Her new look wasn’t an experiment in fashion but a desperate measure. As a toddler Audrey would only go to sleep if she could play with Mum’s hair. She would select a single dangling strand and wrap it round her fingers, holding it close to her face. She would tickle her nose with it, breathing in and out very quickly, releasing and capturing some essence which guaranteed sleep. As Audrey grew and she fitted less neatly on Mum’s lap, these demands came to seem less charming.
Eventually Mum started to put her hair up with hairpins, reversing Rapunzel’s strategy by winching the magic ladder up out of reach of the suitor below. Audrey only became more frantic to reach the enchanted strands. She retaliated by stealing and hiding any hairpins she could find, so that Mum would be forced to let down her hair. Audrey would bury the pins in the garden.
Audrey may have loved Mum’s hair, but she wasn’t quite so fond of Mum herself, particularly when Mum withdrew the most important part of herself. Audrey would rage and grieve. Now Mum had been driven to the extreme step of cutting off her hair just to free herself from the fingers that reached for it with maddening possessiveness whenever Audrey was drowsy. And Audrey wasn’t happy about the change.
The nurse approached Audrey with a bargainer’s smile and said, ‘Wouldn’t you like a lollipop instead of that silly thumb?’
To judge by the muffled timbre of her voice, Audrey pushed the thumb even deeper in as she gave her answer: ‘No.’
The nurse persisted, with wheedling of a different character. ‘A shame for such a pretty girl still to be sucking her thumb.’ If I had been able to groan on anyone’s account but my own at this point, I might have done it. Audrey was not an easy child to chivvy. She didn’t take it well. The comment which the nurse had just passed made it significantly more likely that Audrey would tuck her bouquet under her arm on her wedding day, the better to jam her thumb into her mouth below the veil.
In the short term her response was also characteristic. ‘You don’t know what’s in my garden,’ she said, with vicious emphasis. ‘You don’t even know I’ve got a swing!’ At an early stage – perhaps in the womb, where so much is learned – Audrey had developed the knack of winning arguments without going to the trouble of joining in.
I tried not to sob when Mum sat down by the bed in my side ward, partly to preserve some last shred of dignity (some imaginary last shred) and partly out of self-preservation. Sobbing constricted my throat. It aggravated the pain to which it offered the relief of expression.
Dolorific calculus
There’s no gold standard for pain, no agreed yardstick. To be truthful, any yardstick would have to experience the pain directly, to flinch and writhe in the very throes of measurement.
Obviously it would be useful if doctors could quantify the amount of pain caused by a particular procedure, so as to compare it with other routes to the same therapeutic objective. Patients might eventually be offered a choice between paths through pain, in which personal preference would play a part. There are those who would opt for the agony-sprint, others for the long haul of sub-acute torment. Torturers of course could make use of the same figures in their own calculations.
An attempt was made at the University of Uppsala in the 1950s, with the participation of local hospitals, to codify responses to pain. In practice the answers people gave were inconsistent beyond the resolving power of statistical correction. It was impossible to screen out the variables, even after the questionnaires were twice redesigned. Pain itself seems to be mutable, so that sometimes it becomes more intense with repetition, while at other times it dulls into numbness. Flirtatiously the toothache lies low, the moment it has led you trembling to the dentist’s chair.
The Uppsala research led nowhere, in the end. It offered a poor return on the krona. So all that remains of the idea is the name of an imaginary standardised unit of pain – the dolor – while the actual project of a workable dolorific calculus was abandoned. So Mum and I couldn’t have a conversation, seasoned patient to ex-nurse, on the level of ‘Mum, it was agony! It was an 88!’ – ‘You poor thing, JJ. Childbirth only averages 55 – and I should know!’ Our exchanges were much vaguer, with tears on both sides.
Deprived of Mum’s attention for those few seconds, Audrey saw her chance of winning it back with interest. She went very quiet, which should have made us suspicious right away, but Mum was preoccupied with soothing me.
Nurses were popping in and out of the side ward every couple of minutes, and Audrey must have taken advantage of one such entrance and exit to slip out herself. So far she only did what any stroppy six-year-old would have done, but in the latter part of the escapade she showed her quality. When Mum had raised the alarm and charged off to lead the search party, she somehow managed to sneak back to where I was. From my position in bed, traumatised and now also upstaged, all I saw was the door of the side ward swinging open and then closed. No head showed at my level. Then a little later Audrey gave a loud and very stagey yawn and stood up, saying she had had ever such a lovely sleep and where was her Mummy? I pressed the bell for a nurse and slowly the fuss died down, with Audrey sticking to her story that she had never left the room. She even said that I had seen her, which was physically impossible, though it also meant I couldn’t flatly contradict her story, however little I was tempted to believe her. I could see Mum wavering. It wasn’t that she was convinced, she just preferred to think that she wasn’t sharing her home with a manipulative little madam.
Audrey was back in a merry mood. She seemed to think the whole thing was funny, which in a way it was. Mum had longed for years with so much intensity to have a daughter. She dreamed of the completion a female child would bring. She had wanted to be so close to someone that they could almost hear each other’s thoughts, but now that it had come true she didn’t really enjoy it that much.
It was a little breakthrough for Audrey. She had always been a good liar, but now she was an inspired one. She had acquired the knack of being the first believer of her own untruths, letting them radiate unstoppably outwards from that secure core of falsehood.
If Mum really wanted a child who couldn’t get away, I was much the better bet – not that I consented to any such transfer of her hopes, but I could see the truth of the situation. Audrey was already a lost cause. She was supremely well armed, with slyness and subterfuge. She exercised charm relatively late in any negotiation, just before the nuclear tantrum of last resort.
