Maeve's Times

by Binchy, Maeve

  There didn’t have to be a reason to go to places, a base party reason. Take today, for example. He’d be up in Killybegs this morning to launch their fisheries policy document and there was no question of looking for extra seats up there. No, it was quite possible to go to places for real reasons. Charlie Haughey had planned to be back in his home while it was still daylight and he would spend the rest of the evening in his own constituency.

  He loves walking around the constituency with people saying hello to him, and telling him about the real issues of the election, about wanting a bit of hope and about how Charlie would give it to them. He thinks about that when he wakes up and that makes it easy to get up in the mornings.

  Election Brings Life to an Ageing Society

  3 June 1983

  For many old people, the huge rosettes and the bright young people coming to rap on their doors is a welcome chance to meet people. They haven’t had people taking such an interest in them since the last election when the circus came around as well. The arguments about youth unemployment are almost meaningless on some streets where teenagers don’t play and babies don’t cry to each other from prams. In many parts of Britain, an ageing society, almost everyone on the electoral roll is on the pension as well.

  They ask about the cost of living and the Tories tell them that four years ago inflation raged at 18 per cent, but now thanks to careful management it is down to 4.5 per cent. This simply is the best guarantee that they can afford to live. If they say, well it’s still difficult to live, the answer is, imagine what it would have been like if inflation had been allowed to continue.

  The Labour candidate will tell them that fuel costs have been forced up behind their backs and that Labour will cut these. Labour will freeze council and all rents for at least a year. Labour will insulate their houses.

  The Alliance says one of the great wrongs pensioners suffer from is that they have to pay fixed charges for gas, electricity and telephone. All these fixed charges would go under an Alliance government.

  Old people ask the candidates too about reducing the retirement age. In Britain, men retire at 65 and women at 60, and there has been increasing interest in a younger retirement age for men both from management and workers. So if a household asks the canvassers what the policies on retirement are, they will get these answers:

  The Conservatives say that to reduce the retirement age would cost £2,500 million and is hard to promise. The Tories also say that they are against compulsory retirement at any age.

  Labour says that its aim is a common retirement age of 60, and that if returned it will endeavour to get this organised, but it will first raise the pensions before it does anything else.

  The Alliance has no very strong views, but says that it should all be more flexible.

  A matter which worries many pensioners is the earnings rule. This means that if you earn any more than £57 a week and are in receipt of the pension, that pension will be reduced in line with your earnings. Many older people who feel capable of working on for several years after official retirement age resent this rule greatly.

  The Conservatives say that it was their party which raised the earnings rule to £57 from a lower figure and they hope to take the top level away altogether eventually. Labour says that it doesn’t intend to do anything about it at once since it’s a matter that only affects a small number of the country’s pensioners anyhow. The Alliance is in agreement with the Conservatives on this matter.

  So far, no specific campaign has been spearheaded towards the elderly. The granny vote has not been isolated as an area of winning support. It is presumed that the elderly in society will follow very much the general view on matters to do with defence and the economy, and will share the opinions left or right on a normal statistical basis. But there are some matters, like the cost of living, law and order, and housing, where you would imagine that more specific attempts might have been made to woo this considerable section of the electorate. There’s nothing to stop you being a floating voter at any age. Pensioners do not always vote according to the habits of a lifetime.

  Maeve’s Operation: The Whole Story

  8 October 1983

  First I’m afraid you have to have a little of the background. Since July, I haven’t been able to straighten my right leg. This is of no consequence when you’re sitting down or lying down which I seem to do a lot of, but in the odd bits where you have to walk from one place to another it is very harassing. Not to put it too finely, it means you can’t walk.

  I have arthritis in the other leg and so I thought gloomily that it must be spreading, like a rumour, or like one of those nice Russian vines that cover a wall in no time. But this knee took on terrible proportions, and by the time I found it easier for people to pour my gin and tonic into a saucer and let me at it on all fours like a big kitten I considered the wonderful Art of Medicine and went to a doctor who was very nice and said it seemed unmerciful to her and she sent me to a specialist.

  I can’t tell you all these people’s names because it would be advertising, but suffice to say the country is filled with kind, sympathetic GPs and serious, efficient orthopaedic surgeons.

  We had a merry month in August which involved great things like heat treatment which were really nice and didn’t work and cortisone injections in the knee which were desperate and didn’t work. ‘Will these make my neck swell up?’ I asked anxiously. I’m chubby enough already without gaining a lot of innocent fat from a knee treatment. It wouldn’t, I was told. Then because we were all getting puzzled and I was like Quasimodo on two sticks now and I was wondering would I have to be fitted with a collar on my neck and led around … I went for an arthrogram.

  Now I know I’m a long time coming to the hospital bit but honestly if you’ve never had an arthrogram you’d need to know about them. They call them X-rays. And you go like a simpleton to the X-ray department of a hospital to have one. I thought it was a great name for a start: arthrogram, like something out of Minder or a telegram from Guinnesses.

