I asked Mum if the train was going to be special, like the special ambulance that would be laid on for us. ‘Not really, JJ, but trains are always special to me. I’d live on a train if I could!’ All her life she had a fascination with trains. Roads terrified her, but trains were somehow soothing as well as thrilling. If she had her wish, there’d be more trains everywhere, more trains and more lines and more stations. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were no cars and only trains, no cars anywhere except taxis to take people to the station? Being proposed to by Dad on a train hadn’t crowned her obsession with the permanent way, but it had fallen short of putting her off the romance of the rails.
Any train was special for me, too, just by being a train, by not being my bedroom and by going to a place which also wasn’t my bedroom. That was specialness enough for someone whose experience had been narrowing, over the previous years, almost to a point. It didn’t need to go anywhere. Even a train that just sat there in the station without moving would have been enough to fill my dreams for weeks.
The sick room
I left the Bathford house with no regrets. That rather austere room had done as much as it ever could do for me. Its bareness embodied the philosophy of the period, that it wasn’t right to make a sick room too bright and cheery. Perhaps it was thought that if the room had a sick look in its own right, it might spur the patient on to get better! The steep down-pointing road outside my window showed no signs of doing anything interesting either. Beautiful things had happened to me there, but apart from Dr Duckett (who was still around) and Jim (who had gone) the experiences were internal, and I was taking ‘me’ with me.
Even separation from Mum didn’t really worry me. My prayer to God to ‘have the ability to move to the end of this room, or possibly even a little further’ was being answered in a big way! Taplow and the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital sounded modern and futuristic beyond belief. Everything would be there: doctors, nurses, friends, children to play with both mentally and physically, and because it was a famous hospital, it would be connected to everything in every conceivable direction of time and space. There would be people who were better connected with God than Mum and Dad were. There would be sure to be a doctor or scientist to tell me what this mysterious sense of ‘I’ was, this entity which burned in the reddish-brown space of consciousness, and didn’t weaken when the body weakened. So I would be sure to find out all about that!
The ambulance was enormous fun. After I’d been on board about ten seconds I started thinking that if Mum could happily spend the rest of her life travelling on trains, then I could just as happily spend the rest of mine travelling in ambulances. It was quite an exciting world, there was much more life in it than the room in Bathford. Every new face was a feast, and here there were two at once, the driver and his friend, who would be riding in the back with me and Mum. Every face was a feast, but the friend’s was more of a three-day banquet. He had green eyes, something which I had never seen before, and hair so pale it was almost transparent. He had freckles. I didn’t think boys could get them. I’d only ever seen freckles on girls, but then I’d hardly even scratched the surface of the world.
There was a container of water with a glass attached to the wall, so I asked for a drink of water. Mum started to get some out of her bag but I stopped her, saying, ‘I want a drink of that water.’ I wouldn’t rest until I had tried some special Ambulance Water, special water for the people who travel in a special ambulance. After that I spotted a sign saying OXYGEN and wanted some of that too. Mum said, ‘That’s only for sick people, John,’ beginning to be embarrassed, and I said, ‘I’m sick so I want some.’ I hadn’t been out of the nest for an hour yet, and I was already turning into a full-fledged pest.
Mum was starting to look a bit thin-lipped so I asked for Martin to come over. I’d picked up from their conversation that Martin was the man in the ambulance and his friend Mick was the driver. At some point Mum must have used the phrase ‘properly trained’ about the people in charge of the ambulance. I said I wanted Martin to come and sit next to me because he was properly trained.
I had to have Martin sitting right by me. Close contact with Mum wasn’t a novelty, but the sudden nearness of a man made me feel as wildly excited as if I was about to discover Africa, Venus or London. Martin was wearing a uniform, but even without it he would have been exciting because of his male aura and vibrations. But there was undoubtedly something transcendent about the properly trained vibrations of a man in uniform. I snuggled up to him as closely as I could, and I relied on looking as sweet as pie. The plan was to get to know him really well, and then ask for what I wanted. Then if he said ‘No’ it wouldn’t really matter. The snuggliness was much more than a means to an end, even if I planned to use it to get my way.
