Climbing the Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  And every bed had got curtains and they were drawn not only at bedpan time but at any time you were attended to.

  There was only one thing that was exactly the same and I suppose always will be and that is that neither nurses, house surgeons nor the visiting specialists would ever answer any questions about your condition. In fact they never stayed long enough by your bed for you to get the question out.

  I think that a generation that’s brought up on Emergency Ward 10 and Dr Kildare must suffer great disillusionment when they go into hospital. In all the time I’ve spent there no doctor or house surgeon has ever sat on my bed talking to me about my complaint.

  As for the specialists they don’t even look at you. They seem to stare right over your head. They frighten you to death. They stand there looking so stern you feel you’ve got every ailment under the sun and you’re not likely to last much longer and they’re weighing up who’s coming into your bed when you’ve gone.

  And the nurses seem to think that along with physical deterioration goes mental deterioration. You get these young nurses saying, ‘Come along, Mother, be a good girl. Put your nightie on and pop into bed.’ As though you were suffering from senile decay and didn’t understand plain English. It riled me the way they did that. I hate being jollied along at any time, let alone when in hospital.

  As I said, I went into this hospital to have this cyst removed from my breast and the night before the operation the Sister stuck a form under my nose for me to sign. I hate forms at the best of times and when I’d recovered from the shock I read it and discovered that I’d got to agree that in the event of them discovering that I needed major surgery I was prepared to have it done. At once I knew that they were going to slash my breast off otherwise why go into all this palaver if it was just a cyst.

  So I signed – and I knew what it meant.

  I wasn’t shocked when I came to after the operation and found I was bandaged up in miles of bandages. I knew it hadn’t been just a cyst.

  I asked the nurse of course but she just said, ‘Go to sleep, Mother.’

  But Mother knew. The nurse wouldn’t tell me because she felt I was going to suffer from the shock. But I’d suffered from the shock the night before when I read that form.

  About a couple of days after the operation the house surgeon told me that they had found a tumour there and had to remove the breast, but that it was a non-malignant one and I would be going home shortly. It didn’t take me long to get over the operation and I was soon able to get up and help a bit.

  We had some lively people in that ward. There was an unfortunate woman there who used to suffer with the most rude noises. She couldn’t help it. But when she let one go the patients would call out, ‘There’s a bomb just gone off, Nurse,’ and then a little later, ‘It’s all right, the all clear’s gone now.’

  There was another woman. She was only in there to have her bunions done. She was a card if ever there was one.

  She said to me, ‘This is the first time I’ve had a bed to myself for forty years.’

  So I said, ‘Is it? It must be awful being separated after all those years.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody marvellous. Sharing a bed with my old man is nothing but sweat and swill.’

  She said she wasn’t going back to sharing a bed, which shows that hospital life has a lot to answer for.

  Some of the patients looked at me a bit queerly. They told me later that they thought I’d have delayed reaction emotion about losing my breast. But strangely enough I wasn’t ever really upset.

  My mother was more. She kept weeping like mad by my bedside. But if you’re a young girl and you’re hoping to get married it’s a far more serious thing, isn’t it? You’d have to tell your young man and explaining it away would be a bit embarrassing. But I’d got a husband who I knew wouldn’t think any the worse of me because of it. And when they told me it was non-malignant I was quite happy about it. Naturally I would have preferred to have kept it. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I could chuck off and not know I hadn’t got. It’s not the kind of an appendage that doesn’t matter whether you have it or not. It’s not like your appendix. But no, I wasn’t too upset about it.

  Then three days before I was to go home they came up to me again, put the curtains round the bed and I prepared myself for another shock.

  In came the Sister this time. I’d always thought of her as a bit of a martinet. Mind you, you need a Sister that’s a martinet because the other hospital I was in the Sister was very strict indeed and I used to feel sorry for the nurses, but we realized when she went on holiday what a difference a strict Sister made to our lives because once she was out of the way the nurses didn’t care a bit. They used to laugh and joke and make the most terrible row and we never got half the attention that we had when she was there. But this one I’d thought was a hard woman – unfeeling – but what a change. She was kindness itself to me. She sat there by my bed for half an hour. She told me that they’d got a report back from the Marie Curie hospital in Hampstead that my growth was malignant and that I’d got to go there and have radium treatment.

  It was only then that I really thought about cancer. As soon as she mentioned the Marie Curie I knew what the hospital was for so I knew I’d got cancer and I was very upset then for the rest of that day. I know I wept a few times to myself and that. The thing I asked Sister to do for me was to catch my mother before she came in to visit me and tell her because I didn’t feel as though I could. I knew she’d be terribly upset about it, which she was.

  But strangely enough by next morning I’d recovered. I thought – oh, well, here goes. Lots of people go to the Marie Curie and they don’t all die. I mean if you’ve got to have cancer you couldn’t have it in a better place than in the breast because once you’ve had it removed most of it’s gone.

