I really upset myself. I was fretting as well as wasting away. Mum had to work hard to reassure me. She said soothingly, ‘They didn’t kill any snakes, JJ.’ She’d started calling me JJ. It began about then. ‘When they have to get bigger, snakes just crawl out of their old skin and leave it behind.’ I cheered up mightily, relieved that there was no blood-guilt on my Christmas present. I sucked the sweet lie right up, no better than a clarinet. No one was telling me the truth about important things at this point. Everything from Christmas to my gramophone was wrapped in a nasty secret.
It’s entirely in character that I don’t remember Peter at all from that Christmas. Years later I asked him if he remembered Jim Shaeffer, the nice Canadian airman who came for Christmas, but the name didn’t ring a bell with him. He remembered me being given the gramophone and the watch, though, when all he got out of it was a handful of sweets. Even so, he wasn’t a neglected child in any real sense, except by me. Mum smacked him a fair amount, but smacking isn’t exactly neglect.
Perhaps it was Dad’s choice to be away that hectic Christmas, but I doubt if he had any say in the matter. He was often away for as long as a month at a time, and the armed forces didn’t go in much for compassionate leave in those days. Even if they had, I imagine Dad would have preferred not to ask for it. It would have been more in character for him not to ask for special treatment. That was very much a virtue to his generation’s way of looking at things.
With the help of herbalist hindsight, potent tincture, it’s pretty plain that Dad was a Cerato, which is one of the original Twelve Healers of 1933 and a fundamental character type. His buried keynote was indecisiveness. Surprising in a military man, or perhaps not. Where better to hide an inability to choose than in a chain of command? In the forces decisions are handed down, and servicemen are routinely relieved of the burden of initiative.
It’s mysterious that this fundamentally lukewarm soul should attach itself to a long line of strong believers – preachers and pastors – whose only previous aberration was a fairly distinguished Victorian architect, his piety well up to par.
When Dad was a young man his own father kept quizzing him about whether he had yet been visited by Jesus the Christ, as if this was positively a stage of adolescence, the spiritual equivalent of starting to shave. Dad had to admit that no such visitation had been granted him.
Of course they aren’t all sheep in the armed forces. There are occasional mavericks, and one of them was his friend Kit Draper, the one he’d wanted to middle-name me after. Hence Draper’s nickname: the Mad Major. Yet even Dad’s worship of this senior airman (who had seen action in the First War as well as the Second) didn’t break the pattern. Has tendency to imitate is also part of the herbalist picture. Dad admired the Mad Major for daring to break the rules, but didn’t even get as far as imitating him. He just muttered, ‘Good old Kit. He showed them.’ Kit Draper did his rebelling for him, at a safe remove.
Promiscuous sympathy
In daily life Dad hated to be asked to make choices, and the more trivial the alternatives with which he was presented the less he was able to choose between them. The rolling incompatibility that was my parents’ marriage can be described in many ways, but one of them is herbalistic. They were a Heather and a Cerato bound together, one sapping the other’s vitality by demanding sympathy, the other sapping right back by needing to be told what to do. The whole situation was made worse by the fact that he had no sympathy to give her, and so she sought it promiscuously elsewhere. He, of course, as a man of his time, would happily take advice from a male acquaintance, however slight, but never from his wife.
Tempting to say that if someone had been there to administer the relevant tinctures, those four drops in water four times a day, they could both have been brought into the positive ranges of their characters, so that Mum could sympathise with the uncertainty that Dad tried so hard to hide, and he in turn could tap into the large-scale emotions which she could bestow as well as demand. But I chose the womb as it was and must accept the life it led to, without getting out my portable dispensary of herbalist hindsight to tamper with the givens.
I myself seem to be a Vine, another secondary character type, as infallibly sketched by Dr Bach, when he came to round up the stragglers after the Twelve: they think that it would be for the benefit of others if they could be persuaded to do things as they themselves do, or as they are certain is right … Even in illness they will direct their attendants … may be of great value in emergency. The layman’s term, I suppose, would be bossy-boots.
I had been patient for a long time, but now I was beginning to chafe against the restrictions of my bed-bound life. Mum had to step up her efforts at diversion without excitement.
Abstraction of wrestling
When children are very young, their parents find styles of rough play that won’t cause any harm. If one adult hand is pushing against the chest of a delighted toddler, the other arm is poised behind his back, ready to catch him when he falls. The joy of play is intensified by a tiny infiltration of pretend-fear, pretend-risk. Mum had a harder task when it came to rough-housing with me. She had to carry the risk-monitoring approach much further. My level of agitation had to be carefully measured. She would climb carefully onto the bed so that she could support herself on her elbows and knees, poised above me. Then she would blow on my face, shake her head so that her cheeks wobbled, make menacing noises in her throat, roar like a lion, and raise each hand from the bed alternately, to waggle her fingers thrillingly in front of my face.