Mates
I explored this man as far as my limited reach would allow. I pressed his thigh and told him to flex his quadriceps and he laughed. I told him he could feel mine if he wanted. Then I said I had something I wanted to whisper in his ear and I asked, ‘Martin, can I have some oxygen please?’
I didn’t get any, but the snuggliness was a wonderful consolation prize. And there was one more thing about the rest of the ride that I stored away in my memory. Martin called the driver ‘Mikey’ and also ‘mate’. The lingo went so well with Martin’s manliness and fresh properly trained male scent, and the word ‘mate’ made a great impression.
I remember the ambulance pulling up at the train station, and wondering why we couldn’t just stay in the ambulance all the way from Bath to Taplow. But that was it for ambulances for the time being. Any disappointment I felt didn’t last. A new wave of excitement rose inside me as I realised I was about to make my first journey by train.
Nothing in my straitened experience prepared me for the railway station. My view of everything was skewed since I was carried on a stretcher. I could see people’s heads from below, some of them jerking down to look at me with an expression that was almost angry. There was a wonderful high ceiling, with pigeons fluttering under it. I remember thinking that this might be a good place for a church if it was only a bit quieter. Perhaps it became a church at night? There was certainly enough of an echo.
The concourse was full of activity, with people running and announcements blaring. Being inside the station was like being born all over again, the impression of light and confusion. It was a good job Mum was so enthusiastic about the train, because I wasn’t so sure as the stretcher came near to it. It looked very dirty and it made an awful lot of noise. Then I realised that the dirt was probably caused by smoke, which cheered me up. Smoke was a mystical substance as far as I was concerned, just by being so little like a substance. I sometimes thought I would like to be smoke because then I could be everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. Smoke was like mist, only it was man-made, and mist was mystical. When I learned the word mystical it seemed positively to smell of smoke and misty devotions.
From my position on the stretcher I couldn’t see anything of the rails beneath me. Probably just as well. If I’d caught a glimpse, I doubt if I’d have agreed to go on something which looked and felt so dangerous. Being carried on board was like flying, but not nice. I felt fluttery and afraid. I knew what railway carriages were, from toy trains I had played with before my illness, so I knew I was in a carriage. I was being carried though to a compartment.
I’d hoped that there would be other travellers on the train to talk to, but those hopes came to nothing. Although the train wasn’t special, Mum and I did have a compartment to ourselves. I had to lie flat across two seats, while Mum sat opposite with all our things. I suppose we were also given so much privacy as a way of protecting the public from distress, the distress of seeing this sick and unsightly child, but that didn’t occur to me at the time.
When we had got settled Mum put some of our things above our heads, where there were shelves called luggage racks. I must have looked worried, because she said, ‘It’s all quite all right up there.
You don’t have to watch it. You don’t even have to think about it. It just gets carried along with everything else!’ My neck had very little play in it, but I could nod to my own satisfaction, if nobody else’s, so I nodded now and said wisely, ‘What a relief!’ It was a phrase I had picked up from Mum. She always seemed to look and feel a little better after saying it. What a relief!
I wasn’t quite as convinced as I made out, and I kept asking how she knew that the things up there would not come down when we met a rough bit of journey. Wouldn’t they come down and bash me right where it hurt? Mum said, ‘Don’t be silly! It’s all quite safe,’ and I said ‘What a relief!’ again, wondering why those words didn’t seem to work as well for me as they did for Mum. Perhaps if I kept on saying them, the effect would come on gradually. Then the whistle sounded, meaning that the doors were about to be slammed shut and I suddenly panicked.
‘Mum, are you sure you remembered my Siss-Bottle?’
‘Quite sure!’ she said, opening her bag and letting me have a peek at it.
