Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  Miss Krüger’s solo pool sessions were mainly about power, and her group lessons were about pain, pain that was distilled and extracted from us for another person to consume. Ankylosed joints were being asked to take our weight without other means of support. It was no different from getting people with freshly broken ankles to walk on them. One day Geraldine bit quite deeply into her tongue, trying not to scream. The sight of blood seemed to sober Miss Krüger up. It may even have frightened her. It’s possible that she was squeamish – an odd characteristic in a sadist, but not unheard-of. Some of the blood got onto her smock, and she was very distressed by that, less by where it had come from, I suppose, than where it had got to. The violation of the proper order wasn’t blood dripping from a child’s chin but the same substance compromising a uniform, contaminating the wearer.

  It may be, though, that there was a part of Miss Krüger which didn’t consent to her actions, and which was suddenly made aware that things had got out of hand. The dream of cruelty can become too real even for the person who is making it happen. For a while Krüger certainly watched herself. She eased up on us for a bit – she was almost like a real physio. And then she started all over again. It was stronger than her. It was the deepest part of her, and the part of her that did not consent to it was effectively smothered, or held under the surface of some interior pool until it stopped struggling.

  Deep down she wanted to save me

  In the pool Miss Krüger could almost have been modelling herself on the bogus priest in that rather scary film Night of the Hunter, who has love tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, HATE on the other. In Miss Krüger’s case the words appearing in phantom form on the knuckles of her clean, well-cared-for hands would have been DROWN and SAVE, perhaps with a question mark – SAVE? – to make the symmetry perfect. Even when she was pressing down on my chest with one hand, after all, she was continuing to support me with the other. Otherwise I would have sunk like a gasping stone. Perhaps the whole ritual was about her and not us at all. Perhaps it was more to do with frustration than cruelty. It may be that deep down she wanted to save me, and how could she do that without drowning me a bit first?

  The other part of her programme, though, the agony ballet in group physiotherapy sessions – I can’t devise any nuanced reading of that. That was just a routine of atrocity.

  And still we failed to realise we were being tortured. I’m not sure we ever really got the message, as a group. We never talked about it. We weren’t attuned to our own violation. In the culture of the time, the real danger to children wasn’t abuse but spoiling. The fear wasn’t that children might be cruelly treated but that they might not learn manners. They might cry themselves to sleep after torture by physio, but at least they would write proper thank-you letters, a minimum of three paragraphs long, to relatives they rarely saw, for presents they hadn’t liked.

  So many aspects of our lives at CRX were painful or humiliating that it was hard to be sure when something had no other purpose. Being photographed naked by Mr Fisk four times a year, for instance, was something I dreaded, since no one had taken the time to explain what it had to do with being ill, or how those photographs ended up being pored over by the medical staff. My sense of dread wasn’t nuanced enough to make a real distinction between Mr Fisk and Miss Krüger. It’s just that Miss Krüger’s visitations happened more often.

  The whole doctrine of walking at any cost had the effect of making us feel our pain was beneath notice, so it was hard to be aware of the difference when it was being actively cultivated, when we were being mined for the pain we could be made to yield. One of the defects of the prevailing wisdom that you had to be cruel to be kind was that it masked so well those who were being cruel to be cruel. It’s hard even now to draw a meaningful line between a régime of obtuse doctrinaire rehabilitation and straightforward abuse. This was a characteristic of the system which Miss Krüger shrewdly exploited. Even the authorised therapies prided themselves on ignoring the desires of the patient.

  I can’t answer for anyone else, but it never occurred to me to grass Miss Krüger up to Heel. That wasn’t a thinkable option, it was strictly taboo in the culture of the hospital. Even if I had been tempted, the timing wasn’t right. Sister Heel was full of budgie love and budgie thoughts. Charlie’s loving beak was pouring endearments in her ear which would drown out any complaints.

