Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Mixed population

  She was doing what she could to make sense of a distinctly perverse arrangement. Professor Bywaters was an acknowledged expert on Still’s Disease, but he had another interest also, a sideline. It seems absurd now to imagine that sick children could be put together simply on the basis of a doctor’s twin clinical specialities, but that was how it was on Wards One and Two. Eric Bywaters was a big name, his wishes had force.

  His other interest was childhood leukæmia. We were a mixed population for no other reason than that we had equal claim on his attention. The two classes of patient were nursed together, with no one actually explaining to them that they belonged to two quite different categories. The leukæmia children were going to die. The Still’s Disease children weren’t. They were likely to be in pain, and they were going to be deformed to one degree or another. You could go so far as to say that life had turned its face away from them (certainly that must have been how it seemed to many of their parents) but death wasn’t staring them down.

  So when Wendy had said on that first day, ‘He’s not pale – he’s very twisty,’ to the cannibal girl called Ivy, she was for once being scientific – in a rudimentary way – rather than merely baleful. Deep down she didn’t buy the Death Bed notion, though it was a useful idea to frighten others with. She had understood from the first that some children were going to die, Death Bed or no Death Bed. She was establishing that I had Still’s Disease and not the other thing, whatever it was. Information which could be obtained no other way than by going and taking a look. Sarah had been curious too, which was why she had joined the little party. Secrecy was the prevailing condition in that hospital. We were all in the dark. Why should patients be told about such things as the composition of the wards they were on? Patients who were children least of all. It was none of our business. For once Wendy Keach was ranged on the side of knowledge, against the ignorance in which we were left by the hospital. She was only assigning me to the correct tribe.

  Professor Bywaters was a good man and a good doctor, but in those days being an expert in Still’s Disease didn’t actually mean you knew very much. The last I heard, he was still alive and alert. The mystery of Still’s Disease is still alive too. There’s a theory that it’s an auto-immune condition, like the rheumatic fever I was originally supposed to have, but the jury is still out on that. Childhood leukæmia has given up a much larger proportion of its secrets. In the 1950s, when to say ‘cancer’ seemed no different from saying ‘death’, leukæmia was even more terrifying a diagnosis than it is now. It had a starkness.

  Not all of us with Still’s had quite the same symptoms. Ivy Horrocks was blind, although she was in the middle of a long series of operations which might do something to restore her sight. Her problem must have been acute iritis, caused by the disease from which we all suffered, with antibodies in her case attacking the eyes. Wendy told us Ivy was a witch who would put the evil eye on us, but that may just have been politeness on her part, wanting to establish her friend on an equal footing of malevolence.

  I was fascinated by Ivy’s books, of which she was very proud. They were made up of raised dots in enchanting patterns. In a genuinely rather witchy way, Ivy’s eyes seemed to have migrated down her arms to her fingertips. Reading for her was now something that took place outside her head.

  Sarah Morrison had senior status in the group, not because she was the oldest but because she had contracted the illness the youngest. She had been eighteen months old. She had been born in India, which meant she could eat the spicy food called curry without dying. She collected dolls. They were all from different countries and some of them had strange foreign names.

  A girl called Geraldine, who was given to silent sobbing, could play chess, but as there was no one else who could, and no one who wanted to learn, her accomplishment didn’t raise her status noticeably or even help her to pass the time.

  Wally Snorts the Posh

  As for me, I tried to sell myself as the son of an Air Force pilot war hero, but that made no impression, whether because an audience of girls wasn’t susceptible to that brand of glamour, or because in our strange way we were a meritocracy, one of the few enclaves in the country at that time where it didn’t matter what your father did as long as you said ‘toilet’ and not ‘lavatory’. I was branded as Wally Snorts the Posh in Wendy’s eyes, and I couldn’t do anything about that, but I did manage to use Charlie to broker an enlarged identity.