‘And the kidney dish?’ I added, which was silly really. If the answer was ‘No’, then they would hardly have held up the entire train while Mum just popped out for a few seconds to grab a quick kidney dish for John. But if I had a whole compartment to myself, then I must be fairly important, so perhaps the train would be held after all.
Mum let me have a glimpse of the kidney dish too.
What a relief!
Watery leaf
I fell into a sort of doze after all the excitement and forgot to notice everything that there was to see as the train pulled out of the station. The train’s wheels sang a song as they rumbled and slid along the tracks. What-a-relief, What-a-relief, What-a-relief …
On the edge of sleep I thought, ‘Now the train is agreeing with Mum.’
What-a-re …
LIEF WHAT-A-RE, LIEF-what-a-re,
Lief, watta-ry
LEAF, watery, leaf watery, leaf watery leaf, watery leaf …
I should say in my own defence that I had never been on a train before, but I knew plenty of Enid Blyton’s books, and the trains in her books were always making words like that. It was life imitating art, the Great Western Railway’s trains imitating Blyton’s. Their speech pattern was different, though. Blyton never tried to render the way trains pass with a clatter over points on the track, ratcheting up the volume and the urgency of what they’re trying to say.
My eyes were absurdly heavy. I knew I should be looking out of the window, to see the sights that had been kept from me for so long. There would be rabbits nibbling at lettuces at the edge of fields. What was the beautiful word Beatrix Potter used about the effect of lettuce on the Flopsy Bunnies? Soporific. Enid Blyton never mentioned that travelling by train was so soporific.
When I woke up I was very thirsty.
Mum was nodding, but she always told me she slept With One Eye Open, so I didn’t seriously suspect her of having a little nap of her own. I called out for water. ‘Thirsty, Mum, want water …’
She sprang to life right away. It was really true. She did sleep with one eye open.
‘Well you can have water if you really want it, darling, but I thought perhaps you might care for some of this.’
With a flourish Mum produced a huge Thermos flask from the depths of her basket.
‘What’s it got in it, Mum?’ I asked. When she told me it was tea I thought Father Christmas had popped by with an extra present. By now I was allowed to drink tea occasionally, but it had never lost the romance it had had in the days of ‘the girl’ and the feeder. Today Mum said I could drink as much as I liked. She wouldn’t have been Mum if she hadn’t stepped in to damp down joy the moment she’d aroused it. ‘Before you get carried away,’ she said, ‘you’d better realise that “as much as you like” means “you can’t drink more than there is in this flask”. They don’t hold anything like as much as you think!’
It didn’t really matter, because the amount left in the flask would surely still be huge – enough to get us to Taplow station and half-way back as well, I thought. Coming back on the same train on the same day was an option I still secretly had in my mind. In case the famous Taplow hospital didn’t live up to expectations. Mum and I had managed on our own before and we could do it again.
Mum got out a cup for herself, and instead of the hateful spouted feeder, a proper cup for me too. A supply of pillows had materialised from somewhere, so I was half-sitting, and with a little more expert plumping I was half-way to perching in my mobile bed, and starting to feel very chirpy.
I told Mum I was looking forward to the tea very much, and then asked what the taste would be like, because she always put the milk into the cup first and then poured on the tea. Wasn’t it going to taste funny after being mixed in the flask with the milk for so long? Mum’s tongue did some clicking in her mouth and then she said, ‘Jay-Jayeee! You don’t think Mum would forget a thing like that, do you?’ She pulled a little bottle out of the basket.
I watched in rapture as she poured out the milk and then the tea. Mum was always saying she needed to keep her blood sugar levels up, and so she dropped two sugar lumps in each cup. It turned out there was a limit to the elaborateness of her preparations. ‘When you’re having tea on a train,’ she said, ‘bringing tongs along is just showing off,’ dusting her hands together to shake off any lingering grains.