  By this time the scene had shifted back to London but I feel sure that the beauty and joy of an arthrogram is pretty much the same no matter what part of the world you’re in. First it was in an operating theatre, second it took nearly two hours, third it involved a series of injections of dyes to point up little-known facets of the knee and lastly it had something straight from a James Bond film: they blow your knee up with gas like a balloon and X-ray it in its expanded state. I was nearly demented at this stage and trying to make conversation with people who seemed to be surrounding the operating table in increasing numbers. I saw a pile of papier-mâché hats and wondered did those who have to be exposed to radiation a lot wear hats as well.

  ‘Do you often wear those hats?’ I asked a tiny girl from Trinidad.

  ‘They’re sick bowls,’ she said.

  ‘Are you very uncomfortable?’ the polite English radiologist asked kindly.

  It was a ludicrous question. I tried to single out the most agonising thing about it all. ‘There’s some awful bit of machinery underneath my knee sticking into it,’ I said, thinking it was probably a wrench or a hammer that someone had left there by mistake.

  ‘That’s my hand,’ said the radiologist.

  Ashen, I came out of it all and carried the pictures around my neck on a string until I got home. Remember I was now walking on two sticks and it’s not easy to carry things and the arthrogram was not something I would repeat just because I lost the snaps. The snaps and myself flew back to Dublin and the serious but brilliant orthopaedic surgeon looked at them.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said after five minutes.

  ‘Was there no film in the camera?’ I said, tears in my eyes, ready to go back and bludgeon them all to death in that hospital with their own sick bowls.

  ‘No, perfect pictures, just reveal nothing at all,’ he said.

  I waited for it … my poor big heart thumping, I waited and he said it.

  ‘We’d better open you up.’


  When the world settled down from the thunderous roar of terror that filled my ears, I heard myself saying in a high-pitched voice of total panic, ‘Well, if that’s it, then I suppose that’s it. Let me look at my diary.’

  I couldn’t even see my diary. I just agreed like a big lamb to what he said, and a date was fixed. And I went to Admissions and an admission date was organised and then there was no getting out of it. I looked at the knee very dismally. What could it be, I asked myself in lay person’s terms. Maybe my leg had just gone crooked to punish me for all my loudness and showing off. I was going to suggest this to the surgeon, but brilliant and serious he was, a person able to cope with an impish, ageing sense of humour he was not, so I said nothing.

  I packed five books and a typewriter and 144 sheets of paper, and a manual on how to take up calligraphy and several tomes about evergreens so that I’d be an expert on them when I came out. I remembered to take some nightdresses and a wash bag too, but only at the last moment so I had to carry them in a plastic bag.

  I put on my ingratiating face when I met the nurses on Floor Three of St Vincent’s Private Hospital. ‘I’ll be a model patient,’ I said. ‘I’ll be no trouble.’

  Two of them remembered me from the gall bladder incident over a decade ago. ‘She’ll be a monster,’ they said.

  ‘I’ve got much calmer and older and more fearful since then,’ I said.

  They were possibly the kindest bunch of women I ever met in my life anywhere, and I’m not only saying that because one day I suppose I’ll have to go back to them, to get a new hip, but they were kind. There wasn’t one of them I could find fault with and let me tell you after a day or two I was ready to find fault with anything that moved. But not the nurses ever. Night and day cheerful and reassuring and they didn’t even laugh at the typewriter and the books that just sat there untouched for two and a half weeks. They know we like to come to hospital with our illusions. I suppose there’s a name for the operation. I didn’t ask. I was so weakened by the memory of the arthrogram. I wanted no more definitions; anyway, a kind, efficient and nameless anaesthetist came the night before to tell me about it, and I closed my ears so that I wouldn’t hear a single word while maintaining what I hoped was a look of alert interest on my face.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask?’ he said politely.

  ‘Might I die of a heart attack without your noticing what with being a bit on the plump side?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  They’d notice and stop me dying of a heart attack. They had a machine that told them that sort of thing. I lay in the dark and thought about people who have much worse things and wondered how they could bear them and I thought of all the bravery in the world. And big, sad tears came down my face. The night nurse who can hear silent tears at a hundred yards came in.

  ‘I know you won’t believe me. I was caring about other people,’ I said.

  ‘I know you were, aren’t you a grand, kind thing,’ she said.

  And I told her that I now understood immediately why men married their nurses and if things had been different I would propose to her there and then, and we both said wasn’t it great that I only had a silly old knee and not something awful and I went to sleep while she was talking to me.

  They gave you three Valium next day to space you out and so of course I didn’t know where I was but I was very, very happy. Unfortunately what often happens is that the schedule takes longer than they think. Some operation they think is simple turns out to be long and complicated then the lovely floaty Valium wears off and you know only too well where you are. And you can’t keep asking to be topped up because that would be bad for you to tank you out of your mind.

  So I remember the journey on the trolley passing ordinary people doing ordinary things. They had washed, or scrubbed I think it’s called, my right knee so much I thought it wasn’t going to survive it.

  ‘I must admit I don’t normally wash my knees that much,’ I said humbly in case my own native filth was responsible for all the pain and we could now call the whole thing off, and put the pain in my leg down to common dirt.

