by Henry Marsh
*
I’m not sure how my love of and obsession with making things arose. I hated woodwork at school: you had no choice as to what you made and you would come home at the end of term with some poorly fashioned identikit present for your parents – a wobbly little bookcase, a ridiculous egg-rack or a pair of bookends. I found these embarrassing; my father was a great collector of pictures, antiques and books and there were many fine things in the family home, so I knew how pathetic were my school woodwork efforts. He was also an enthusiastic bodger who loved to repair things, usually involving large quantities of glue, messily applied. The family made ruthless fun of his attempts, but there was a certain nobility to his enthusiasm, to his frequent failures and occasional successes.
He was a pioneer of DIY before the DIY superstores came into existence. I once found him repairing the rusted bodywork of his Ford Zephyr by filling the holes with Polyfilla, gluing kitchen foil over the filler, and then painting it with gloss paint from Woolworth’s. It all fell off as soon he drove the car out of the garage. My first attempts at woodwork away from school were made using driftwood from the beach at Scheveningen in Holland, where we lived when I was between the ages of six and eight. I sawed the wood, bleached white by the sea, into the shapes of boats. I made railings from small nails bought at the local hardware store. The only Dutch words I ever learnt were ‘kleine spijkes, alsjeblieft’ – small nails, please. I would take these boats sailing with me in the bath, but they invariably capsized.
When I married my first wife, we had no furniture and little money. I made a coffee table from an old packing case with a hammer and nails. It was a wooden one from Germany, with some rather attractive stencilled stamps on it, a little reminiscent of some of Kurt Schwitters’ Merz work. It had been sitting in my parents’ garage for years and had contained some of the last possessions of my uncle, the wartime Luftwaffe fighter pilot and wonderful uncle who eventually died from alcoholism many years after the war.
My brother admired the coffee table and asked me to make one for him, and I said I would, for the price of a plane, which I could then buy and use to smooth the wood. I have not looked back since. My workshop is now stacked with tools of every description – for woodwork, for metalwork, for stone-carving, for plumbing and building. There are three lathes, a radial arm saw, a bandsaw, a spindle moulder and several other machine tools in addition to all the hand tools and power tools. I have specialist German bow saws and immensely expensive Japanese chisels, which are diabolically difficult to sharpen properly. One of my disappointments in life is that I have now run out of tools to buy – I have acquired so many over the years. Reading tool catalogues, looking for new tools to buy – ‘tool porn’, as my anthropologist wife Kate calls it – has become one of the lost pleasures of youth. Now all I can do is polish and sharpen the tools I already have, but I would hate to be young again and have to suffer all the anxieties and awkwardness that came with it. I have rarely made anything with which I was afterwards satisfied – all I can see are the many faults – but this means, of course, that I can hope to do better in future.
I once made an oak chest with which I was quite pleased. I cut the through dovetail joints at the corners by hand, where they could be seen as proof of my craftsmanship. The best and most difficult dovetail joints, on the other hand – known as secret mitre dovetail joints – cannot be seen. True craftsmanship, like surgery, does not need to advertise itself. A good surgeon, a senior anaesthetist once told me, makes operating look easy.
*
When I see the tidy simplicity of the lives of the people living in the boats moored along the canal by the lock-keeper’s cottage, or the sparse homes of the Nepalese peasants William and I walked past on our trek, I cannot help but think about the vast amount of clutter and possessions in my life. It is not just all the tools and books, rugs and pictures, but the computers, cameras, mobile phones, clothes, CDs and hi-fi equipment, and many other things for which I have little use.
I think of the schizophrenic men in the mental hospital where I worked many years ago. I was first sent to the so-called Rehabilitation Ward, where attempts were being made to prepare chronic schizophrenics who had been in the hospital for decades for life in community care outside the hospital. Some of them had become so institutionalized that they had to be taught how to use a knife and fork. My first sight of the ward was of a large room with about forty men, dressed in shabby old suits, restlessly walking in complete and eerie silence, in circles, without stopping, for hours on end. It was like a march of the dead. The only sound was of shuffling feet, although occasionally there might be a shout when somebody argued with the voices in his head. Many of them displayed the strange writhing movements called ‘tardive dyskinesias’ – a side effect of the antipsychotic drugs that almost all of them were on. Those who had been treated with high doses of a drug called haloperidol – there had once been a fashion for high-dose treatment until the side effects became clear – suffered from constant and grotesque movements of the face and tongue. Over the next few weeks, before I was sent to work on the psychogeriatric ward, I slowly got to know some of them as individuals. I noticed how they would collect and treasure pebbles and twigs from the bleak hospital garden and keep them in their pockets. They had no other possessions. Psychologists talk of the ‘endowment effect’ – that we are more concerned about losing things than gaining them. Once we own something, we are averse to losing it, even if we are offered something of greater value in exchange. The pebbles in the madmen’s pockets became more valuable than all the other pebbles in the hospital gardens simply by virtue of being owned.
