Mr Vogel

by Lloyd Jones

  With this Waldo got up and prepared to depart.

  ‘Among all this linguistic carnage I have one positive story to tell you – every massacre has a survivor,’ he said. ‘In a tiny corner of Lower Saxony there’s a slip of a language called Sater Frisian which is spoken by about 2,000 people in just three villages – and it’s growing. Look on the bright side!’

  He added, with a trace of sarcasm: ‘When do we put Plan A into operation then?’

  ‘Next Monday. I’ve arranged for you to see the hospital administrator. He’s a very nice man. Very accommodating. He’s looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘You knew I would say yes?’

  ‘Yep. By the way, here’s another little bit of information for your factfile. In your first week at Gobowen you were strapped onto a metal frame which held you tight and which made movement almost impossible – you were effectively tied down, like Gulliver, for over a year, but you could move your arms and your head. You had two leather straps around each leg, in your groin, and you still have the marks of those straps on either side of your unmentionables. A weight was attached to your left foot to act as a drag, to encourage your left hip to regenerate. The frame was called a Jones Frame, after its inventor, Dr Robert Jones, who believed that immobility and plenty of fresh air was the best cure for cripples. He was right in your case, because you have no aftereffects of Perthes’ Disease and you have been spared a lifetime in callipers, or having to walk in a clumpy shoe with a built-up sole. The only physical mementoes you have of that year in your life are small white scars on your hips, the result of corrective surgery, the white strap-marks, and an over-correction in your left leg, which means that it points straight in front of you when you walk, rather than at a quarter to three like the rest of the yokels round here.’

  Waldo smiled and went through the door, his hound leaping and bouncing after him. They left me sitting in the dark, with my teddies and my memories.

  The next stage of the search for Vogel was in place.

  There was one thing left to do before I headed for my bed, and that was to choose the second person to join us at our last supper in the Blue Angel, following the end of the quest. I had no doubt who it would be. Doctor Robert Jones, who would sit alongside doughty old Hotty, Hugh Owen Thomas, at a table in the snug so that they could talk about the old days at 11 Nelson Street.

  Robert Jones, with his white hair, droll walrus moustache and his studious, steel-rimmed glasses. I have an immediate reference point: he was born in Rhyl, although he was brought up in London. I have a picture of him in my mind: his eyes have seen many profound experiences, and in those pupils I see a deep compassion.

  I think I have told you enough about Dr Jones, but let’s imagine a few snippets from his conversation with Hotty after they have received warm greetings from their ex-patients, who have shuffled into the snug to greet them, smiling but unsure what to do next. Robert Jones will want to catch up on family news; his father was a journalist, and he has a knack of gleaning information quickly. Robert Jones went to live with Hotty and his Aunt Elizabeth in Liverpool when he was seventeen.

  ‘I’ve never told you this,’ he’ll say, ‘because I thought you might tick me off for gadding about when I could be ministering to your patients in Nelson Street. Do you remember that week when I passed my primaries in anatomy and physiology at Lincoln’s Inn?’

  ‘I do indeed, Robert... after all, you were only a boy, and quite carried away by your own brilliance.’

  ‘Well I’m afraid Daddy and I were quite outrageous and spent three days on the town. We saw Moody and Sankey, Dr Joseph Parker, the Royal Academy, the Albert Hall, Crystal Palace, Patti at the opera, Salvini the great Italian actor, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. What a week that was.’

  ‘Tell me Robert, what were those Navvies like on the Manchester Ship Canal? You must have had a devil of a job with them, drunk and riotous...’

  ‘They were like warriors Hugh Owen, like soldiers at the front. The dangers they faced were almost as great as facing battery rounds from the German trenches...’

  ‘Tell me Robert, how did you get hold of that X-ray contraption? It changed our craft for ever...’

  ‘From Mrs Wimpfheimer, that fussy woman who helped us at the Sunday clinics, actually – she translated an article from the Frankfurter Zeitung and I crossed over to the continent immediately. I think I’m right in saying that Dr Holland and I were the first to use the X-ray in this country... we used a little tube and developed a photograph of a small bullet embedded in a boy’s wrist.’