  I did worry, though, about Mary, and whether her short life had included episodes of torture in the pool. She had gone up on pointes with the rest of us in group sessions, but I didn’t know about the pool. I tried to remember if she had talked about Miss Krüger, but if she had I had already forgotten. I told myself that she couldn’t have sat there so happily, elaborating schemes for raffles, on the last day we spent together, if the pool had meant pain and horror to her, as it already did, partly, for me. She had a very forgiving nature, but forgiving Miss Krüger without making a protest would have been a crime against herself.

  Couldn’t bear to see children suffer

  With a bona fide sadist on the premises, it seems odd that we had any fear left over for anyone else. It was Ivy who had first told me stories about Vera Cole. I’m certain that she believed what she was telling me. She was passing on fears that she shared, not infecting me with something to which she was immune.

  Vera was a lady who killed children. The story always went that she’d been seen just lately in the hospital, looking through a list of names she held in her hands. She was very smartly dressed in a fur coat and wore gloves. She wasn’t heartless, it was just the opposite. She couldn’t bear to see children suffer. She wanted them to be out of their pain, and so she slit their throats and drank their blood. We all believed absolutely in Vera Cole. There were even a couple of cadet nurses who talked about her. Of course they seemed old to us, but cadet nurses were hardly older than children themselves.

  I wonder if there was some tiny basis in truth behind the story. Perhaps there really was a Vera Cole in the newspapers at that time, or someone with a similar name, who’d been involved in a child’s death with a hint of mercy killing. I can imagine someone like Wendy embroidering a few nasty extra touches – she maintained, for instance, that it was boys that made Vera Cole so sad, and that she got into bed with them for a special kiss before she ended their pain. Still, I don’t think any of us had the imagination to make the whole thing up from scratch. The details about the clothes make me wonder if there isn’t an echo of Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians. The book, of course. The film hadn’t happened yet.

  So we could talk for hours amongst ourselves about the danger we were in from Vera Cole, who had been seen in the WVS canteen only the other day, but we said nothing about the sadist into whose hands we were passed on a regular basis. It complicated things that Miss Krüger was German. I had been brought up with a strong anti-Teutonic reflex, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Dad was always saying that the only good German was a dead German, and hadn’t he done his bit in the War to produce exactly that improvement of character? But if Germans were inherently cruel and evil, then we couldn’t be surprised by Miss Krüger’s actions. In fact it seemed obvious that if a German physio had been hired, then it was to do precisely what Miss Krüger was doing.

  We didn’t have the independence of mind to notice that certain things only happened when Miss Krüger was in sole charge of us, when no one else was in the physiotherapy room or the hydrotherapy pool. An outsider might have thought it significant that although we were competitive about our autograph books, as about everything else in our rather restricted world, none of us asked Miss Krüger to sign them, but that was the only ripple which showed even faintly on the surface.

  You say nugget here

  Sarah had been very kind to me after Mary died. She told me once about guardian angels, and how we all had one. She was sure that Mary had been made a guardian angel, but it would be selfish to want to know whose.

  In fact if I had a guardian angel on those premises it was Sarah her
self. She watched over me and helped me protect myself when my home-conditioned reflexes let me down. At home Mum sometimes let me have one of her favourite chocolates as a special treat. At CRX similar sweets turned up in the communal confectionery hoard. When I was asked which ones I wanted, I said, ‘I’d like some nougat, please,’ pronouncing it ‘noo-gah’. Almost before I had said it Sarah made a warning hiss and muttered urgently from the side of her mouth, ‘You say nugget here,’ before Wendy could get wind of my latest poshie blunder.

  As we all grew up, Wendy’s weak points became easier to notice. She was invincibly ignorant – not stupid by any means, but very badly informed. She thought, for instance, that the sun was only as big as it looked. Which meant it was as big as a farthing. I knew from Arthur Mee’s book that the sun was 93 million miles away, and I made my case in the strongest terms. I also moved a coin away from her and asked how big it looked now.

  Wendy didn’t exactly cave in, but she changed her story. She maintained that you couldn’t possibly see something that was so far off, but she did allow the sun a little discreet expansion. The sun was now as big as Ward Two – not Ward One, but as big as Ward Two. Which was, admittedly, the larger of the two wards. But not of cosmic dimensions. I wished that I could bring The World We Live In into the ward, to have Arthur Mee back me up, but I didn’t trust anyone, patients or nurses, with anything precious.

