Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  My falling at that spot was a common enough event to spark controversy among the staff of the ward. Should they replace the lino, or should they train me to adapt to the ward better? It would be most inconvenient and expensive to do anything about the lino, and where would they put the children while it was being done?

  It was decided that the cost of replacing lino to save me from injury was too great. The physios would take me in hand and make me, again in the same unspecified way, able to raise my foot above all obstacles. I don’t think Withie Boy would ever have taken such a tough line, but she had ’flu at the time and her deputy, Miss Clipworth, was in charge. It happens very often that deputies are more authoritarian than their bosses. Flexibility seems a form of weakness unless endorsed at the highest level. So really it was the inflexible giving the inflexible a masterclass in being unbending.

  Miss Clipworth watched me at my tottering and then asked me where I focused my eyes.

  ‘Well, on the next bed, of course!’ I said. ‘If I see where my next stop is I can walk that far. I make believe it’s a runway, and I’m a plane that can’t land until it gets there. My Dad’s in the RAF. It starts off hard, but it gets easier and easier as you go along because the distance gets shorter. That’s how I worked out how to walk.’ I felt rather proud of explaining my method.

  ‘Then no wonder you keep falling over!’ she said. ‘What an absurd idea! If you’d wanted to learn how to walk properly, you should have come to me.’

  She told me not to concentrate on the next bed, but to keep my attention on the floor. I obeyed, and keeled over after three steps. I lost confidence without being able to concentrate on the next bed, the vista that kept me going. She caught me, then roughly lifted me back to the vertical and told me to try again. The same thing happened again, and although she didn’t let me fall I was very shaken. My heart was beating away like mad, and I started to cry. She said coldly, ‘You’re too old to cry – you don’t want people thinking you’re a sissy, do you?’ If I’d been less upset I might have answered that most of them already did, but I just wanted to apologise for all the trouble one little person was making for everyone who tried to help him. It was frightening to realise that Miss Clipworth was angry with me. She was being rough, but that wasn’t the worst of it, it was knowing that she despised me for the difficulties I was having.

  I didn’t hear the approach of righteous footsteps. All I knew was that I was caught in a whirlwind of starched uniforms. Sister Heel had snatched me from Clipworth, but it took me a few moments to grasp what was happening. I was still being roughly treated, but oh what a difference! Heel was absolutely cross, but not at me, she was cross at the way I had been treated. Her strong arms held me to her. It was painful in its own right, and there were sharp edges to the hug, her belt buckle perhaps and the watch she wore pinned to her front. It was a hug against a barrier of starched hospital linen. It was very far from anything you could term a cuddle, but in its own way it was sheerly loving.

  Heel gave Clipworth something as close to a scolding as the absence of direct authority allowed. ‘I don’t know what you hope to gain, Miss Clipworth, by torturing your patients.’ She was shaking with feeling as she said this. The tremors passed deliciously through me.

  When Clipworth answered I could feel her emotion as a great wave of heat against my back, all that pride and shame and territorial resentment. ‘Physiotherapy is my area and my responsibility, Sister Heel. You must allow me to know best in these matters.’

  ‘Allow you to know best fiddlesticks!’ cried Heel. ‘This must be taken to arbitration.’

  This was marvellous. I thought I knew CRX better than anyone by now, but I had no idea who or what Arbitration was. Sister went to her office, still holding me in her arms, and made a telephone call. Then she told me I should leave her. ‘You can manage, can’t you? I’m sorry Miss Clipworth is so disappointed in your walking. I think you’ve done rather well.’ And this time the wave of heat came from inside me.

  In less than a minute the Tannoy lady was announcing, ‘Dr Ansell to Sister Heel’s office, please … Dr Ansell.’ Soon Ansell was conferring with Heel in her office. At the time I was disappointed not to learn anything about Arbitration, but I knew Ansell would do the job just as well. I hung around the door and listened. This wasn’t strictly necessary – when Ansell was on the ward, everybody heard her anyway. Soon Clipworth was summoned to the office. She must have been taking a series of deep breaths as she approached the show-down – this was High Noon in Bucks (or Berks) – or she would have scolded me as she passed. I hadn’t been able to come up with an innocent reason for hanging around the office, and was picking off flakes of cream gloss paint from a crack in the wall.