  Robert Jones was physically exuberant, a keen all-round athlete – an excellent shot, a cricketer, a horseman and a boxer. He liked organising boxing bouts with his friends and had a huge collection of books about boxing.

  ‘Tell me Robert, what was the name of that American boxer who cried in terror and ran out of the surgery when you tried to treat him... Sullaman or something.’

  ‘It was John Sullivan. Saw him again when I was staying in a hotel in Washington. Massive man. Saw Dempsey beat Carpentier too, and Jimmy Wilde go down before Pancho Villa. One of those big boxers came to me once and I made him lie on the floor ready for treatment. I said to him, I seem to have seen you in this position before my man...’

  ‘Very droll Robert. But I think it was teaming up with that little Hunt woman which was the making of you.’

  Robert Jones first became involved with Agnes Hunt when she took some of her young patients in a home-made handcart to his clinic at a hospital in Liverpool.

  ‘She was a rare bird, that one,’ he murmurs.

  He visited a new home at Baschurch in Shropshire, set up by Agnes and her mother – the first open-air home for crippled children. Through sunshine and storm, snow and sleet, one side of the shed or ward was always open.

  ‘It was an inspiring sight to visit the children,’ says Robert Jones. ‘Such rampant gaiety. Infectious diseases rarely spread, not even the dreaded pneumonia. I went there every Sunday morning by car with my dogs in the back.’

  ‘Ah well, Robert, you certainly completed what I started. Well done my boy. But don’t forget, you ate up all the knowledge of the bonesetters too! And you borrowed one of my little ideas, I seem to recall, to save all those soldiers in the war, aint that so?’

  It was so. The Thomas Splint, strapped to the soldier’s leg immediately after the injury and before the victim was taken to a clearing station, reduced mortality in compound fractures of the femur from 80% to 20%. It was close to a miracle – many thousands of lives were saved.

  ‘My dear chap, I hear the war made you a household name throughout the world,’ says Hotty, shaking his head with pride.

  That shipwrecked boy sowed the seed of modern orthopaedics, and Robert Jones, in the post-war years until his death, attempted to take all the lessons learned from the war to the civilian populations of Britain and America, to treat every potential cripple. It is Dr Robert Jones, more than anyone, who rid our city streets and our country cottages, gleaming white in the sun but concealing a dark secret, of all those wasted lives.

  Dr Jones, please join us at the Blue Angel.

  THE PHOTOGRAPH

  WALDO came whistling down the path with a triumphant, supercilious look plastered all over his face so I knew he’d found something. He wore a voluminous white coat stretching down to his feet; fortunately it hid most of his pendulous midriff – that blubbery mass saddling his central regions like a glob of glacial moraine. His attempt at a shave looked like the residue of a child’s experiment with a magnet and iron filings. As soon as he stepped inside my door he whipped off the top layer, exposing his usual coating, a frayed and emulsion-speckled pair of overalls, which somehow reminded me of a Papuan native in full war paint. He had a large black and white photograph in his hand, which he waved with a childish and idiotic gesture – he was Chamberlain wagging his bit of paper from the plane steps. But though exuberant, Waldo played me like a fish before giving me his catch.

 
; ‘Tell me, my old friend, do you intend writing about this peregrination of yours before shuffling off the mortal coil? A few ruminations? Will you be our new Baedeker, the latest Theroux, our own Dr Johnson? No, not Johnson – he hated the wild bits of Wales didn’t he. Something modern and provocative, another Landor’s Tower perhaps. No, you couldn’t manage that, could you?’

  ‘Just shut up, Waldo.’

  I was in a foul mood. Emmeline hadn’t replied to any of my love-ciphers.

  No cheeping bloody starling had arrived on my windowsill with a message tied to its wing, leg, wherever you tie messages to starlings. Neck perhaps.

  During that day on the Dyke I thought we looked great together, side by side: hadn’t Wales been joined to North America once upon a time, hadn’t we leant on each other like two plates in a washing-up rack, in the kitchen of creation, when Baby Earth was still pumping volcanic squitters into its crusty nappy?

