Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  Andy arrived to collect us in time for him to hear the talk. As a townsman he couldn’t get used to the total blackness of a country night, or indeed to the silence and emptiness of Charminster House. Eliza had left a cold dinner for him but I think he would much have preferred to seek the conviviality of a local pub if he had dared to venture out. He said he closed the curtains, shut the doors firmly and wouldn’t even leave the sanctuary of the kitchen to walk the ten yards down the passage to the television room. Instead he was fearfully aware of the row of bells, each labelled with its room, and sat there expecting one of them to begin ringing in the empty house. I suppose country people can be equally ill at ease in town, and wonder how we survive behind our grilles while the wicked and violent city rages outside.

  I sympathize with Andy. Although I spent my early years in Ludlow amid beautiful country, I am happiest in towns and cities. When I visit Tom and Mary Norman in rural Dorset I always feel I am venturing on dangerous and alien territory. The two cats chase mice around the kitchen table unremarked on by anyone but me, and small bodies of rodents are left outside the pantry door as morning offerings. One is never surprised to find the heads of chickens murdered by a fox and laid out in a circle like some pagan rite, while dinner guests complain that the otters, a protected species, are attacking their dogs. At night the darkness presses against the windows like a black carpet while the silence is occasionally broken by the shrieks and screams of tormented animals. A night in deep country is a demonstration of nature red in tooth and claw.

  I would certainly feel nervous if required to spend the night alone at Wolfeton, which I am sure has its ghosts. The house is charged with a sense of the past and if it is not haunted in the usual sense, it is certainly inhabited by more presences than those of the present owners, Nigel and Katharine Thimbleby. During the sixteenth century a priest called Cornelius was imprisoned in the gatehouse. He was so attractive that his gaolers, the Trenchards, and their circle (including Walter Ralegh) would dispute with him amiably and they became friends. But they couldn’t save him from being tried in Dorchester, condemned, hanged, drawn and quartered. It is said that his footsteps can still be heard climbing to his room in the gatehouse.

  In 1506 the Archduke of Austria and his Spanish bride were forced by storms to put in at Weymouth and were taken to Wolfeton to await better weather. Neither the visitors nor the Trenchards could speak each other’s language, but luckily John Trenchard had a cousin, John Russell, who knew Spanish and came over to interpret, making himself so useful that, when the Archduke and princess went to visit Henry VII at Windsor, he went with them. From this royal meeting was founded the House of Russell and the Dukedom of Bedford. It makes a change from the more usual founding of great dynasties by illicit encounters between the sheets.

  MONDAY, 3RD NOVEMBER

  This is the month, in 1949, when I began my working career in the Health Service, having answered an advertisement, I think in the Evening Standard, for clerical assistants in the newly formed service. I applied to Paddington Hospital Management Committee in the Harrow Road, a choice which now seems to me highly eccentric, was duly shortlisted and presented myself for interview at the group’s headquarters next door to what was then Paddington General Hospital. I was one of a large group of aspirants. It was apparent that the administrators of the highly diverse hospitals and outpatient clinics, which had been somewhat illogically grouped together, had been asked to submit requests for additional staff and that what was being held was a kind of labour market. I found favour with Mrs.—or it may have been Miss—McBain who ran the London Skin Hospital in Fitzroy Square. She was an intimidating woman, grey-haired, stocky and with the face of an angry Pekinese, and I think she rather relished the effect her gruff, no-nonsense manner had on the male members of the Hospital Management Committee.

  The London Skin Hospital was one of the many small specialist hospitals which abounded at that time, supported by payments from the patients and by voluntary help and subscriptions, treating a faithful band of patients who seemed neither to expect to get better, nor to much resent the fact that they appeared weekly for some years. My duties were simple. Patients attending for the first time were issued with appointment cards and numbers. A numerical filing system had to be instituted, and reports of the number of patients attending submitted, I think monthly, to Group Headquarters. I would make appointments when the patients rang up, get out the records and have them ready for the dermatologist when he or she arrived. Making the appointments merely meant adding the patient’s name to the clinic. The Skin Hospital believed firmly in a policy of first-come, first-served, and indeed this was generally acceptable to the patients.

  The staff, other than the medical staff, consisted of Mrs. McBain, Sister Ewell, a devout High Anglican, Mrs. Clayton, a highly efficient pharmacist, and the porter, referred to as Reid, who had, I gathered, more or less run the hospital singlehandedly during the war years, having been fortunate enough to be at school at a time when literacy and numeracy were assiduously taught. I would arrive promptly at nine, don my white coat and Mrs. McBain would arrive some hours later on a convenient train from Hove where she lived. I had a feeling that my job was not strictly necessary or, at least, could have been done by existing staff, but there was a general feeling of optimism, of public money liberally available, and a sense that people, no longer working for a charity, need not overexert themselves. But the staff at the London Skin Hospital were fiercely anti-National Health Service, seeing it as the triumph of state bureaucracy over personal charitable service. Mrs. McBain would pretend not to recognize patients: “It’s no good saying you’ve been coming here for years, Mrs. Collins. You’re just a number to us now.” I liked Mrs. McBain, who had, like many women of forbidding appearance, a charitable heart and who, I suspect, liked me, since otherwise I should have been returned to Paddington Group Headquarters with scant ceremony.