Mum had propped me up so expertly that I needed only a little extra help to drink my tea. She also helped herself, took a ladylike sip, sat back, closed her eyes and said, ‘What a relief for this cuppa!’ Leaf for this cuppa, leaf for this cuppa, agreed the train. My whole world became more highly coloured, and my mind rushed off in a number of directions. Mum’s system was hardened to tea, but mine wasn’t really, and despite her nurse’s training she had forgotten that tea is fundamentally a stimulant. I was used to much smaller doses.
God the puzzle-picture
God featured largely in my thinking. This was inevitable, given my basic cast of mind. God was indeed the basis of all things, and I could see now that whenever I had been afraid and doubted Him, it was merely lack of vision on my part. God was like those puzzle-pictures we played with to pass the time, where you had to see secret things – spinning tops, banjos, cats and books – hidden inside a picture. I also knew that getting to know Him was going to be hard work, and a long journey, but I felt I was on my way. Once Paul Gallico’s Snowflake had begun her trembling descent from the sky, there was no turning back for her.
Soon I learned that it wasn’t just Snowflake that couldn’t turn back. After the first cup there was only enough tea left for half a cuppa for me and the same for Mum. She had been right in saying that the flask didn’t hold much. And it wasn’t long before I remembered that I didn’t hold much either. I wanted to have a siss. I was grateful that Mum had arranged me with the aisleway to my left, because I could only use the bottle if my taily was pointing that way. A lifetime of weeing to the left has fixed my taily so it points in that direction, though I seem to be the only one who has noticed.
On the way into the train I had noticed that the carriages were connected by something that looked like a concertina. It looked very worrying and I was frightened. I had been glad that when they had laid me down we hadn’t needed to pass that point. I’d thanked God that I didn’t have to pass through the sinister concertina. When the train began to move the concertina became even more terrifying, bucking and plunging, emitting squeaks and groans.
After the siss was comfortably managed I felt my bowels begin to stir, and then I couldn’t get my fears out of my mind. I told Mum that I needed a tuppenny, so could she please get out the kidney dish, but she went all strange, and said she would have to ask about it first. She made me secure in my bed and then disappeared. She was back after a few moments with a rather fixed look on her face.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But it just isn’t allowed. Out of the question. I’m going to have to get you to the lavatory. Somehow.’
‘But you can’t!’ I wailed. ‘We’ve got the kidney dish in your bag, you showed it to me yourself!’
‘Yes I know, JJ, but we’re just not allowed to do it here. It’s against the rules. But don’t worry, I’ll carry you carefully. The way only Mum knows how.’
‘But that means I’ll have to go through that concertina thing, and I’m scared and you know if I knock any bit of my leg it’ll hurt for days and weeks. I won’t go through the horrible concertina thing.’
‘Well you’ll just have to get used to it!’
I decided then that I hated trains and I wished we’d never got on this one.
‘But you know I can’t. I’ll never get used to it!’
Now the train was siding sneakily with Mum, going against me and joining in with her scolding. Used-to-it, used-to-it, GET-USED-TO-IT …
‘But you tricked me! You lied! You showed me the kidney dish! If you make me go to that lavatory through the concertina thing, I can never trust you or love you ever again!’
Ever-again, trust-her-again, ever-again, love-her-again … The silly train really didn’t know when to shut up.
I had been deceived by Mum, deceived by the mystic enchantment of the train, and finally deceived by the God to whom I had prayed with all my heart. The concertina thing was bucking and rattling madly. My terror wasn’t entirely irrational. I had never seen a storm at sea, but I grasped instinctively that some such collision of almighty forces was involved, a war between the elements. All the mechanical tensions in the train, the parts struggling to go in different directions, or (worse) trying to be in the same place at the same time, fought themselves out in this dark and rickety area. It was tricky enough for Mum to carry me from my bedroom to the kitchen as a special treat – how could she hope to manage when the very ground under her feet was lurching and plunging?
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