  If Wales and America were drifting a couple of inches away from each other every year, me and that American temptress, with her too-wide smile and her scented city chit-chat, were moving apart at a million miles a minute. She’d given Wales a good push with her oar when she left and sent me flying. I was really mad with her.

  She’d told me that the hedges of Wales reminded her of Clark Gable’s moustache in Gone With the Wind. By now I hoped a hurricane had sucked her into the sky, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Curse her, and a pox on Wales too for allowing us to meet in the first place.

  Waldo persisted. ‘Well, what’s the answer? Where will you begin? With the Red Lady of Paviland perhaps, or with that tooth from Pontnewydd Cave?’

  ‘Come on, let me see it Waldo, don’t fool around.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll start with the dinosaur footprints at Sully,’ Waldo droned on.

  He was trying to be really smart. Waldo my great chum, my old pal, was roaming around the room like a clockwork troll high on Duracell.

  My mind flitted to some of my high-points: those towering south Glamorgan cliffs, once under a shallow Mediterranean sea, or perhaps the Pembrokeshire coast, which had been higher than the Swiss Alps in the world’s infancy.

  ‘Come on, give me a clue,’ said Waldo.

  He sat down in his usual chair with his legs right out and his chin on his chest. In that position his belly reminded me of the burial chamber at Bryn Celli Ddu, a large grass-covered mound in Anglesey. One day, while I stood regarding the chamber, a mole had started rising on it, creating a little animal pimple on a bigger human pimple. It seemed neat, almost allegorical.

  ‘Let me see it Waldo.’

  ‘You will see it, my man, you will see it indeed, but not before you’ve answered my question. Two can play the guessing game. And you’ve kept us all waiting long enough for just a clue about your interest in this Vogel character. Don’t try to tell me, for one nanosecond, that your sole interest is the Vogel Papers. Because I can sniff you as well as my dog, and I know that you’re hiding a bone. You want to see this photograph far more than a mere bystander would, and your pediculous rovings through Wales’s private parts betray a man who has seen a pirate’s map and wants to reach the treasure as soon as possible. So, speak – where will you start your story? I intend to give you one morsel of information for each titbit you give me.’

  I saw that my rotund little friend was in frolicsome mood, so after a few hums and a few haws I answered his question.

  ‘All right, Waldo, I will play your little game. My first choice would be a little place called Portskewett in the shadow of the new Severn Bridge. It’s mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles – some obscure king, Caradog Freichras or someone like that, put himself out to grass there. Viking cloak-fasteners found on the foreshore. It’s that place where a few men still fish for salmon on rocks in the river, with bigger versions of those pole-nets that kids use on the beach. Lots of Parliamentary soldiers were drowned there when they were tricked by the ferrymen who had taken Charles across and wanted to give him a head start. There’s a large Iron Age fort on the banks of the Severn, with one edge nibbled away by the river – it reminded me of a jam tart which has been gnawed on but returned hurriedly to the pile by a child who’s heard his mother’s footsteps in the hall. Apparently the estuary is fairly new, if you know what I mean, and the Severn Channel was a shallow valley when the hill fort was in use. The really striking thing about this fort is that there’s a football pitch smack bang in the middle of it. The whole thing’s a metaphor. New gods for old. Let me put it like this. If an Iron Age man walked through that door now, teleported from the past, the first place I’d take him would be Portskewett. He’d be astounded by the river and the new bridge, the cleaving of England from Wales, and the coming of a massive henge to bear people from one bank to another. He would be intrigued by the ruins of a gothic church. He’d be bowled over by the waterworks, which look as though they should house a crazy eccentric’s telescope, and the houses and the cars and the clothes and the televisions and the computers would also astonish him. There, Waldo. That’s where I’d start it all, with a football game in the middle of a hill fort with an Iron Age Celt standing next to me on the touchline. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘Bet that Iron Age hairball would know more about football than you do mate,’ he answered cynically. ‘Or he’d smack his head with his club and say Jeez, what a cracking idea, we’ve built thousands of these but didn’t know what the fuck to do with them and leg it up the valley to sell tickets to his mates.’