The whole performance was a wonderful treat. I think we both forgot that this was an abstraction of wrestling, taken to such a stylised extreme that no physical contact was involved. It was closer to an art form like Noh drama than to actual rough-housing. Then one day while she was crouched over me like a tenderly devouring spider, her weight shifted on the bed, and that was enough to make my back click. The pain came shuddering and stabbing into the facet joints of the spine. The immobility of bed rest was encouraging my ligaments to weaken, so that tremors of the facet joints could happen more or less at any time. Mum climbed off the bed in slow motion, trying not to make things any worse, and weeping bitterly at the failure of our mime of normal fun. Even this charade of roughness was too close to the real thing. From then on we had to find other forms of game, less risky than horse-play even at its tamest.
Mum racked her brains to devise new pastimes for me. One huge treat was a candle set on a saucer. She gave me a knitting needle, which I used to heat up and poke into the wax. She kept the flame of my pyrolatry from flickering out in those dark times. Peter and I were even allowed, under close supervision, to hold scraps of food in the flame to toast them. It need only be a modest square of bread, toasted in the flame and then dipped in tomato sauce. We became adept little chefs, and produced quite a range of toy snacks. We wanted to feed Mum and Dad with our one-candlepower barbecue. It was our turn, after so long being looked after, to play host.
One day Mum said she had a surprise for me. When I asked what it was, she said I’d just have to wait and see. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it? She went out and I heard murmuring in the hall. She came back in. ‘Shall I tell you what it is? Perhaps I better had.’
‘No you mustn’t. You said it was a surprise!’
‘I know I did.’ But she was having second thoughts, remembering the risks of over-excitement. What if it was all too much for me? So she whispered, to take some of the shock out of the scene she had engineered, ‘It’s a surprise donkey.’ At last she called out, ‘We’re ready.’
It must have taken quite some organising. She must have persuaded or bribed a rag-and-bone man, or someone from a fair. A fair is more likely, I suppose, since the animal wore ribbons. There were rags tied round its hoofs so that the surprise wouldn’t be given away by clops.
What I saw first was its master walking backwards into the room holding a parsnip and backing slowly towards me. He made clacking sounds of encourag
ement with his tongue against his teeth. He wore a hat, also with ribbons, which he swept off with an awkwardly dramatic gesture as the animal advanced into the room. I think his showmanship must have been cramped by the lack of space, the difficulty of steering a sizeable quadruped with a mind of its own. Under the hat he had bright red hair, worn rather long for the period.
The donkey was comfortably lower than the lintel, but almost too wide to fit through the door. There was a strong bodily smell which fascinated me. As they came nearer I realised that it came from the man and not the beast. The man manœuvred himself towards the bed and crouched down so that the donkey would be almost beside my head when it got its reward. I could smell the donkey now – it had an intense burnt smell, harsher than the whiff of bonfires. It reached down and took the parsnip with a series of astounding crunches. The man said, ‘Want to pat him, sonny? He likes that ever so,’ but my tensely smiling mother was already calling out, ‘Better not, John.’ As if the surrealist tableau she had laid on would be pushed over the edge by actual contact with the wonderful animal, into something that would squeeze my heart to bursting.
The man made slow shunting gestures with his hands. Again his tongue clacked against his teeth, and eventually the donkey backed out of the room. It left no trace of its visit except a little patch of drool on the worn carpet by my bed, which soon dried up. I would almost rather it had left one of its droppings, a shocking log or a scatter of pellets which my mother would have rushed to clean up, though I don’t suppose it would have smelled any worse than horse-shit does, which is wholesome enough. At least that would have made the episode less like an apparition or a dream about a magic animal, about a clacking noise and a series of deafening crunches, about a man whose red hair I would have liked to touch at least as much as I would have liked to stroke his donkey.
I had few other visitors. I remember a troop of local children coming to sing their carols one Christmas – though not perhaps the first, the indelible Christmas of candy and gramophone, of hairy hands and suspect clarinet.
The carol singers would traipse round knocking on doors, singing their two carols alternately. ‘Away in a Manger’. ‘Hark the Herald’. They came into my bedroom and sang their whole repertoire to me, first one and then the other. They brought the cold in with them. There were six or eight of them, mostly girls. A great crowd in my room. They clustered round the bed, but they didn’t look at me while they sang. Only a couple of the little ones, the ones closest to my age, couldn’t resist lowering their eyes and sneaking a peek.
What had Mum said to them? Here’s a few coppers for you, if you sing to my poorly boy, only be sure not to stare. It was a treat. It was certainly meant to be a treat.
They stood very near the bed. They breathed over me. Perhaps Mum was getting extra value out of her handful of coppers by asking them to expose my system to every bug that was going. She’d been a nurse, it was her way of thinking. Otherwise I would be a sitting duck for every cough and sneeze, if I ever managed to find my way back to the lively world of germs.
After so much under-stimulation, such a rationing of sensation, having this multitude burst into my room and sing at me was like an assault. It was a shock seeing runny noses and bright scarves, open mouths and chapped lips, all in a bunch and from close to, after so little variation of solitude. My heart raced and didn’t slow down for a long time after they had gone.
It seems obvious in retrospect that I must have been bored, but boredom doesn’t really describe my experience. Small events resounded with more significance than I knew what to do with, and attempts to vary my surroundings didn’t always have the intended effect. When Mum brought some buds in from the garden and put them in a vase I found their presence on my bedside table disturbing. Some of the inflorescences fell off in a day or two, the little catkins, and they looked like slugs dusted with yellow powder. It wasn’t the resemblance to slugs that bothered me (I’d always liked slugs) but the invasion of known space by an alien element. I was happier, perversely, with the unchanging roses on the wallpaper.