  I said that my best friend was a budgie who knew all my secrets, and that he would soon be coming to live with me on the ward. I knew perfectly well that pets of any sort were forbidden at CRX, but it was worth fibbing for the short-term advantage. Until I was found out, I could make any number of promises about what Charlie would do when he came to live on the ward, the words we’d teach him, whose bed his cage could be stood by at night. If they were really nice to me, that is.

  Mary was my closest friend on the ward, not only because of her sweet nature but because we shared a passion for books. We would read Famous Five adventures together. We were always coming up with some altruistic scheme or other. The altruism was stronger in Mary, but I wasn’t going to show myself up in front of her. Because I had a gramophone on top of my locker but no records, we decided to write a letter of appeal to Decca on behalf of the ward. It wasn’t quite true that I had no records – there were a number at home that Mum would happily have brought in, but I didn’t dare risk Wendy’s contempt about my posh tastes. It seemed to me that Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ was the quintessence of posh, and there was an aria from La Bohème that I also loved, but I wasn’t going to risk that either.

  The letter Mary and I concocted to send to Decca hit the jackpot. They sent us a whole box of 78s. I suppose they were old stock, but I didn’t mind. They were all operatic highlights. So I was even able to hear that aria without having to own up to my love for it. Of course it wasn’t the repertoire the ward would have chosen for itself. Popular taste would have opted for Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele and Frankie Lymon. Frankie Lymon in particular hit the bullseye with a song about not being a juvenile delinquent. He preached a sermon that adults couldn’t object to, and still he filled your head with thoughts of being bad.

  Just when I was beginning to give up on the educational component of the institution, the school began to keep more than Brigadoon hours. Lessons started at last. There was no school-room as such – lessons were held right there in the ward. The first subjects I remember being taught at CRX were music and scripture.

  Miss Reid sang songs in her reedy voice. There was a piano at the end of the ward. ‘Please, Miss Reid,’ I would say, ‘will you pick up my pencil?’ She bent over to do it, saying, not unkindly, ‘I shall have to call you Dropper.’ She taught us, ‘Soldier, soldier, will you marry me?’ but she blushed scarlet, as we knew she would, when we asked if anyone had ever proposed to her. After a moment when it didn’t seem that she’d be able to speak, she said, ‘Yes. Someone did once, as a matter of fact.’ Of course we all cried out, ‘And what did you say?’ Though we knew the answer. If she had said ‘Yes’ she wouldn’t still be a Miss and she wouldn’t be teaching sick kids. It was still a surprise, somehow, when she said, ‘I said No.’

  Playing thickly

  Miss Reid’s lessons were fine, though she could only pick out a tune on the piano with one finger. What we really loved was when Mrs Pullen played thickly. Playing thickly meant using all her fingers, and all at once in great bunches. Playing chords. I looked longingly at the piano, which could make such a complex sound, but for some reason I was only ever assigned the triangle or tambourine.

  In terms of equipment, the school at CRX was a step up from Miss Collins’s portable blackboard, wiped clean by the hanky she kept in her sleeve, but only a step. A school within a hospital was unlikely to attract inspirational staff. It was a legal requirement that we should be educated. It would have been unlawful to strand us without lessons, even those of us
who were not going to see another birthday. Yet there wasn’t a strong sense of what we were being educated for. What, if anything, we were going to become.

  The phantom school at CRX, so timid, so likely to vanish into the woodwork when a doctor appeared, didn’t concern itself with discipline. No matter – Sister Heel took care of that, and it was still her ward when lessons, by her gracious permission, were taking place there. If we children talked after lights out, the procedure was: first, dire warnings. After that the offender’s bed would be pulled into the middle of the ward. If we still hadn’t learned our lesson, the bed was trundled into a side ward where we had to stay until morning. In the morning there would be a full-dress dressing-down from Sister Heel, a proper scolding. As we waited for morning we learned how cracked hospital mugs feel in the seconds before their public smashing.