  So by the next day I’d got over it and as I wasn’t due to go for a week I asked if I could go home. ‘No,’ came the answer. They wouldn’t let me go because they were frightened I wouldn’t come back. But after a day or two I got lively and me and this woman with bunions kicked up such a shindy larking around that Sister said, ‘All right, you’ve won, you can go home for the weekend but don’t forget to come back.’ Of course, I would come back in any case.

  When I got to this Marie Curie hospital in Hampstead I found there were many far worse than me because they’d let it go such a long time before they’d been to a doctor, and it had spread and gone into an arm as well. So really and truly it really does pay to see a doctor in the very early stages because it never affected me in that way.

  I used to go every day for radium treatment – just five minutes a day. It was in a little room that there was this sort of Heath Robinson contraption that hovers over you. You have to lie down and there’s a door about a foot thick, which is closed on you and of course I suffer appallingly from claustrophobia. I didn’t mind the radium treatment but the thought of being shut in that room was almost too much for me. But the nurses were very good. There was a little glass window and they’d look at me. But although it was only five minutes it seemed like half an hour and I’d imagine they’d forgotten the time.

  Anyway I had six weeks of that treatment and then I went home. I had to go back once a month for the first three months and then once every three months and then once a year. I still do now although it was over ten years ago and I’ve never had a recurrence.

  When I got back came the problem of a bra. The old bras I’d got were no good at all. The Marie Curie had given me the address of where to go for one on the National Health Service. Maybe now it’s a better model but at that time, believe me, it was pure stodge. An appalling pink-coloured thing, a cross between a liberty bodice and a strait jacket. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I thought they would have tried to do something better than that. I mean just at a time when you feel mutilated and even though you try to laugh about it, you do feel mutilated, you’d have thought they’d have produced something a
rtistic.

  Well I accepted it because it was on the National Health but I didn’t wear it. I bought myself a pair of falsies and a bra to go with them. I only needed one falsie, but they wouldn’t sell them singly. There’s a waste of money. It was the cult of the huge bra a la Jane Russell and breasts was all coming in then and everybody was endeavouring to look twice the size they really were. So perhaps it was as well I didn’t get them singly otherwise I’d have looked unbalanced.

  Of course wearing a falsie can be a very tricky thing. The first time I put a bathing costume on and went swimming I was very disconcerted to see it bobbing merrily around on top of the waves. I hastily stuffed it back but I felt awful. I don’t know whether anyone noticed or not but it was a pale pink colour and it looked most peculiar. Anyway after that I used cottonwool. I thought of buying one of those bras that you blow up and you’re provided with a little pump. I would only have blown up one side but then I thought it would be a bit awkward if I had a puncture. I couldn’t really carry a repair outfit around with me, could I? So I gave up that idea.

  But though I joked about it then and joke about it now, losing a breast does something to you in a sort of psychological way. You never feel the same person again. Not to yourself. Maybe you seem the same to other people. In the beginning you feel degraded and then you don’t feel a complete woman any more. All right there’s things on the market to make you look the same externally but there’s nothing on the market that makes you feel the same internally.

  But don’t let me make a big thing out of this psychological feeling. What I would say to anyone would be if they suspect anything like that is to go straight away to a doctor. Mine was only a breast operation – one amongst many, but I made a friend at the Marie Curie who was there for an internal cancer operation – and a very big operation indeed. She was in hospital for months, but now she’s out, she’s doing a full-time job in domestic service and she still only has to go in once a year like me. She caught it in what were the early stages and although the operation was a big one because it was internal it hasn’t spread all over her body. But I had a sister-in-law who suffered the pains and wouldn’t go in and when she had to it was far too late. If it’s caught early mostly it can be cured and even if you have to have the operation I had you can still live a very happy life.

  17

  SOME PEOPLE JOIN evening classes because they’re bored and want company. I didn’t. I just wanted to be able to converse with my sons. I found that I wasn’t able to do this because they’d all won scholarships and gone to the grammar school. There they were, eleven and thirteen and fifteen, sitting at the table talking among themselves and Albert and I were completely left out. It didn’t worry Albert – he didn’t care whether he conversed or not. He likes to be quiet but I enjoy making conversation and I hated being excluded from it.

  You hear children say that they’ve got nothing in common with their parents and the psychiatrists tell you that parents mustn’t become divorced from their children, that they must make efforts to understand them. They say you don’t understand them because if you never talk to them you can’t understand them. As well as cooking, washing and doing the cleaning for them you’ve got to be able to talk to them otherwise they consider you less than the dust. They won’t realize that you’ve worked so darned hard looking after them that you’re tired. Oh no, if you’re not bothering to keep your old brains exercised then there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with them if they don’t understand these things.

  Anyway I found that conversation was reduced to the weather and the headlines in the newspapers and after you’d said that there was nothing else to say. Then I read an article that said that the more one soaks up knowledge the more the brain expands to absorb it. Something like Parkinson’s Law where the work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion, which is the truest law I’ve ever known. You’ve only got to look at our town council’s employees. They demonstrate Parkinson’s Law to a tee. So I decided that although I’d never believed in keeping up with the Joneses, I’d try and keep up with the boys – and that to do this I’d got to start educating myself by going to evening classes. I thought, well, I’ll try this theory out.

