Cartwright and Christine had the place to themselves for that lunch hour. Since Baxter’s lunchtime pint could almost time the half hour, his two pints, plus the five minutes each way it took to walk to the park gates and across the road, was how long the two eighteen-year-olds had on each occasion, and they quickly learned to use it well. Given their circumstances, their encounters clearly gave new meaning to the cliché “I’ll show you mine if...”
Christine Gardiner and Thomas Cartwright were brought up in the same village, though they never attended the same school and, until their illness, had never met. The Gardiners were a middle class family. Richard, Christine’s father, was an optician with his own established practice in the local town. Jennifer, his wife, was a colour chemist, employed by a chemical company in another nearby town that specialised in the manufacture of dyes for the textile industry. Both parents pursued professional careers and were already comfortably off when Christine, a late child, was born. They had already designed and built the extensive bungalow on a corner plot in an exclusive, almost hidden, enclave on the edge of the village and had been in residence there for almost ten years when Jennifer’s mother moved in with them, following the death of her second husband. It was two years later, when Jennifer Gardiner was almost forty that Christine was born in 1952. Jennifer went straight back to work, of course, and Christine was brought up mainly by her live-in grandmother, with whom she developed a close relationship.
The Cartwrights lived at the other end of the village, close to the coal mine. Trevor Cartwright was a coal merchant and by the mid-nineteen-fifties was already running his own business with the help of the family lorry and the two assistants he employed on a casual basis. His own father had run such a business, starting with a horse and cart before graduating to a truck as his trade increased. Trevor’s father joined up and served in the army during the war, and was killed in action in Burma just as Trevor himself was approaching school leaving age. A premature exit from school allowed him to devote himself full time to the business, which needed considerable attention, since neglect during the later war years meant that everything had to be rebuilt virtually from scratch. As an only child, he took full possession of the family home and business when his mother died in 1947.
Trevor Cartwright married Stella Ramsden at eighteen and they eventually had five children. Thomas Cartwright was born in 1952, and was the middle child. Two older brothers grew up to strapping lads in their father’s mould. They joined the family business on leaving school and soon refocused it away from the by then ailing coal deliveries towards removals. Tom’s two younger sisters both lived what can only be described as conventional village lives, leaving school at fifteen and sixteen respectively, and getting both married and pregnant before the age of twenty. Both made their homes in the village.
Tom Cartwright’s four siblings thus conformed to their father’s somewhat limited expectations and canalised assumptions of what constituted a life, something the middle child never seemed to want. He was different, from an early age, and his desires and needs were always a bone of contention between Trevor and Stella. The child may even have forced the parents apart. Whatever the reason, the family had a reputation in the village for domestic violence, with, in later years, Stella Cartwright often seen out about sporting a shiner. I must stress that my willingness to be definitive about the domestic violence indicates that reference has been made to it during our research on the background of the subject by several independent contacts. This is no mere gossip.
The relationship between husband and wife started to deteriorate when Tom Cartwright fell ill as a toddler. He contracted meningitis and took several months to recover. It was said by those who remembered him as a child that he was still in his pram long after he ought to have been walking, that he used to sit with his head lolling to one side, wore a rather vacant unchanging expression and developed speech very slowly. But he was well enough to start school as a rising five and, by the age of seven, his experience there had become far from the norm, since he was identified as a gifted child, whose intellectual abilities deserved special treatment. He was duly accelerated through primary school and entered Grammar school at the age of ten. This meant, of course, that by the time he came to be playing bowls in 1970, he had already completed his A-levels and won a university place. He had used his third year in the sixth form to seek entry to Oxbridge, an ambition that was thwarted by his cancer treatment.
Christine Gardiner, meanwhile, attended a private prep school and then the private Girl’s High School, which was in the same town as Thomas Cartwright’s Grammar, but separated by the half mile or so of the town park. They did not know one another - in fact they had never met, Christine assured me - before their first shared encounter in hospital in their mid-teens. Christine did her A-levels at eighteen, having already been prepared for Oxbridge entrance by her school, which had more experience of the process than Tom’s Grammar. She was offered a place to read ancient history at a well known ladies’ college, as she herself used to refer to it, but still needed to achieve reasonable grades in her exams. Of course she lost a lot of school time during the latter part of 1969 and into 1970 as a result of her own treatment regime, but she sat her exams at the appointed time, just six weeks after her amputation. Her grades proved to be lower than required, but the college took circumstances into account and upheld her offer.