  Early in my stay in the hospital, an astounding thing happened on Ward Two. A boy with Still’s Disease came down with measles, and when the measles cleared up so did the rheumatoid arthritis. The lesser illness carried off the greater on its back. Professor Bywaters was fascinated and did every test he could think of. He would have been happy for the boy to stay on the ward until the mechanism of this absurd cure was understood, but the boy no longer needed to be looked after. He wasn’t a patient any more, and he wasn’t going to loiter around. Gregory went home.

  The mystical action of the measles cure was as mysterious as the way white wine lifts a stain of red, leaving the tablecloth none the worse for wear. And after all, the person who first tried that desperate bit of dinner-party alchemy must have been something of a mystic, or else only threw the second glassful in a fit of temper.

  I spent a lot of time arguing with God about the measles cure. It seemed so unfair that Gregory was the one to get the luck. I tried not to bear a grudge, to resent him for his good fortune (not that I even knew him, since he was on Ward Two), but it was hard to accept things as they were. Why did it have to be Gregory who got to go home? Why couldn’t it have been Wendy?

  The professor tried to be methodical about this freak thunderbolt of healing energy. He wanted us all to get the measles, hoping that some or all of us would stumble on the same happy cancellation of one disease by another. I remember being indefatigably coughed on by feverish children. I didn’t succumb, but quite a few did, including some of the leukæmics, who could hardly hope to benefit. There were no repetitions of the miracle cure, even among the Still’s children. Freak lightning only struck the once. When the measles cleared up, they took nothing away with them except a little hope.

  It doesn’t seem exactly scientific, to expose sick children to measles on the off-chance that it will do them good. But ever since Fleming had waited for penicillin to re-occur naturally, after a promising mould was washed up by an over-zealous technician, the picture of scientific discovery had been changing. Now discoveries could be made by knowing what you were looking for and waiting for it to actually happen. It was less about genius taking a chisel to the materials of the universe, and more about a dance and marriage between a drifting spore and an opened mind.

  I don’t know if the term ‘immune system’ even existed in the 1950s. Certainly it wasn’t in general currency. The mechanism of that freakish cure is easier to understand with its help. By analogy: a householder is fast asleep while thieves are stripping the house, packing his treasures into bags marked SWAG and throwing them out of a window to accomplices in the street outside, when he is woken by a bird flying down the chimney. Measles being the bird.

  The analogy can just about be stretched to allow for the possibility that Still’s proves to be an auto-immune condition. A sleep-walking householder is putting his own treasures into bags marked SWAG, throwing them out of the window into the empty street, when he’s woken by a bird flying down the chimney. Measles still being the bird.

  I remember asking Mum if I could have more pocket money if I caught measles. It vexed me that a boy called Wayne on Ward Two, who was only five, had two shillings a week pocket money, while I at eight had ninepence. When I complained about the manifest injustice, Mum had the good sense not to say, ‘Don’t get too jealous, John. Wayne has two months to live.’ Instead she said, ‘You’ve learned a very good lesson. There’ll always be someone who’s younger than you and gets more.’ Taking a hard line. Still, when I said, ‘Honestly, Mum, it’ll take me till I’m twenty-four to save up for a tape-recorder,’ she softened a bit and said, ‘Oh all right. We’ll meet you half-way.’ There would be time enough for me to learn that Wayne had leukæmia.

  Cross-bracing

  Jim Shaeffer’s two presents from the long-ago Christmas of fear and giving (of course the candy had been scoffed in short order) were invaluable in this new setting. They provided vital cross-bracing to my identity. The gramophone sat on the cupboard next to my bed, though I was strict about when it could be used – the nurses tended to brush against it and make the needle jump. I used to adore playing Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Gambling Man’ but it tempted the staff to jive about. Some of them had such a heavy tread that they could make the needle skip just by galumphing nearby. ‘You’re not supposed to do that!’ I told them, but it didn’t do any good.

  The Relide watch also enhanced my status. The boys and girls on the ward said it was ‘Illuminous’, but then the nurses called it that too. I tried for a while to correct them but it was much easier just to let them get on with being wrong. Radium was lovely because it glowed on its own. At any time of night. Staring at it during periods of sleeplessness was a great consolation.