Only lightly agonised
Treats and surprises were one thing, but what my morale needed was some regular occasion to look forward to. Mum had enough nursing expertise to know how to forestall bedsores by changing my position, but my mind was always lying in the same dull trench of thought. It was agreed with Dr Duckett that one expedition per week, properly supervised, was compatible with the sentence of bed rest.
It wasn’t much of an expedition. I only went as far as the hall. Our local grocer offered a delivery service, for which orders could be taken by telephone. It became my weekly treat to play a part in the chain of retail command. Mum would write out her list in diagram form, in the days before my reading became fluent. A sketch of two oblongs meant Two pounds of potatoes please. A red stick was A pound of carrots. Wiggly strips meant A half of streaky bacon. I even learned to understand the hieroglyph that meant a quarter of field mushrooms if they’re not too dear – ask how much. Then Mum and ‘the girl’ would set me up on a chair, well supplied with cushions, only lightly agonised, within reach of the phone in the hall. Mum would hold the receiver while I relayed the family order into the cold black curve of the mouthpiece. I loved doing that, feeling that I was at the nerve centre of the household. I manifested a character trait for which there was little scope at the time, obscured by pathos on this first appearance. The desire to be useful.
How did Mum cope? How did she save her sanity? One of the things she did was to get a dog, a golden retriever, our lovely Gipsy. If Gipsy was company for Mum then she was a sort of nurse for me, just as Nana in Peter Pan is more nanny than dog. Golden retrievers are frisky, lolloping creatures, but Mum trained her to stay put on a chair next to my bed. I would only have to say, ‘Hup!’ and Gipsy would jump up onto her chair and curl up to watch over me. I couldn’t really pet her. There’s a picture of the two of us taken the year after I became ill. I’m terribly skinny – it’s not surprising that Mum devoted so much energy to making me eat. I look like a monk on hunger strike. My face is like a worn-out mask, at the far end of life. Gipsy wears an expression of the most soulful worry. You would think she has just taken my temperature and is wondering when my fever will break. She slept in my room, adding her night voice to Mum’s and Dad’s. Every now and then she gave out a distinctive grunting sigh.
I remember one day when a neighbour came to call, bringing her own dog, a low-slung terrier. Gipsy jumped down from her chair and the two dogs went around in circles, sniffing each other’s bottoms. They were of such different heights that they had to get into the strangest positions. I thought that was the funniest thing ever – I really laughed, but being careful not to let my head go back or my shoulders shake.
Afterwards I asked Mum what Gipsy was doing with that other dog. She explained that long ago all the dogs in the world went to a special party, and they hung up their bottoms on pegs as they arrived. But then there was a fire at the party and everyone left in a rush, taking any old bottom down from the pegs. And ever since then, dogs have sniffed each other’s bottoms, trying to join up again with the lower half that had once been theirs. This fable says almost nothing about dogs, but it explains a great deal about Mum. During that fire alarm she might not even have looked for her bottom half. She would have managed without, and never looked back. Perfectly happy to wipe other people’s bottoms as long as she wasn’t expected to have one of her own.
Tuppenny black
Yet she often discussed my stools, with enthusiasm and technical knowledge. One day I asked, ‘Why was my tuppenny black today?’ I must have caught a glimpse of the kidney dish while she was carrying it away.
‘That’s because the doctor has been giving you iron. You need iron because you’re anæmic.’
‘Is it just iron that makes a tuppenny black?’
‘No, charcoal does it too. I expect a piece of burnt toast would be enough …’
‘Next time I have my half of boiled egg, can
you burn the toast? I want to see if it makes my tuppenny go black.’
‘Yes, but you must finish the iron tablets first.’
‘Do tuppennies come in other colours?’
‘Oh yes, many! Ever so many.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I saw many different colours of tuppenny when I was a nurse.’
‘What colours did you see?’
‘Babies do tuppennies that are yellow. Yours looked just like scrambled egg. And I’ve seen tuppennies that were red.’
‘I bet you never saw a white tuppenny!’
‘Oh but I did!’
‘When?’
‘I told you. When I was a nurse.’
‘Was it a man’s tuppenny or a lady’s tuppenny?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I just can’t.’
‘Why was the tuppenny white?’
‘Because he’d had a barium meal.’
‘What’s a barium meal?’
‘It’s like porridge. You eat it and the next day they X-Ray your tummy and your botty so they can see if it’s all right.’
‘Have you had a barium meal?’
‘No. But your granny has.’
‘What did they see in Granny’s tummy and botty?’
‘Oh they were both fine.’
‘Remember when you saw the white tuppenny?’
‘Yes.’
‘You said you didn’t know whether it was a man’s tuppenny or a lady’s tuppenny.’
‘No, and I don’t.’
‘But then you said, “Because he’d had a barium meal.” So it must have been a man’s tuppenny!’
‘Then I expect that’s what it was …’
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