The fact that two adolescents of roughly the same age and from the same village both developed bone cancer in the knee is one of those coincidences that becomes only harder to accept. I have spoken personally to the epidemiologist who two decades later conducted research on several identified disease hotspots and she shared with me both the papers she published and the primary data she collected. She investigated the West Yorkshire cancers of the late 1960s and found nothing to suggest they should be attributed to anything other than chance. And yet these two sixteen-year-olds, as they were when they first developed symptoms, lived in the same village and both developed virulent and similar tumours on the knee, albeit in different legs, albeit on the tibia in Christine’s case and the femur in Cartwright’s. They found themselves visiting the same treatment centre, often with adjacent appointments with the same specialist. Of course, it did not take long for the two patients to become friends and compare notes on their progress, but their parents never seemed to exchange more than a cursory greeting and hardly interacted. Tom was always accompanied by his mother, since his father by then wanted little or nothing to do with him, whereas Christine’s parents shared the responsibility of taking her to the hospital in an attempt to disrupt their professional lives as little as possible. As a result, Stella Cartwright sometimes greeted Jennifer Gardiner and on other occasions it would be Richard, and it was perhaps this lack of habit in their practice that precluded more intimate engagement. At the time, of course, Stella Cartwright was also suffering domestic abuse, so there would probably have been occasions when her main personal goal was to hide.
Their tumours, of course, were similar, but not clinically the same, and were thus treated quite differently. Both patients had chemotherapy and radiotherapy at different times, but Tom’s cancer was soon deemed to be highly aggressive and his amputation took place soon after his seventeenth birthday, giving him some months to recover before his exams. In any case, that summer he was scheduled to take only scholarship exams, and special papers, since he had completed his A-levels the previous year.
In Christine’s case, whether because of the different nature of her disease or as a result of some desire to prevent her cosmetic disfigurement if at all possible, she underwent prolonged radiotherapy in an attempt to avoid amputation. This proved debilitating at the time, but allowed her sufficiently long periods of stability to enable her to complete her Oxbridge selection process. When she eventually was forced to resort to amputation, it was close to her exams and affected her performance, but because she was already in the system, her application p
revailed. Tom, over at the Grammar, had never been able to enter the Oxbridge selection process so, despite getting excellent A-level grades, he made do with a place in Manchester, since he had spent most of the previous year’s scholarship period in hospital. By April 1970 they had both had their operations and were attending regular sessions to dress the wounds and receive counselling and advice on what might happen next. They attended fitting sessions for their false limbs on the same day, and the doctor still remembers their jokes about sharing a pair, since his was a right and hers a left. Tom’s wound had taken several months to heal, whereas Christine’s progressed at speed, which is why they were both being kitted out at roughly the same time.
Their false limbs were not as sophisticated as those in use nowadays, but were near state of the art for the time. Initially neither of them was fitted with a foot. Instead, there was a rounded heel of compressed rubber, which was treaded with a thick replaceable sole. The body of the limb was a simple frame of tubular metal and plastic, with a sprung joint to mimic a knee, but was only designed to be bent when seated. When walking, the limb was held rigid, and there was no pivot at the ankle, so progress was very much dependent on their learning to swing the contraption forward through a rotation at the hip, and then using the solid support almost as a crutch to assist a step. The structure was secured around the waist by a couple of wide belts that were at least adjustable. At the time, neither Christine nor Tom could take either weight or friction on their scar tissue, so most of the body weight was supported via straps near the groin. I am assured by Christine that these would soon start to rub and chafe if they tried to do too much. Strangely enough, this usually did not hinder them on the bowling green, since they both developed a technique of playing which involved standing on one leg.
It was only during these recent interviews with Christine that I appreciated how vivid an impression the period had left in her memory. It’s not every day that you lose a leg and gain another, and perhaps none of us knows how we would react in such circumstance. Cartwright, for instance, had always been a rather distant character, with family and friends alike describing him as a remarkably quiet, self-contained, even withdrawn individual. And yet, with Christine he was different enough for her to describe him as a bundle of fun, full of energy, free-flowing conversation and jokes. Christine assesses herself as having been something of a snob in her youth, and was generally unwilling to mix with anyone her parents - and particularly her grandmother - deemed beneath the Gardiners’ class. But with Tom Cartwright, an accomplished academic, but a mathematician from a working class background and sporting a thick West Riding accent, she ignored any desire or advice to reject, and so entered his world. The two of them needed one another, given their strangely shared predicament, and both of them knew it implicitly and immediately. After that period, of course, it could be said that both reverted to type. Christine became a Young Tory and later an arch Thatcherite, right-wing journalist and champion of the individual, whereas Cartwright espoused socialism, became almost professionally working class and for a time took to selling Socialist Worker outside factory gates.