  It didn’t work with me this Parkinson’s Law – maybe because I started too late. I thought, oh, well, the more you take on the more your brain expands – and I took on three things straight away – French, social science, and something called metaphysical philosophy. This last one I took as a sort of status symbol. The very name of it! I imagined myself surprising all my sons with some gem of intellectual conversation that I’d got through this metaphysical philosophy. A sort of female Oscar Wilde I visualized myself as, with repartee and wit flashing round the table. But after six weeks of classes I hadn’t understood a word of metaphysical philosophy. The dictionary defined it as abstruse and abstract and, believe me, the dictionary definition was correct. Certainly it was abstruse.

  We had to do homework on it and we were picked at random to get up in class and explain in layman’s terms what we’d written. Well, I copied mine clear out of the book. I hadn’t any idea what it meant. I was just hoping that I’d get away with it. Unfortunately I was picked one night to get up and I couldn’t say that I’d copied it out of the book. It would have been too terrible for words, especially when you want to be a big noise and I always liked to be the big noise. So I stumbled through it somehow or other and the teacher said, ‘I don’t really think you’ve grasped what it means yet.’ I thought – no, you and me both because even if you’ve grasped what it means you can’t explain it in lay terms. So after six weeks I gave it up. I didn’t bother about metaphysical philosophy any more. But I did keep on with the French and social science.

  Social science I thought would have some bearing on life; the social approach, not history with dates and figures or what’s been. I thought it would enable me to co-relate the sort of life I was leading to the world around and would give me an idea of what made people tick – that kind of thing. It didn’t, but that’s what I thought it would do.

  I suppose I started where most people were leaving off. There must have been a lot that I should have studied before I even took on social science but I didn’t know. People used to say, why didn’t I take up a craft, but I didn’t want to do things with my hands – tatting, lampshade-making, glove-making and things like that. I’d quite enough to do with my hands running a home and I didn’t want to start threading beads or petit point or making pictures out of bits of felt. That sort of thing’s all very well if you’ve got an artistic sense, but I haven’t. I’m devoid of it. No – I wanted to use my brains; I wanted to be able to talk to my boys. I wanted to be able to baffle them with social science, then we could sit at the table and have unintelligible conversations, all of us, because as soon as there was a gap in what they said I could rush in with mine, and they wouldn’t be able to understand me any more than I could understand them.

  The French course was ludicrous. In my imagination I thought that as they were learning French they would help me. I didn’t realize that the rot had set in with regards to children and their parents. My generation had revered their parents; whatever their parents said was law and gospel and you believed what they said and you gave them respect as well as love. But by the time I became a parent children no longer thought that what their parents said was true or gave them any respect at all. When I used to come out with my little bons mots in French they hooted with laughter at my pronunciation. I pronounced the words as they looked. I got old Hugo’s French dictionary out at the table and I’d say, ‘Voulez vous passer le sel s’il vous plaît,’ saying it like you see it in print.

  And they’d say, ‘Mum wants the vinegar? Pepper, Mum? Pass Mum the mustard, Dad.’

  The little blighters knew I meant pass the salt but they purposely misunderstood.

  When I said, ‘Chacun à son goût,’ they’d say, ‘Get up, Dad, you’re sitting in something. You’ve got your
arse in the goo.’ They just made fun of me all the time. But I plodded on. Once I start anything I do it till the bitter end, except for metaphysical philosophy.

  The teachers, too, vary in their approach. I’ve had ever so many kinds of teachers. Some of them have the idea of ramming a lot of facts and figures down you – perhaps it’s because they were taught that way themselves and they haven’t been able to get out of it, but students who go voluntarily want the lessons made interesting. They naturally find facts and figures unpalatable and that’s why I think attendances fall off. Some teachers don’t make allowance for the fact that all we go there for is leisure-time activities, that we haven’t had much schooling and that we require time to assimilate knowledge. They get impatient. And you have only got to make people who are a bit insecure about their early education feel that they don’t know enough for them not to come any more. They’re very vulnerable. You’re vulnerable with your children but at least you can laugh it off. It may hurt you – it got beneath my skin even in my own home. But in classes if you have a teacher who makes you feel that you’re ignorant, you think well what the bloody hell am I doing here? You haven’t gone there to be humiliated so you stay away. Not all teachers are like that. Some are very good indeed. But still you can sense that some are thinking to themselves, she couldn’t understand this when she was young so what hopes has she of understanding it now?

  We students know that teachers are often tired. That they’ve been teaching all day and that this is only an extra to them because they want to earn a bit more money. The advantage is that with us at any rate at the beginning everybody is very enthusiastic. They want to learn. And yet again it’s funny because in any class where you have to use your brain attendances keep dropping. You may start with about thirty and you’re lucky to have got ten by the time the course is over.

  I don’t know about the handicraft courses. I only attended one. It was flower-arranging and that was a lark if ever there was one; it was an absolute riot. The teacher must have had a marvellously aesthetic eye because she could make the most wonderful arrangements out of next to nothing, from the most unlikely materials.