  Although the small staff of the London Skin Hospital were unenthusiastic about the Health Service, most of us welcomed it unreservedly. The assurance that medical treatment, including hospital care, would be free at the time of need lifted a huge weight of anxiety from many shoulders. It did from mine. I could remember when my mother suffered from renal colic due to stones in the kidney. I must have been nine or ten at the time. Because it cost money to visit or call in the doctor, she went on enduring spasms of atrocious agony until she finally collapsed in the butcher’s shop and was taken by ambulance to Shrewsbury Hospital. It was good to know that this need not happen to anyone ever again.

  But we were all surprisingly overoptimistic. Members of Parliament admitted that the initial cost of the service might be high, but said that the annual expenditure would decrease as people were treated for long-standing conditions, and received their free wigs, dentures and appliances. After that the free service would ensure that the nation became healthier year by year. No one then could have believed that medical science and technology would make it possible to transplant kidneys and hearts, or to overcome infertility by fertilizing the ovum outside the woman’s body. No one could foresee the onset of new diseases such as AIDS. On looking back it seems strange that we took no account of an ageing population and the demands that an increasing population of the over-seventies would make on a free service.

  In addition to filing and getting out records, I was responsible for the stamp book. All letters sent were entered in the ledger by name and I was supposed to reconcile on a daily basis the total of stamps left with letters sent, a task which I found tedious and accordingly neglected. As the weeks passed it seemed even more difficult to tackle it, and when the auditors unexpectedly arrived, as is the wont of auditors, they seized on the book in triumph and bore it down to their basement office with evident satisfaction. Some hours later, they arrived to admit with reluctance that the stamp book was correct to the last stamp, while pointing out that it was deplorable that it hadn’t been reconciled daily. I said smugly that I had seen no reason for that chore si
nce I knew the book was accurate. Accuracy to the last penny can only have been a matter of the purest luck. I did tot up the book daily thereafter but never again succeeded in getting it right.

  My record unsullied by financial misdemeanour, I applied for promotion to Grade C at Group Headquarters. The job was that of Committee Clerk, which meant sitting in at the meetings, taking a record of what was said, writing the minutes and later collating all the papers and sending them out to members of the House Committees, who oversaw the individual hospitals, to the subcommittees of the Hospital Management Committee and to the Management Committee itself. I never managed to learn shorthand but devised my own quick way of writing and luckily found I had a good memory for speech so that the job wasn’t overdemanding.

  It was about this time that I began to realize that Connor, who had returned mentally ill from overseas service, might never be well again and that I might have to support the family indefinitely. I was then living with my parents-in-law at Ilford, Essex, who provided unfailing support and, until they retired to Suffolk, a loving and stable home for Clare and Jane. I was going to need, not a job, but a career. I began going to evening classes at the City of London College in Moorgate to study for a diploma in hospital administration. Without it any further progress would be impossible. A small group of us would go to the College together after work, eating a light supper in the canteen, usually of soft roes on toast, before the classes began. The syllabus covered hospital supplies, building and planning, personnel management, bookkeeping and law, the latter for me being by far the most interesting. We were taught by a vivacious, rotund and obviously excellent lawyer called Schmitov, I imagine originally a refugee, with a penchant for the dramatic. This meant that he acted out all the cases: pretending to travel in a cab round Regent’s Park for immoral purposes, thus vitiating the contract between him and the driver, or purchasing a desirable ball gown from a West End store and lying to the assistant about his age, illustrating the interesting legal point whereby a ball gown could not in law be regarded as a necessity.

  I found the bookkeeping the most difficult—indeed, at first totally incomprehensible. It seemed to me that all transactions were being entered on the wrong side of the ledger. We were taught by an Irishman with a heavy accent who, early ignoring me as a hopeless case, would repeatedly say, “Yer have to learn the teery, boys.” Alas, “the teery” perpetually eluded me. But I did eventually pass the final examination with honours, gaining the regional prize. Without this I doubt whether I would have gained my next promotion, which was to replace the head of the committee section when he, too, was transferred to higher things. I was now beginning to earn the kind of salary which might mean I could support the family without help from my parents-in-law. The next move at one grade higher was to the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board and its offices opposite Paddington Station, where I remained until 1968.

  Now that there is so much concern with waiting lists, treatment priorities and the rationing of limited resources, it is easy to forget that not all demands could be met in those heady early years of the service. One of the greatest problems facing the country after the war was tuberculosis. Paddington Hospital actually had huts in the hospital grounds where the TB patients were nursed, inhaling the not very salubrious air of the Harrow Road. There was the TB waiting list for admission to sanatoria, and another for the young chronic sick, with illnesses such as disseminated sclerosis, who only too often had to be nursed in long-stay geriatric wards. My section was responsible for the latter waiting list and I was interested in how human beings differ in their response to chronic illness. There were families in which a wife or a husband was coping with an almost intolerable burden of care and yet could barely contemplate the thought that the partner might have to leave home and be institutionalized. I remember another case in which a wife was battering on the doors of the Regional Board almost as soon as the diagnosis was made, complaining bitterly that her husband could no longer get to the lavatory and had to use a bottle in the presence of the children. It was deeply depressing to contemplate a family in which a disabled father was made to feel ashamed because he couldn’t get unaided to the lavatory. The section of which I was head was responsible for a variety of duties in addition to the young chronic sick waiting list: the compilation of the regional statistics based on returns made by each hospital, the mental health service and legal actions against the Regional Hospital Board, which were handled by an outside firm of solicitors.