  They explained that they didn’t either but this was to make it nice and sterile. Then they put gauze on it and a sort of red flag. I didn’t like the red flag.

  ‘Is that so he’ll know which one to do?’ I said in mounting panic, every story about people amputating the wrong limbs coming back to me in a line.

  No, apparently, it was to keep it warm and sterile, they said. I wonder, but anyway it’s not something you’d fault them on. And then to be honest I really don’t remember much more. I have to rely on other people for what went on.

  They say I asked the serious surgeon how old he was, which I might well have because it was something I had been speculating about. And he had said, ‘guess’ and I had guessed right, which had pleased the semi-conscious me enormously and horrified the acolytes who wouldn’t have dreamed of asking a consultant surgeon anything at all. And apparently I had forgotten all about my knee and wouldn’t listen when they tried to tell me what was wrong with it. Instead of listening I paid flowery compliments to everyone I met. ‘How very courteous of you to come in and see me,’ I said to one greatly loved sister who had been sitting there like a lamb waiting till I woke up. I used to say this to her graciously each time I woke up. She must have loved her vigil. When my other greatly loved sister came in I said it was extraordinarily courteous of her to have taken so much time off work even though this was the middle of the night and she’d had to fly home early from a conference in order to receive this level of conversation.

  I had refused to allow my husband to come anywhere near me for the whole business, because he had a big broadcasting job in London that day and I couldn’t have borne to think of him sitting in the corridor not understanding nuns and holy pictures and maybe thinking that I’d snuffed it. But I made an ill-timed attempt to ring him. He had been on the phone many times and quite unlike myself now knew what was wrong with me.

  ‘Isn’t it great?’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t it great?’ I said, miffed. My voice sounded as if I had drunk an entire bottle of some spirituous liquor ten minutes previously.

  ‘But isn’t it great what they found?’ he said, happily determined not to be put off by this sporting drunk ready to fight with her shadow.

  ‘I don’t think they found anything,’ I slurred. ‘I forgot to ask.’

  ‘You were full of Foreign Bodies. They got them all out,’ he said happily.

  ‘I think Gordon is very drunk,’ I said, and hung up. Fortunately the angelic sisters got him back on the line and then I agreed to look at a jar full of ridiculous things, bits of bone, bits of cartilage, like the kind of jar a child might take home from a day on the beach.

  ‘They were never in my knee,’ I said. And then I looked at them with pride. Not everyone goes round carrying that kind of stuff in a knee; it reminded me of space debris. I was delighted with it, and then to be honest all was semi-oblivion for a couple of days.

  I had no visitors only family and nurses so I felt safe in saying I love you to everyone who approached my bed. The paper lady was surprised but tolerant. And then came the dull bit, the bit where you think you’re well but you keel over if you get out of bed, where you ache for visitors but after five minutes the room is spinning and you want to go to sleep. And in the end the only thing you yearn for is television.

  And you won’t believe this but just as I was sitting up and saying I’m going to have a whole night of telly and I won’t look at one documentary or one serious analysis, I’ll look at rubbish until they come and tuck me up, the entire television reception disappeared from the place. I joke you not – Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, we lay like mad bats in our beds, no Gaybo, no Gone with the Wind, no Three Days of the Condor that I once queued for an hour and a half in Fulham to see. I was purple with rage. Oh there were explanations, none of them made any sense to invalids. I wondered would I get a rebelli
on going and get us all to march on our crutches up to Phoenix Relays or to sister somebody and beat them all about the heads. You have no idea how awful it is lying there when you think you’re going to have Remington Steele and instead you have your own thoughts. A fearsome fury descended on me and I staggered out of bed and tried to push the television out into the corridor. A nun tried to restrain me. She had been explaining yet again why the hospital had been five days without television. I wouldn’t listen.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, filled with this new excessive politeness which seems to have been injected with the anaesthetic. ‘I am moving this out to the corridor; if I do not have a room with a television, why do we keep up the pretence that I have?’

  They told me people would fall over it in the corridor so instead I hung my dressing gown over it and went to sleep in a monstrous sulk.

  I started to walk round the room. My leg was nearly straight. I had a frightening series of encounters with what calls itself the physiotherapy department but is actually a troupe of circus trapeze artists and acrobats who got stranded in Vincent’s. They think you can lift your heel while you keep the back of your knee flat on the bed or the ground. Try it. No one can do it. They can do it of course because they are all the Flying Firenzes or something in real life and are just doing physio as a power trip. They also were one nicer than the other … and in the days when I was like a weasel with no television and no concentration, I couldn’t even finish the Evening Herald … I couldn’t find a fault with a physio. And then they said I could go.

  I had heard awful stories that the bill was pinned by a dagger to your chest when you woke up from the operation but this was not so. It wasn’t mentioned until the last day and delivered discreetly. And the nurses of the Third Floor all came and said goodbye and lyingly told Gordon that I had been as good as gold, which he didn’t believe for two seconds, and in an odd way I knew I’d miss them, and I hoped whoever would be sleeping in my room that night would get well and strong like I did. And I cried to think of the people who hadn’t been as lucky as I was with just Foreign Bodies.