  What I heard from my listening post was a terrible piece of adult ganging-up – a coalition of Ansell and Heel against the physio. It was Heaven. Heel asked, ‘Do you have any idea what effect your actions are having on the emotional development of the child?’

  Clipworth must have known from the start that she was outgunned but she shot back with, ‘I’m simply trying to do the job I was trained to do. I am also aware of what it would cost to pull up the lino and re-lay it.’

  Apostle of walking though she was, she had just made a false step herself. Heel let her voice go almost sugary as she asked, ‘Since when have physios been so interested in the doings of the Costs & Maintenance Department?’

  Taplow Tetragrammaton

  I was reeling, outside the office, from all these new ideas. ‘The Emotional Development of the Child’ sounded wonderful, though I wasn’t sure what it might mean. Still, it was something to do with Me. ‘Costs & Maintenance’ was another stunner. On my journeys along the corridor I had memorised every notice board in the place, and I had never seen one labelled Costs & Maintenance. I had learned, though, that CRX was mystically organised. There wasn’t really any such thing as The School on those premises, either. It was an idea, a dream. It was conjured up when the stars were in the right alignment, and dematerialised when medical matters were in the ascendant. Costs & Maintenance, and also perhaps Arbitration, must have a similarly evanescent nature.

  I was learning such a lot from the dramatic show-down in the office. I wish I had taken notes, except that my hand-writing was so poor I couldn’t usually read it myself. In any case, all these revelations were just the prelude to a statement of fantastic brevity and interest. It was in the class of Ansell’s ‘The illness has raged’, but you could argue that it was even more distinguished, since it contained a mere four syllables in four words, as against Ansell’s rather slapdash and prolix five.

  With Ansell laying down covering fire behind her, Heel produced a fantastic ack-ack of invective, making it clear that Ward matters were her province, and ending with this astounding fusillade: ‘I am the Ward …’

  I am the Ward. I am the Ward. Something about the phrase resonated so deeply inside me I almost fainted. It was a connection more fundamental than memory

  I am the Ward. This was the Taplow Tetragrammaton. It stopped the mind dead in its tracks, as a good mantra should. It sent a pulse of wonder through every brick in the place. This was an atom bomb of an argument against which nothing could prevail. I AM THE WARD. It had links with the Old Testament: I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14). It joined hands with the New – In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). ¶I AM THE WARD.

  When Heel detonated this exemplary mantra, Miss Clipworth for all practical purposes ceased to exist. She must have crawled off somewhere, blackened and smoking, perhaps through a door marked Arbitration or Costs & Maintenance, or maybe she just melted into nothingness, falling between the cracks in the rucked-up lino. I don’t think any of us ever saw or heard of her again.

  It was only later that I worried about the hierarchies, about thrones, principalities and powers. If Sister Heel could atomise Miss Clipworth by saying ‘I am the Ward’, did that mean that if it came to a fight, Matron could flatten Heel by saying ‘I AM THE HOSPITAL’?

&n
bsp; I hadn’t disliked Miss Clipworth, though it would be going too far to say I missed her when she was gone. There was only one physiotherapist I really disliked, in fact only one person on the whole staff, medical or scholastic: Miss Krüger, who worked on our walking and sometimes supervised solo sessions in the hydrotherapy pool. I hated and feared her because she was German. Dad always said that the Germans were an evil race. They were just naturally cruel and bad.

  The rest of the staff pronounced her name as Krooger, but she herself used a different pronunciation, the vowel thin and gloating, the consonants as crisp as snapping bones.

  In Miss Krüger’s sessions, we would be made to walk without shoes, and without help from walking aids, the various crutches and canes. Miss Krüger was dark and short. I’m not a good judge of height, but I don’t think she can have been much more than five feet – which could have worked in her favour. We liked to be looked after by people who didn’t tower over us too much, but her therapy was anything but fun. At the beginning of each session she would say brightly, ‘We have much work to do. We must make your ankles strong!’ She would go down on her haunches in front of us, and hold out her hands, palm upwards, to encourage us to take steps, but if we did manage to hobble towards her, she moved backwards so that there was more ground to cover. None of us could ever reach that receding target. She’d say firmly, ‘You must do it without help!’ When we overbalanced she would catch us, but then she just set us to walking again, on legs that had no aptitude for keeping us upright but whose inflamed joints were sensitised to every little disturbance.