  By the time I went to the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board, my father-in-law had retired from general practice in Ilford, and he and my mother-in-law moved to a village outside Halesworth in Suffolk. The house we shared in Ilford was sold and I had to find a new home for the four of us. I thought it would be pleasant to live in Richmond, but taking a day off to reconnoitre I was told by all the house agents I visited that even a small house or flat in this desirable borough couldn’t be purchased under £4,000. So on their advice I took a bus to Kingston-on-Thames and there found a small semi-detached Victorian cottage in Richmond Park Road for just over half that sum. It is almost unbelievable now to think that a house could be bought so cheaply. The journey from Kingston-on-Thames to London was slow, but it was a delight to be so close to the park.

  It was while we lived at Kingston-on-Thames that my elder daughter, Clare, married and moved with her husband, Lyn, to America, where Lyn had been offered a job in Huntsville, Alabama, on the space programme. She did not see her father again. Connor died at home on 5th August 1964, aged forty-four years. While he was alive I hadn’t felt it possible to change my job. He would periodically discharge himself from hospital, sometimes at very short notice, and I never knew quite what I would have to face when I returned home from the office. It was not a propitious time to look for promotion or for a new job, which would only impose additional strain. But now I felt the strong need to look for a change of direction. I saw an advertisement, I think in The Times, inviting applications for the grade of Principal in the Home Civil Service. I sent for particulars, only to receive a reply saying that my educational qualifications were nowhere near the standard required. The following year the advertisement appeared again, but was differently worded. Now, those applicants who hadn’t a good honours degree could take a written examination followed by a series of interviews. I applied again and was successful, coming third in the country on the final list. This wasn’t quite as impressive as it appears. Many of the questions covered the kind of work I had been doing in the Health Service, writing reports, sitting in committees, replying to letters of complaint. I was lucky, too, in finding that the intelligence test was one based on a sequence of geometric shapes, the only kind with which I have never had difficulty. My place on the list of successful candidates gave me, if not a choice of departments, at least a say in where I should be posted and I asked for either the Home Office or the Department of Education. On 1st March 1968 I entered the Home Office as a Principal* and began what was probably the most interesting and happiest part of my working life.

  TUESDAY, 4TH NOVEMBER

  To Edinburgh yesterday afternoon by air with Joanna Mackle, a director of Faber, for a talk in the Assembly Rooms followed by a signing. Afterwards we went to dinner with my grandson James—reading politics at Edinburgh University—in his flat in Henderson Row. James and his girlfriend have made the flat strongly individual with bold primary colours on the walls throughout, the paint applied with more enthusiasm than finesse. Like his father he is an excellent cook and we had rabbit in a curry sauce with salad and a lemon cake to follow. His aunt Mona and her husband were also in the party and we argued amiably, if forcefully, about education, about which she knows a great deal and I considerably less.

  After the Assembly Rooms talk I was asked the question which comes up frequently during question-and-answer sessions: Do I draw my characters from real life? I am not surprised that this is a popular question. Characterization is at the heart of a novel and pe
ople are always intrigued about the novelist’s method of creating fictional men and women who live as vividly in the imagination as real people. The creation of characters is, I suspect, as mysterious to many novelists as it is to their readers. I usually reply that I don’t draw characters directly from real life and then explain that, by this, I mean I don’t take someone I know and, after making a few judicious alterations to height, age, appearance or occupation, put the essentials of that person into a novel. But I go on to admit that to state that characters are not drawn from life is to be disingenuous. All characterization comes from life; where else can it have its origin?

  Some writers make no apology for drawing directly from people they know. A name can be put to almost every C. P. Snow character, as it can to the most successful characters of Nancy Mitford. But for most of us the creation of character is rather more complicated.

  Dickens drew directly from life. Indeed, in a letter to a Mr. Haines in 1837 he stated that he needed a magistrate for his next number of Oliver Twist and, having cast about for “a magistrate whose harshness and insolence would render him a fit subject to be shown up,” stumbled upon Mr. Laing of Hatton Garden. He knew the man’s character perfectly well but wanted to describe his personal appearance and therefore wondered whether he might be smuggled into the Hatton Garden office for a few minutes under Mr. Haines’s auspices. I suspect that, in today’s world, Dickens would be at constant risk of an action for libel. Similarly, he responded to a complaint from Leigh Hunt that he had been portrayed as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House by apologizing for Leigh Hunt’s pain, but excused himself by saying that when he felt he was getting too close to reality, he stopped himself. Besides, he did not fancy that Leigh Hunt would ever recognize himself. He ended: “Under similar disguises my own mother and father are in my books, and you might as well see your likeness in Micawber.”