  I loved the fact that the watch was supposed to be serviced every thousand days – it was so precise and scientific an interval, but also like something out of a fairy tale. A princess might fall into a deep sleep for a thousand days, while a forest (or at least a herb garden) grew up around her. After the prescribed interval Dad took it to Maidenhead for servicing. When he brought it back I found that the dial had been replaced and I wanted to know why. Dad said it was nothing to worry about, but they’d had to change it because we weren’t allowed to use radium any more.

  ‘It’s just the same, chicken,’ he said, ‘it’s still your watch.’ But it wasn’t. He always called me chicken when he was being extra nice or when he felt in the wrong.

  The numerals and hands on the new dial had to be charged by holding them close to a light, and even so the effect didn’t last long. You couldn’t see anything at all, later on in the night. The old dial had actually made its own light. The radium markings were a kind of mind that could think its pale-green thoughts to the very end of the darkness. The new dial was only a memory, and not a very good one. It was in decline from the moment it was charged, fully informed with light. It could dimly remember the brightness from earlier on, but only for a little while. So it wasn’t at all the same thing. In the darkest watches of the night my watch deserted me and went dark itself. I felt that some of Jim Shaeffer’s gift had been filched from me. As if Dad was jealous, and trying to spoil things somehow.

  Breakfast elves

  There were some aspects of the running of the ward that were sociable, and even inspired. For instance: when it was someone’s birthday there was jelly and ice cream for the whole ward, not just the lucky girl or boy, so we didn’t resent each other’s festivals.

  Mum brought me squash for my locker. Though sweets must be shared, soft drinks could legitimately be hoarded. At breakfast there was a choice of cereals, so there was no direct repetition of the Weetabix trauma. In any case my taste had shifted by now to Rice Krispies. I particularly liked the three elves on the packet. I wanted to have elves like that, to keep as pets. Snap, Crackle and Pop would be useful little helpers for me, running errands and carrying messages, turning the pages of books. The other reason I wanted a little retinue of elves was so that I could pinch them very hard and make them cry out.

  Behind the scenes Ansell must have been busy trying to solve the problem of my walking. Walking was an absolute passion and obsession of t
he establishment. In that respect also I’m sure it was of its time. Walking was more than encouraged, walking was absolutely insisted on. Not to walk qualified as a surrender to disability, a moral defect, but it was no good telling that to my joints.

  Percussion parade

  One day Ansell proudly produced something that was supposed to help me with my walking. The first I heard of them was this tremendous clattering coming down the corridor. I thought this must be some sort of music class, a free-for-all percussion parade. What I was hearing seemed to be an unholy cross between drums and cymbals.

  Then Ansell came into the ward brandishing a pair of bizarre devices. They were like sticks with tripod bases for extra stability. The effect was of very narrow pyramids with handles on the top. The tripods had an aluminium cladding which was what made all the noise, acting as a sort of amplifying chamber. Slowly it dawned on me that they weren’t percussion instruments at all but intended as part of my rehabilitation. I hated them. I wouldn’t even try them. It was bad enough being assigned the triangle or tambourine in music classes, without being made to advertise my sub-standard walking all over the premises with a one-man marching – tottering – band.

  If I’d been taken to a room and quietly shown the tripods, and had their advantages explained, I might have approached them with an open mind. They had been made thin and light for my benefit, and the cladding was an ingenious way of bracing flimsy metal that would have been impossibly bendy otherwise. But when Ansell tried to show me how to use them, the din went all over the ward. I couldn’t contemplate making all that noise. Imagine what it would have been like if I had ventured with those pyramids into that quarter-mile corridor! I couldn’t afford having one more negative distinction being attached to me, on top of being Wally Snorts the Posh and having beautiful sucking-up manners. I’d given Wendy and her gang enough hostages already. The clanking which preceded the tall pyramids down the corridor had ruled them out as walking aids before I’d even set eyes on them.