  I didn’t use walking aids like the others, so it wasn’t a deprivation for me to do without such things as crutches and canes, but I couldn’t keep myself vertical without the support of my shoes any better than anyone else. I’d topple again and again, until I thought I would prefer to fall over outright without being caught, as long as I was allowed to stay on the ground for the rest of the session. Miss Krüger would keep saying, ‘Ups-a-daisy!’ or ‘Boomps-a-daisy!’ as we lurched in our agony, breezy idioms which I came to hate since their actual meaning seemed to be ‘Show me more pain.’

  It wasn’t that other physios (such as Miss Withers) made no pain, but Withie Boy stopped as soon as she could, and her own pain showed as a fact in the frown on her face. With Miss Krüger we went up on pointes like some tormented corps de ballet, and she made sure each of us had a solo. I had always had mixed feelings about the Little Mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, who chose human legs over a fishy tail even though each step would be like walking on knives. We had the sensation of walking on knives, all right, but our legs didn’t even work properly. We’d been swizzled, getting all the bad bits of the bargain. I for one would happily have traded my legs for a mermaid’s tail, which would have been hardly less useful and a lot more decorative. I’d like to see Miss Krüger try to get me walking on my tail! And at least I’d be able to do without a rubber ring in the hydrotherapy pool.

  Hating the Hun

  It was a relief to discover that we all hated and feared Miss Krüger. It wasn’t just me. I felt better knowing I wasn’t the only one who said hateful things under his breath, the only one who hated the Hun.

  Although Clipworth had been annihilated, her arguments shredded and disposed of, somehow the lino didn’t ever get taken up. Officially I was praised for being ‘adventuresome’, but there was some brisk back-pedalling on the let-him-walk-and-fall-over-as-much-as-he-wants idea. Suddenly a proper wheelchair materialised, and the Tan-Sad was held in reserve for long outside walks on rough terrain. I was told to stay in the wheelchair and only walk if nurse or physio or doctor was on hand. ‘Besides,’ said Miss Reid, ‘we can’t have you neglecting your Education, can we? And the staff have better things to do than to spend their time running round looking for you, you know …’

  That was CRX all over. If I had asked for extra lessons, nothing whatever would have happened, but by tottering around the place like a madman I was able to force that wonderful sentence, ‘We can’t have you neglecting your Education,’ into being. The best technique for getting something in the topsy-turvy world of CRX seemed to be to head firmly in the opposite direction. The most effective way of undermining the régime of the place was not to protest against its ordinances – like the walk-at-all-costs idea – but to carry them to extremes.

  The feeling in those days seemed to be that rules were good things in themselves. For instance: hospital visiting hours amounted to eight hours a week, no more – seven to eight in the evening on weekdays, two to four in the afternoon on Saturdays, three to four on Sundays. These restrictions were strictly enforced unless you’d just had an operation or were actively and officially dying. Some of the kids asked rather tearfully about this. Mums and dads would have liked to visit more often, but many of them lived a long way away. Public transport wasn’t reliable and there was no provision for family members to stay in the hospital. In general the presence of parents was considered an obstruction to the smooth running of the ward.

  No one was allowed to sit on the edge of the bed except doctors, and they never did. Occasionally Ansell would sit on the edge of your bed, if she was explaining something important. This gave the lecture a special meaning and you listened particularly well to what she had to say, but it was a rare event. Again, the rule was waived if you were very ill or dying, so I suppose it was really quite a good sign if visitors weren’t getting too familiar. The strictness of hospital policy meant that no one on Wards One and Two had visitors in the week except for Sarah Morrison, whose mum had moved to Cookham just to be near her.