  Sex was another area of intellectual vulnerability for Wendy. Wendy was adamant that when a lady had a baby it came out of her belly button. There was consistency to her theory, since she thought a man made a baby by putting his willy ‘in a lady’s belly button’ in the first place, but I had an eloquent supporter on my side. I didn’t even need to go into detail, because Sarah Morrison had a book. Muzzie must have been very advanced to supply such a thing. Sarah didn’t contradict Wendy directly, she was too politic for that. Instead she just read aloud from her book: ‘When humans mate, they lie on their sides facing each other …’ Funny that there was no leeway in her book for missionaries and their positions.

  It was sweet enough that Wendy was too dim to know about tailies and pockets. Even better that the street arab of the ward, our resident guttersnipe, had fallen back on the word ‘lady’. She went all posh herself, when she was threatened and flustered.

  What would life have been like if Wendy had been better informed about the universe and the marriage bed, if there hadn’t been a necessary limit to her tyranny? It was a question that used to haunt me, my scaled-down equivalent of the one that could still make people of my parents’ generation shiver: what if Hitler hadn’t attacked Russia?

  I also wondered from time to time what life at CRX would have been like without Sarah. One day she told me that she was unfortunately unable to propose to me, since that task fell to the man. I immediately proposed, and she accepted. Sarah told Muzzie, I broke the news to Mum and everybody was delighted. I held Sarah’s hand and Muzzie and Mum, surprisingly emotional, gave each other a hug and a kiss. When I went to do the same to Sarah she said, blushing slightly, ‘We mustn’t get any closer than this until the day.’ Muzzie and Mum clapped their hands and burst out in peals of laughter. I didn’t quite know why.

  Sarah and I would have our own house, made a bit smaller just for us – but not too small, so our parents and other visitors wouldn’t bump their heads. Sarah could develop her talent for charity work, and we would work away like beavers for the PDSA (not the RSPCA). We would probably form our own Hive. Then I’d have a much better chance of getting a proper mention in the Busy Bee News, though my resentment of Sarah’s greater success in such matters had evaporated long ago.

  I could just see it. There we would be in our own sweet little house, and organising a Grand Fête. I would be phoning up design firms and explaining to the manager, for the sixth time that morning, exactly what a circumflex was (a recent discovery of my own).

  ‘Think of it as a word meaning F-E-S-T-I-I-I-I-I-V-I-T-Y,’ I explained, tired but delighted I’d learned to put a warble into the word to bring it to life. ‘It used to be “Feste”, but that’s not too easy to say so they dropped the awkward “s”. The circumflex is just a reminder that it used to be there.’

  ‘Well, now you put it that way, Guv,’ the design manager would say, ‘I think I shall remember the word “Fête” for the rest of my life. The way you put it, Sir, seems to make it stick in my mind somehow. Wish I’d ’ad a teacher like you when I was a kid, Sir.’

  During all this Sarah would be answering the phone on the other line. I’d spotted that Heel had two phones in her office and coveted this nerve centre of modern communications. To the caller she’d say: ‘Just one moment please, I shall have to ask my husband,’ and then to me, putting her hand over the mouthpiece, ‘M’dear …’ (I would have quickly weaned her off such gooeyness as ‘Darling’), ‘It’s Mr Millthorpe from Cookham Dean. Submissions for stalls closed yesterday, of course, but he has a family of performing voles – in fact a whole vole vaudeville, or so it seems.’

  I would make a delighted face and give a thumbs-up, as this was just what I had been looking for, but then I would change it to a frown and make a wavy signal with my hand instead. Sarah, experienced in our business and perfectly attuned to my little ways, would take the cue and say, ‘Well, I’m afraid your application is in late, Sir, and we are absolutely chock-a-blocko, but I’ve put in a word with my husband and he thinks he can manage to squeeze you in somehow, even if he has to stay up all night working out the details.’ I would yawn at the very thought of it, and then (yawns being so very contagious) Sarah would yawn too, apologising to the grateful caller as she signed off with, ‘We’ll see you on the day.’ I would remind her about the importance of proper supervision for the queues. Mum had once seen Ken Dodd jump the queue for the fortune teller at a CRX fête. She sometimes laughed at his jokes even after that, but lost all respect for him as a person.