But for that short period in the summer of 1970, after exams and before college, they had one another. Christine is still reticent about what they did with themselves, at least in part because she still suffers pangs of guilt about lying to the school about fictitious hospital visits. In fact, I have subsequently learned from her former form teacher, who is still alive and compos mentis, that they knew she was making it up. They took pity on her and considered that, under the circumstances, she should be granted the small freedom of going off to see her friend. And, of course, Cartwright’s school also knew he was going off to meet Christine, since both schools had been cooperating for at least a year to assist in coordinating the two victims’ appointment times. Apparently, no-one on the staff of either school expected either of them to live. As to what happened in the bowling green shed at lunchtime, we can only speculate, but, despite Christine’s continued reticence on the subject, we can speculate with some certainty and without need of imagination.
One thing Christine did describe at length and with much mirth was what used to happen on the days when they had hospital appointments and therefore did not go to the park. By then they were both being called at roughly the same time to see the same specialist and so always met in the waiting room. Cartwright used to play a joke with an inane double meaning with the help of his false leg. The sprung joint at the knee could be brought to its fixed position at the flick of a catch that could be pressed through the fabric of his trousers. Thus, if he was sitting, he could bring the limb to its rigid position before he tried to get up, so that it would be ready to take whatever weight was put on it. He took to using the facility differently, however, to mimic an erection, suggesting that his leg had come up as a result of a new rigidity poking down his trouser leg. And he would do this whenever an attractive nurse or fellow patient walked past him in the hospital waiting room, leaving it sticking into mid air and commenting on it until it made Christine laugh. The joke remained private, but I recall that the laugh she gave when recalling the story was considerably greater than a giggle, and I can now state with certainty that it was that same laugh she repeated when she fell into Cartwright’s boat on the first morning of their encounter.
The school terms finished in late July that year, but their encounters in the park continued, with the two of them meeting in the village to take the bus into town. Both sets of parents were happy to see them keen to take the exercise needed to familiarise them with the demands of their new limbs. This continued until the Gardiners took off in mid August for a month in southern France, where they owned a rural property. In the last week of September, when Christine returned from her holiday, they saw one another just once before Tom left for university. At the time the Cartwright household was in turmoil and Stella had temporarily fled, taking Tom with her, to her sister’s house, also in the village. The source of the domestic dispute had been Trevor Cartwright’s expressed unwillingness to make up his son’s university grant with the expected parental contribution. He insisted on comparing Tom to his elder brothers, both of whom were by then earning salaries from the family business and living independently. Christine had tried to telephone Tom several times, but her father and sisters, who were still at home, put the phone down on her. Why Tom did not try to contact her remains something of a mystery, but Christine’s opinion is that he was completely preoccupied with his mother’s difficulties. At least that is what he told her when he cut their eventual encounter short. A week later saw Tom’s departure to Manchester to start his degree course and they did not see one another again until Cartwright’s boat approached the hotel jetty over forty years later.
“...had each other...”
Cartwright’s repetition of the phrase gradually raised Christine’s smile. “We argued like two rabid dogs, didn’t we?”
“Of course we did. I blame you.”
She laughed.
“We’d spent a week dividing our time between the not so fine points of crown green bowls and political posturing on the impending British General Election. If my memory serves me well, that happened on June 18, so we spent a week or so analysing how we would vote and then over a month castigating one another over what we had done.”
“You remember it that well?”
“How could I forget?” He was almost shouting, but through laughter. “I lost.” He turned towards Christine and pointed an accusing but wholly playful finger. “·And you, you silver-spoon privileged Tory, argued the toss like your life depended on it, and then chose not to vote at all ... and still won! Story of my life...”
“Says the world’s richest man...”
“But you have to admit, Chris, that your claim of ideological integrity, let alone the added angle that implied racial superiority, on the bases of rightness, democracy, morality and even religion on the Wednesday were a bit thi
ck, when on the Thursday you didn’t even bother to turn out and vote. It was specious in the extreme!”
“I had a limb fitting appointment.”
“So did I! I was with you at the hospital. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I do. I remember you saying you were off to vote.”
“And who went shopping with her mother?”
Christine laughed. “I did intend to vote later...”
“...excuses ...excuses... I just could not believe my ears that Friday morning when we got to the park. There was I, suffering from a political hangover and a victim’s pathos, having stayed up all night to watch the results come in and thus getting more and more depressed, and still breaking my arse to get down to the park in time to meet you. And I was as sick as a dog, because I had just been ideologically robbed... feeling about three inches tall because I knew a triumphalist Tory was going to take glee in rubbing it in... and then you said you hadn’t even bothered to vote! What a put down!”
“It wasn’t a put down, I just went shopping and stayed out with my mother.”
“And probably ate out in a restaurant, had a glass of wine, discussed Oxbridge...”
Christine thought for a moment. “You know, I think we did...”
“Bloody hell woman, were you born a sadist?”
“Are you sure I claimed superiority on racial and religious grounds? How can you possibly remember what we said forty years ago?”
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