  Flowers were donated by posh ladies who felt sorry for us, making the ward a cheerier place. When it got dark Nurse came in and took them all off to another room and closed the door. Visiting hours were over for the day, even for flowers. When I asked the reason why, she said, ‘They’re dangerous at night. You’re not allowed to be near them.’ Mum got the science from Dad for me, explaining that plants absorbed carbon dioxide during the day and gave out oxygen, but at night they drank oxygen and emitted carbon dioxide. Normally this wasn’t a problem, but the plants might take a bit too much and cause breathing problems for sick children. After this I was reconciled to the nightly departure of the flowers, though mainly with their welfare in mind. Surely they would be relieved not to be competing for air with the massed lungs of the ward.

  The hospital restricted the hours for visitors, their seating arrangements and even their numbers. No one was allowed more than two visitors at a time. So if a kid had an auntie and an uncle and a mum and a dad visiting, two of them would have to wait outside in the main hospital corridor, which was cold and draughty. Each bed had two chairs, one on each side. Visitors were allowed to stand by the bed, or sit on the chair. Sister and her staff would police the system. A certain amount of hand-holding was allowed. I suppose that was how visitors knew this was a hospital and not a prison.

  The hardship experienced by all those uncles and aunties over the years, waiting outside in such a spooky and comfortless place, must have come to quite a tidy sum of misery. It didn’t compare with the sufferings of patients, but it was wholly unnecessary. Yet there was barely a murmur of grumbling. If families did speak up, they would be told firmly, ‘We don’t want to over-excite the patient, now, do we? Why not go to the WVS canteen and have a nice cup of tea? It’s at the end of the corridor on the right.’ Only a quarter of a mile away.

  One day the visitors had exceeded their quota, and an officious nurse was doing her best to enforce the rules. There were also four kids who didn’t have visitors. One of the aunties had the nous to say, ‘Well, seeing as we are four relatives to one nephew, and the boy in the next bed has no visitors, why don’t two of us be visitors to this boy, and then we can swap round, and we can all chat with him and he won’t feel lonely? Besides,’ she added in a whisper, ‘even if Matron did swoop in, she would never know whose visitor was really whose, now would she?’

  The ward he
ld its breath while the nurse hesitated, and then she dissolved into a human being. Suddenly extra visitors were being hustled and bustled in. The ward rang with friendly chat and laughter, and boys with no visitor reaped the benefit. To crown it all, when the tea trolley came round, the rule of visitors being allowed tea but no cake went out of the window. It was madness, it was Liberty Hall. One boy ended up becoming very attached to his new uncle and auntie, and I think he went home with them for the odd weekend.

  One day Mum told me that she and Dad were buying a house. At first I wondered what that had to do with me, and then I was suddenly terrified that they were moving far away on purpose so that they would never have to visit me again. It took me quite a while to realise that I’d got it exactly the wrong way round. They were moving to be near to me.

  They must have done quite a lot of house-hunting on the sly, before I ever knew a move was on the cards. They didn’t have much money, unlike Jacquetta Morrison who could just swan into Cookham and buy a house whose address ended in Court. Dad’s pay at the time was barely a thousand pounds a year, so really it was a bit of a stretch. Mum and Dad had settled on Bourne End, which wasn’t quite Cookham but was certainly a desirable place to live. Properties could easily fetch £10,000, which was far beyond Dad’s reach. In fact riverside properties like the one they had found on the Abbotsbrook Estate could easily fetch higher prices than suburban Cookham – not that a village can have suburbs, but I’m sure that was how Mum would have viewed anything that wasn’t in the heart of Old Cookham.

  Somehow they had happened on a house that was much cheaper. It was only £3,000, though there was a reason for that. It had no electricity. The garden was so over-grown you could hardly see the house itself (which made it sound to my ears like Sleeping Beauty’s castle). It had been occupied by two old dears who were nearly blind. Gardening was beyond them, but they made up for it in the kitchen. They spent all their time frying, or so it seemed. The kitchen was so encrusted with grease that it stank, and there would have to be many hours of scrubbing before the new occupiers could so much as make a cup of tea which didn’t taste rancid. Every other room was dusty and decaying in a different way.