  Newts up-stream of their ladies

  Sarah and I would soon work out that all this taily stuff really wasn’t practical or necessary. Dad had shown me books about the animal kingdom, and I had learned that there were methods of carrying on the species much more appealing to me personally than putting tailies in ladies’ holes. Newts, for instance, simply swam up-stream of their ladies and dropped off a parcel for them to collect! I wanted the physical side of marriage to be run on a similar, postal basis, otherwise I wouldn’t have any part of it.

  Our beds would be close enough for us to hold hands before going to sleep. For babies we had plenty of options. By the time we were grown up, everybody would probably be doing it all by packages and parcels. Besides, Mary had become an angel by now, and she would help us. She was far above feelings of jealousy and being left out. She would probably be a senior angel by then, so we were well connected. We would be high on the waiting list.

  All I had to do to link up with this marvellous future was to survive my solo sessions in the pool with Miss Krüger. I was scared, of course, though there were weeks when nothing happened – either because she was adding psychological torture to the mix, until I was almost longing for the drowning to start, so that it would be over for the week and I could think of something else, or because there were other staff around and she couldn’t get up to her tricks. I had enough sense to know that she was risking her job, German or no German, if she actually drowned someone.

  Then suddenly, from one day to the next, Miss Krüger was gone, and she didn’t even drown anybody! Gone under a cloud, a pink fluffy angora cloud, disgrace raining down on her head. It wasn’t her perversion that got her dismissed, the sessions of ankylosis ballet when no one else was around, the drowning therapy in the pool. It was pilfering that was her downfall. She had stolen three balls of pink angora wool from another nurse. They were found in her locker. And she didn’t even knit! So perhaps it was simple spite. If she’d stuck with sadism and not been tempted by spite, she would have been more secure. She would have kept her position.

  I supp
ose it’s possible that the theft was only a pretext for dismissing her, to prevent uglier things coming to light, and the real reason was some cruelty that had been witnessed or reported. If so I think even in the ’fifties we’d have been asked about her ideas of treatment. What she’d done. Unless the principle of Least Said Soonest Mended which ruled our house so fiercely held sway on the ward also. And perhaps in this case it actually was for the best. I was very happy to know that I would never see Miss Krüger again.

  There were weeks now when the phantom school’s existence within the hospital was almost continuous, weeks when that shy woodland creature hiding in the buildings seemed tame enough to come and eat out of my hand. The headmaster, Mr Turpin, known of course as Turps or Old Turpentine, began to take a closer interest in me.

  I loved the smell of turpentine, and a little of that tenderness rubbed off on Mr Turpin. When Sarah did oil painting by numbers, she thinned her paints with turpentine even though everyone said you shouldn’t do that.

  When he first met me Mr Turpin said doubtfully, ‘I suppose he might earn a living as some sort of clerk.’ It’s true I had a little movement in the elbow of my writing arm, but it was hardly something I wanted to do for eight hours a day. He said it before he had seen my hand-writing – there were only smudgy dashes where the letters should have been. ‘It’s a shame you can’t be a doctor,’ he said, rather insensitively, ‘your hand-writing would be perfect for that.’ Turps must have seen my wounded expression, because he brought in an art teacher from Ward Three, who let me be as smudgy as I liked.

  She gave me a brush and some water-colours and said to try and draw a cornfield. When I’d finished, the teacher said, ‘Your painting is very like van Gogh, John!’ which made me very happy. As Art progressed, she gently gave me a few tips. She got me to look out of the window and see if I could spot any straight lines. ‘The moment you see any straight lines in nature, John,’ she said, ‘be sure to let me know.’ That was tactful. She suggested I watched her paint a bit, just to get a few ideas, and I lapped it all up. Two weeks later, when I’d finished another painting, she put it alongside the ‘van Gogh’ and said, ‘See how much better the new one is, John!’