It reminds me of the way that I have surrounded myself with books and pictures in my home, rarely look at them, but would certainly notice their absence. These poor madmen had lost everything – their families, their homes, their possessions, any kind of social life, perhaps their very sense of self. It often seems to me that happiness and possessions are like vitamins and health. Severe lack of vitamins makes us ill, but extra vitamins do not make us healthier. Most of us – I certainly am, as was my father – are driven to collect things, but more possessions do not make us happier. It is a human urge that is rapidly degrading the planet: as the forests are felled, the landfill sites grow bigger and bigger and the atmosphere is filled with greenhouse gases. Progress, the novelist Ivan Klima once gloomily observed, is simply more movement and more rubbish. I think of the streets of Kathmandu.
My father may have been absent-minded and disorganized in some aspects of his life but he was remarkably shrewd when it came to property, even though as an academic lawyer he was never especially wealthy. When my family left Oxford for London in 1960 we moved to a huge Queen Anne terrace house, built in 1713, in the then run-down and unfashionable suburb of Clapham in south London. It was a very fine house with perfectly proportioned rooms, all wood-panelled and painted a faded and gentle green, with cast-iron basket fire grates (each one now worth a small fortune) in every room, and tall, shuttered sash windows looking out over the trees of Clapham Common. There was a beautiful oak staircase, with barley twist banisters. He had an eye for collecting antiques before it became a national pastime and impossibly expensive. So the new family home, with six bedrooms and almost forty windows – I painted them all once and then had a furious row with my father about how much he should pay me for the work – was filled with books, pictures and various objets d’art. I was immensely proud of all this when I was young. My father was also proud of his house and many possessions and liked to show them to visitors, but in an innocent and almost childlike way, wanting to share his pleasure with others. The family used to tease him that he was a wegotist, as opposed to an egotist – the word does exist in the Oxford English Dictionary.
My pride was of a more competitive and aggressive kind, albeit vicarious. When he eventually died at the age of ninety-six, my two sisters, brother and I were faced by a mountain of possessions. I discovered to my surprise that few, if any, of the many
thousands of his books were worth keeping. It made me think about what would happen to all my books when I die. We divided everything else up on an amicable basis, but looking back I fear that I took more than my fair share, with my siblings acquiescing to their demanding younger brother so as to avoid disharmony. As for the house, with its forty windows and panelled rooms, I heard that it was recently sold for an astronomical sum, having been renovated. The estate agent’s website showed the interior. It has been transformed: painted all in white, even the oak staircase, it now resembles an ostentatious five-star hotel.
When I am working in Nepal I live out of a suitcase, and have no belongings other than my clothes and my laptop. I have discovered that I do not miss my many possessions back in England at all – indeed I see them as something of a burden to which I must return, even though they mean so much to me. Besides, when I witness the poverty in Nepal, and the wretched effects of rapid, unplanned urbanization, I view my possessions in a different light. I regret that I did not recognize the virtues of trying to travel with hand luggage only at an earlier stage of my life. There are no pockets in the shroud.
‘The first case is Mr Sunil Shrethra,’ said the MO presenting the admission at the morning meeting. ‘He was admitted to Norvik Hospital and then came here. Right-handed gentleman, sixty-six years old. Loss of consciousness five days go. On examination…’
‘Hang on,’ I cried out. ‘What happened after he collapsed? Has he been unconscious since then? Did he have any neurological signs?’
‘He was on ventilator, sir.’
‘So what were his pupils doing?’
‘Four millimetres and not reacting, sir. No motor response.’
‘So he was brain-dead?’
The MO was unable to answer and looked nervously at me. Brain death is not recognized in Nepali law.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Bivec, the ever-enthusiastic registrar, helping the MO.
‘So why was he transferred here from the first hospital if he was brain-dead?’
‘No, sir. He came from home.’
I paused for a moment, unable to understand what this was all about.
‘He went home from the hospital on a ventilator?’ I asked, incredulous.
‘No, sir. Family hand-bagged him, sir.’ In other words, the family took their brain-dead relative home, squeezing a respiratory bag all the time, connected to the endotracheal tube in his lungs to keep him oxygenated (after a fashion).
‘And then they brought him here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, let’s look at the scan.’
The scan appeared, shakily and a little dim, on the wall in front of us. It showed a huge and undoubtedly fatal haemorrhage.
‘So what happened next?’
‘We said there was no treatment so they took him home, hand-bagging him again.’
‘Let’s have the next case,’ I said.
I had noticed that the sickest patients on the ITU, the ones expected to die or become brain-dead, had often disappeared by the next morning. I was reluctant to ask what had happened, and it was some time before I learnt that usually the families would take the patients home, hand-bagging them if necessary, so that they could die with some dignity within the family home, with their loved ones around them, rather than in the cruel impersonality of the hospital. It struck me as a very humane solution to the problem, although sadly unimaginable back home.