  ‘Very amusing, Waldo.’

  I have warned you about the language, haven’t I? Waldo and Paddy use swear words in spadefuls.

  Waldo finally condescended to give me the picture, which although musty-smelling and torn in one corner was the work of a professional – it was sharp and clear, and it was also quite large. It looked like a press photograph which had been given to the hospital after publication.

  It showed a group of beds and a chair, all with children in them. Standing around them were adults, two men and two women. Altogether there were twelve.

  There was a fine-looking man with a walrus moustache – Robert Jones of course. There was a serious, formally-dressed woman in beige, very tired-looking, with a crutch – Agnes Hunt, and in the background a slight man with a damaged eye and a funny little cap – Hugh Owen Thomas. There was also a nurse with long hair, very dark eyes, and a big warm smile.

  It wasn’t obvious at first that the photo had been taken in a hospital, but the conclusion was inescapable, given the number of beds. All the children were dressed up in costumes. A couple of multi-coloured streamers and a balloon on the wall indicated that it was probably Christmas, though there was no tree. All the children were named on the back of the photo in a bleary biro writing, sloping to the left and fudged in places. The names were written directly behind each child, so that there could be no confusion as to whom they all were. There were eight of them.

  In the foreground there is a little boy, the only one sitting on the side of his bed. He has a robe on, and a turban with a big paste jewel in it, and a funny beard made from cotton wool. His scruffy shoes and turned-down socks peek out from under his costume. The boy has a flattish nose, a rash of freckles and cold sores around his mouth. He has a distant, almost blank look in his eyes, and the nurse, stooped by his side, has her hand firmly on his shoulder, as though restraining him. In this get-up he may be one of the Three Wise Men, or a great potentate of one sort or another, which may have been a little joke by the nurses. His name, on the back of the photo, is Luther Williams. His face is artless, to match his character in the Vogel Papers. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that his religious mother named him Luther without knowing that the German theologist advocated the culling of all handicapped children. Luther in the picture has no visible handicap.

  Agnes Hunt has a bed before her. This has a piece of wood rising from the headboard, which looks like a miniature gibbet, but instead of a body hanging from the extending timber there’s a small square
mirror angled towards the camera. In this mirror I can see a little face – a button nose and two eyes, gazing intently at the lens. Her thick hair is frizzled, probably red, and she has a slightly twisted face, with the right side higher than the left, and one eye smaller than the other. Because her body is malformed she is unable to show her full face to the camera. Directly behind her on the wall there is a fairly large wooden crucifix; the Christ figure, which is ivory-white, and has a loincloth which might be coloured blue. Draped on her bed is a counterpane or mantle which shimmers in the light; it has a silver moon and stars glinting on it. The Christ figure, the mirror and the moon-and-stars mantle all match up with the story in the Vogel Papers. A big plastic spider hangs from the mirror, and on her thigh there is a bowl with a spoon in it. She must be Little Miss Muffet. She must also be Angelica – I flip over the photo, and I’m right. What’s more, her surname is Parker, so she must be Nosy Parker’s sister, as she was in the Vogel Papers.

  In the bed next to her there’s a thickset, dark-haired boy, with lively eyes, who somehow looks older than the rest. He has a plaster on one of his legs, and draped over this he has a leopard-skin outfit which makes him look like a pocket version of Fred Flintstone. He has one of those bars with two balls on each end, like the ones weightlifters hoist over their heads, only his must be papier-mâché because someone has painted 1,000 lbs on each end. An exaggerated curly moustache has been painted on his upper lip to make him look like one of those peculiar French strongmen. He is holding his head and grimacing, as if he has just walked into something. I have no doubt who this is – Jack, and his surname is Jones. He has the facial features of a dwarf.

  Part of a bed can be seen in the left hand corner, and propped up in it is a little boy with long fair hair and pretty features. He’s wearing a schoolmaster’s gown and a mortar board, and large spectacles which have been borrowed from a grown-up. They make him look owlish. He holds a cane in his right hand, which he points to a blackboard beside his bed. On this is written, in childish writing, THE PROFESSOR.