision, and I had to ease back slowly into using my eyes after surgery. In short, they wanted to keep an eye on me.
The room had Beatrix Potter characters on the walls, which I thought was a bit babyish, though it was a little more welcoming for children coming in for eye surgery and who couldn’t be placed in the ward with other children. Across the corridor was a large ward with a sign for “Men’s Surgical” and at the far end of a long hallway was “Women’s Surgical.” I had no idea what those things meant. In between was the sterilizing room with something called an “autoclave” and there was also “Sister’s Office” as well as a kitchen and a break room for the nurses.
The morning after the operation my eyes were stuck together underneath big pads and I couldn’t make them open no matter how hard I tried. Then my favorite nurse came in—I recognized her by her soft voice. She was tall and blonde and wore her hair in a French twist under her cap. I knew from Emergency Ward 10 on TV, which I watched every week, that her ornate belt meant she was the Staff Nurse, just one promotion away from being a Sister—who had responsibility for that whole floor of wards. It was a matriarchal system, and you never saw nurses move so fast as when word went around that Matron was on her way to inspect the ward. Even doctors could get shaky when Matron was on her rounds—especially the younger ones, who Matron always saw fit to put in their place. The following year, I wrote to Matron asking her if I could be a nurse at the hospital when I left school, and she kindly replied, encouraging me to study hard for my O levels first. Some years later, when I was a live-in volunteer at a residential school for disabled children, most of whom had spent a good deal of their childhood in hospital, I understood why almost all the girls wanted to become nurses at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children when they grew up. Nurses were the source of comfort at the scariest of times.
I liked the caps the nurses wore and the navy blue capes with a red lining they’d take off when they came on duty, or put on when they left at the end of a shift. I also liked the idea of living away from The Terrace in a nurses’ home with other girls. From Emergency Ward 10, I knew nurses had lots of fun when they weren’t running with bedpans back and forth to that thing called an autoclave.
Staff Nurse lifted away the pads and with soft cotton cloths she bathed my eyes until all the sticky stuff was gone. I’d never felt such smooth hands against my skin—it was a luxurious sensation. I hated the eye drops that followed, but I loved the way she helped me out of bed and took me by the hand to the bathroom, where she ran a bath for me and made me feel so cocooned with caring. Every day Staff Nurse came to my room in the morning, switched on the hospital radio and bathed the sticky stuff from my crusty eyes so I could open them. I loved her. And so did Mike, the male nurse. I knew Nurse Mike loved her because of the way he looked at her and made her blush, which made him blush too. He was tall and young and good looking, and as he walked down the corridor toward Men’s Surgical he’d spot Staff Nurse in the corridor and start singing “Be-bop-a-lula, She’s My Baby,” glancing in to see me, as if he meant the song for me, but I knew it was for my Staff Nurse.
On the third day Staff Nurse let me help with taking round the Guinness to the patients in Men’s Surgical, only I didn’t touch the bottles of Guinness. Instead I helped with filling the water glasses. It was common for hospitals to give patients—especially the men—one bottle of Guinness each day if the doctor decreed it could be tolerated, because it’s filled with vitamins and it lifted the spirits, in the same way that a bit of play helped the children. Years later, when my mother was admitted to the local hospice, the doctor came in to see her and the first thing she asked was, “Would you like a drink, Mrs. Winspear?” My mother smiled at the doctor, a coy smile. “Do you mean, a drink drink?” The doctor nodded. “Well, th
en,” said my mother, “I wouldn’t mind a nice cream sherry.” So the doctor left the room and came back with a nice cream sherry for a dying woman.
One day I got Nurse Mike into trouble. I wasn’t allowed to read and I wasn’t supposed to run, but by day four I was getting a bit fizzy. I loved the hospital radio, and I loved it when Nurse Mike passed and heard a song he liked, because he’d come in and we’d sing together, especially if it was my favorite, “Little White Bull,” by Tommy Steele, which seemed to be playing all the time. And of course, we liked Tommy Steele in our house, because he was a Bermondsey boy—local boy made good from my parents’ part of London. Nurse Mike would sing along with Tommy, and I’d join in to shout the refrain: Little White Bull!
The singing was all very well until the day I decided to run to find Staff Nurse. Was I about to try matchmaking? Probably not deliberately, but I loved to watch him sing when she walked by. I ran from the room and Nurse Mike came after me, calling out for me to stop. I thought he was chasing me in fun, so I giggled and ran a bit faster, but came tumbling down to the floor with a great whack that brought Staff Nurse from the kitchen just as Nurse Mike bent down to pick me up.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, hands on hips.
“It wasn’t Nurse Mike,” I confessed. “I ran.”
“Well, now you’ve got to lie down on your bed.”
Poor Nurse Mike was told to sort out Mr. So-and-so in Men’s Surgical, and Staff Nurse took me to my room, where I had to rest on my bed with the curtains drawn and the radio off. I woke up when I heard voices in the corridor outside my room. Auntie Iris, Dad’s cousin, had come with Uncle Reg, her husband. They were my godparents, and had come down from London on their motorbike to see me, bringing me a gift. A gift! A gift for having an eye operation! It was a small overnight case with a rounded top of the type fashionable with women at the time. Auntie Iris used one for her knitting and I’d admired it weeks ago when they’d visited us—that bag fetish meant I was very observant when it came to women’s bags and purses. At that point they didn’t have children, so they often came to see me, their only godchild. I don’t remember much about the visit, except they were both wearing leather jackets and trousers, and carried crash helmets. Uncle Reg was a policeman and was apparently an expert police driver, so they always had crash helmets, which at that time were not required under the law. But I loved that case and was thrilled to have something better than a carrier bag to take my clothes home in. And going home was getting closer.