10
BROKEN WINDOWS
Back in Oxford, I went to inspect the lock-keeper’s cottage. I walked with mixed feelings along the towpath, rain falling from a dull grey sky, past the line of silent narrowboats moored beside the still, green canal. The air smelt of fallen wet leaves. Several friends had told me that I was mad to try to renovate the place: after fifty years of neglect, with fifty years of rubbish piled up in the garden, without any road access, the work and expense involved would be enormous. The plumbing had all been ripped out by thieves for a few pounds’ worth of copper, the plaster was falling off the walls, the window frames were all rotten. The ancient Bakelite electrical sockets and light switches were all broken. The roof was intact, but the staircase and many of the floorboards in the three small bedrooms were crumbling with woodworm. The old man who had lived there was dead, and the cottage itself was dead. The only life was the green wilderness of the garden, where the rampant weeds flourished after fifty years of freedom.
I had spent months making new windows in my workshop in London, with fanciful ogee arches. Glazing them with glass panes cut into ogee curves had been, therefore, difficult and time-consuming. With the help of a Ukrainian colleague and friend, I had ripped out the old windows and carefully installed the new ones before leaving for Nepal. While I was away in Kathmandu they had all been smashed by vandals. This was presumably out of spite for the metal bars I had fitted on the inside. As it was, the thieves had managed to prise apart the metal bars on the window at the back of the cottage and get in. At least I had put the more valuable power tools in two enormous steel chests with heavy locks that I had had the foresight to install. Wheeling them along the narrow towpath on a sack trolley had not been easy and at one point one of them, weighing almost 100 kilograms, had come close to toppling into the canal.
Apparently the thieves had mounted one of the chests on the sack trolley and then abandoned the effort as they couldn’t open the front door – I had spent many hours fitting a heavy-duty deadlock to it. On the other hand, my elder sister, an eminent architectural historian, had remarked that the ogee arches were not very authentic for a lock-keeper’s cottage; perhaps the vandals had shared my sister’s rather stern views about architectural heritage.
I had therefore arranged for rolling metal shutters to be fitted on the outside walls over the windows, which completely defeated the original purpose of decorating the cottage with pretty arched windows. So the vandals then turned their attention, once I was away again, to the expensive roof windows – triple-glazed with laminated glass – that I had installed last year. They had climbed onto the roof, breaking many roof slates in the process, and then heaved a heavy land drain through one of the windows. As far as I could tell, this was done simply for the joy of destruction rather than for burglary – for the love of the sound of breaking glass. I consoled myself with the thought that the frontal lobes in the adolescent brain are not fully myelinated – myelin being the insulating material around nerve fibres. This is thought to be the explanation for why young men enjoy dangerous behaviour: their frontal lobes – the seat of human social behaviour and the calculation of future risks and benefits – have not yet matured, while the rising testosterone levels of puberty impel them to aggression (if only against handmade windows), in preparation for the fighting and competition that evolution has deemed necessary to find a mate.
Each time I walk towards the cottage I feel a sinking feeling at what further damage I will find. Will they have broken the little walnut tree or snapped off the branches of the apple trees? Will they have managed to break open the metal shutters? In the past I always felt anxious when my mobile phone went off for fear that one of my patients had come to harm. Now I fear that it will be one of my friendly neighbours from the longboats nearby on the canal or the police, informing me of another assault on the cottage. I tell myself that it is absurd to worry about mere property, especially as the cottage only contains building tools, all locked up in steel site chests. I remind myself of what I have learnt from my work as a doctor, and from working in poor countries like Nepal and Sudan, but despite this the project of renovating the cottage has started to feel like a millstone. It fills me with a sense of despair and helplessness, when I had hoped it would give me a sense of purpose.
In the weeks before I left for Nepal I had started to clear the mountains of rubbish from the garden. At one end of the garden there is a brick wall, and on the side facing the canal there was a mass of weeds and brambles. I had cleared these to reveal a series of picturesque arched horse troughs made of red brick. The bricks
had been handmade – you could see the saw marks on them. They would have been for the horses that pulled the barges along the towpath in the distant past, and there were rusty iron rings set into the bricks for tethering the horses. In front of the troughs, and still on my property, was a fine cobbled floor, which slowly appeared as I scratched away years of muck and weeds. Emma, one of the friendly boat people, stopped by to chat as I worked.
‘There is a rare plant here,’ she said. ‘The local foragers were very excited, though I’m not sure what it’s called. Fred and John [two other local boat dwellers] got into trouble with them a few years back when they tried to clear the area.’
‘I’m worried that I might have dug it up,’ I replied, anxious not to fall out with the local foraging community.
‘Oh it will probably grow back,’ she said. ‘It has deep roots.’
We talked about the old man. He had been frightened of thieves, Emma told me, although as far as I could tell from the rubbish, he had owned little and lived off tinned sardines, cheap lager and cigarettes. He had also told her that the cottage was haunted. According to the locals he had been ‘a bit of a wild one’ when he was younger, but all I got to hear were stories of how he would sometimes come back to the cottage drunk on his bicycle and fall into the canal. He had a son who had once lived in the cottage with him for a while, but it seems that they had become estranged. There had been a few pathetic and broken children’s toys in the rubbish in the garden. I had found shiny foil blister packs of antidepressants – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – in the piles of rubbish in the garden. Emma told me that he had died in the cottage itself.