My mother held me to her when she walked into the room on the day of my discharge, and I discovered later it was because looking at my blood-filled eyes and the large bruises that extended down to my cheeks had almost caused her to faint, though she wasn’t the fainting sort. I didn’t know how my eyes looked, because there were no mirrors in the bathrooms. My parents had been warned to remove all mirrors in the house until my eyes had healed. I was given a pair of special sunglasses to wear as I left the hospital, and was instructed to keep them on whenever I went outside in the sunshine, just for a few weeks. Mum let me wear my new navy blue dress home, and Staff Nurse had braided my hair. I knew I would miss her soft hands around my eyes in the morning because my mother’s were rough and worn from the farm.
Though I had no idea what my eyes looked like, I knew something was wrong when we stopped outside a shop on the way to the bus stop. I was in the shade, so I thought it was okay for me to take off the dark glasses. A woman passing gasped and frowned at my mother.
“If you think that girl wearing those glasses is going to stop people knowing you’ve beaten your child, you’ve got another think coming.”
I know my mother was about to give the woman “a piece of her mind” and it might have even been “a mouthful,” which was a much bigger piece of her mind altogether. But instead she turned to me.
“Put your glasses on, Jackie—you know what the doctor said. And tell the lady why you’re wearing them.”
I looked at the woman through a foggy dark veil. “I had my eyes operated on so I could see properly.”
The woman put her hand to her mouth and rushed away.
“Silly cow,” said my mother. Then added. “But I’m glad she noticed. Next time it could be another child, and she could be right.” Mum looked at her watch, and slapped it to make sure the time was right. “Come on, let’s go to British Home Stores for a cup of tea before we get the bus.”
Dad was anxious to see me so he came home early—he always worked on Saturdays—and he didn’t go out to work at his second job after tea that night. He was hardly able to talk when I ran into his arms, because seeing my poor black and blue eyes and cheeks had startled him.
“Come on, let’s have a look at these new eyes,” he said when he’d caught his breath. Having pulled me away to inspect the doctor’s handiwork, he told me they were smashing eyes, that old Coogan had done me proud. He looked up at Mum and held me close again. “Never mind, love,” he assured me. “It’s over now, and anyway, you watch—this time next year, we’ll be laughing.”
Dad had thrown out that mystical line into the future once again, the grappling hook landing in the rock of tomorrow, ready for us to pull ourselves in toward better times. At once the kitchen seemed to light up and the table was filled with plenty. All would be well. We just had to wait another year.
Then the knitting needle exploded out of the pressure cooker and hit the ceiling.
15
The Fledgling Writer
I decided I wanted to be a writer on one of those long journeys to and from the ophthalmology department at the Kent and Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells. Mum hated being on the top deck of the bus, but on our return journey, she always gave in to my brother’s desire to sit upstairs right at the front so he could pretend to be the driver. By the time we clambered aboard, I was so tired, I just wanted to fall asleep with my head resting on my mother’s lap as she ran her hand across my hair.
As the bus rumbled along following my first day as an ophthalmology department patient, I had almost drifted off, my eyes weary from putting the rabbit in the hutch, the dog in the kennel and the horse in the stable, time and time again. I was nursing a migraine from following the tiny light and Miss Trew’s pointed finger—up and down, side to side, here to there. Soon the bus pulled up to a halt for Pembury passengers to get off and new passengers to get on. I glanced down into the bay window of the Edwardian villa situated alongside the bus stop, then sat up to take account of what I saw before me. A desk was situated in the bay window to the right of the door, probably to take advantage of the light, even though there was a tall hedge between the villa’s small front garden and the street—I could only see in because I was on the top deck of the bus. There was a typewriter on the desk, a pile of books to one side and sheaf of papers on the other. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter. A cup and saucer had been set just in front of the books and a cardigan had been draped over the back of the chair. Every wall in the room beyond was covered with bookcases. I didn’t think ordinary people could own so many books. I could just about see coals burning in the fireplace. Whoever lived in the house had probably just left that room. I wanted very much to see the person who owned all the books—but the bus moved off.
A fortnight later, I was ready at the bus window when we reached Pembury. Some of the books had been moved from the desk and a clutch of papers had been laid across the top of the typewriter. There was a cup and saucer as before, and a fire alight in the grate.
“Mum—Mum, come here.” I was sitting farther back in the bus than my mother and brother, who were right at the front, my brother’s hands stretched out, gripping that imaginary steering wheel.
My mother turned around. “What is it? Do you feel sick? I’ve got a magic penny for you.”
I shook my head and beckoned to my mother. “Come here, quick . . . quick, before the bus leaves again.”
Mum left her seat and leaned across me to look in the direction I was pointing.
“Who do you think lives in that house?”
She stared, squinting her eyes. “I reckon that’s a writer’s study—yes, I would imagine a writer lives there.”
I nodded, staring at the typewriter, the desk, the pile of books, the sheaf of papers, and the cup and saucer. Then I looked at the library beyond, and the fireplace with hot coals in the grate. I loved this room.
“I’m going to be a writer when I grow up,” I declared.
My mother didn’t miss a beat. “Well, you’ll need another string to your bow, my girl. Something to fall back on, if you want to be a writer. Be a teacher, or something like that. You can’t just be a starving writer in a garret.”
Then she sat down beside me. I rested my head on her lap, tired and starting to feel sick again, so she pressed a magic penny into my palm. As my brother made engine sounds at the front of the bus, turning a steering wheel only he could see, I closed my eyes and fell asleep wondering what a second string to your bow meant. I’d have to find out, because I was determined to become a writer one day, even if I had to starve in a garret, whatever that was.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 14