Ice cream and jellies all the way
The diet for traumatised throats favoured by at least one of the matrons at Vulcan (a fanatical advocate of dry toast as a healing agent) hadn’t reached Wexham Park, or if it had the staff felt too guilty and embarrassed by my particular case to implement it. It was ice cream and jellies all the way, and I didn’t need to look toast in the face for weeks.
It took me a week or two to recover from the assault on my throat – slow progress. Another day another dolor. I didn’t have all that much incentive to get better, not when I was only getting back to square one. Finally I was pronounced ready for a second go at being operated on. The operation to install the first McKee pin, referred to by others but not by me as my ‘op’.
I rather resented the abbreviation. I felt that styling the coming ordeal was my privilege rather than anyone else’s. Others should follow my lead and say ‘operation’, unless and until I gave the signal to authorise the short form. They should defer to me in this matter, since it was the only little bit of surgery in my power.
It wasn’t Jack Juggernaut but another nurse who shaved my groin when it became time again. Not that my pubic thatch had made much of a comeback in those weeks. It was still at the itchy stage. I wondered if the change of personnel showed that I was in disgrace for my excitement the last time I was shaved.
The new nurse was the same delicious colour as Jack Juggernaut, and had a lovely faint smile playing about her lips while she went to work. I wasn’t worried – that is, I was mildly anxious about the operation but not about the shavi
ng. Later I found out she was Jack’s sister. I wondered madly if they had compared notes about Tom Dooley, hardly likely in their culture but something which would nevertheless explain the smile. When she saw him, Tom was dozing even before the anæsthetist arrived with the gas. Naturally it was gas this time.
Mum’s warning about how difficult it was to sew together three pieces of cloth – and therefore also of skin – had given me pause, but I wasn’t seriously bothered, even after the botch-up of the anaesthetic. I’d seen the excellence of Mum’s work as a seamstress. She rose to every challenge, and there was no reason to think that the surgeon was any less skilled. Mum wasn’t even a professional dressmaker, just a gifted amateur working for pin money, so it made sense that there should be many levels of expertise beyond hers, Himalayas beyond the foothills where she practised her useful domestic skills. A surgeon operating at a proper hospital must be more than just handy with the scissors and the pins and the needles, with basting and seams. He would be a scientist who was also an artist, a visionary thinker, a Leonardo of the surgical blade. Would my case even be distinctive enough to hold his interest? I hoped at least it would take his mind off the cryptic crossword he had been doing before he entered the sterile area. It would be sad to disappoint a person of such qualities.
I wasn’t entirely wrong. The surgeon had skills. He wasn’t intrinsically a bodger. Maybe the problem was simply that we were treating the body as a machine, and if the body is a machine then pain is one of the things it produces. The surgeon who operated on me specialised in arthroplasties, in McKee pins, metal on metal. He even had experience in performing them on patients with Still’s Disease. So he was a specialist within a specialism. It’s just that I turned out to be, once again, even more special than anyone had anticipated.
I was sick to the back teeth of special, but I couldn’t make myself ordinary by an act of will or I might have been tempted to try it a long time ago, provided it was on the Ellisdons mail-order catalogue basis, On Approval, your money back guaranteed if not perfectly satisfied.
The worst of the whole darn bunch
I surfaced, by incredulous degrees, from the anæsthetic, into an experience of pain that was beyond anything I had suffered at Manor Hospital, where they tickled the bone with a little hook to get a biopsy sample, or at CRX when Miss Krüger had made us dance for her pleasure. It was worse because it was constant, without modulation. It was some time before I could bring it down into something as mild as an internal scream of betrayal. Ansell had lied to me. Ansell of all people. Et tu, Barbara! If this was ‘a certain amount of discomfort’, then she was a devil who enjoyed making people hurt, who got a thrill out of offering reassurance and then kicking it away, leaving me to dangle on a rope of pain. She was a compendium of all the ghouls I had ever known or heard of: she was Miss Krüger with her invisible pointe shoes of agony, she was Vera Cole wielding her razor on sick boys because she hated to see them suffer, she was Judy Brisby with her nerve punches, she was Anna Mitchell-Hedges letting demons out of their travelling-case. She was the worst of the whole darn bunch because she had seemed so much like a friend.
With the assault on my throat after the botched anæsthetic I had thought my dolor rating, my theoretical Uppsala score, was close to the maximum, but now I had to reconsider my settings. The new sensation was off the scale. Perhaps there came a point, as with my tape recorder, when the needle flicked far into the red and the apparatus began to fail, the signal unrecognisably distorted.
Again I was told that Mum was on her way, as if that was the answer to everything, to anything. I still didn’t know what I had done to deserve this black jackpot. I was a dolor millionaire, no doubt about it, and I couldn’t help suspecting that they’d done the little man wrong all over again.
Burning spiders in the socket
I had only one consolation as I lay there, with a spouting volcano of agony newly installed in my hip, which I lacked even the power to protect by curling up around, though instinct continued to dictate that impossible reflex. At least the pain was in the right place. The intolerable signals were being broadcast from a transmitter at the proper address, where the left hip was. There was far too much of the pain, and the surgeon had sewn burning spiders into the new socket, he was a hateful monstrous illegitimate brute but at least he wasn’t incompetent. He was torturing me in the right place. The left hip was the one chosen for the first operation. The right hip had the benefit of a little movement, but the left was always a hopeless case.
People came in every now and then and spoke to me, but I couldn’t take in what they were saying. And sometimes I answered them, but I didn’t know what I was saying either. I was howling with pain, and when they gave me pain-killers they didn’t kill the pain at all, only muffled the howling. The pain shrugged off the pain-killers, the pain had been inoculated against pain-killers, but at least I wasn’t making so much noise and upsetting other patients along the corridor.
Over time I realised that Jack Juggernaut was in my room, smiling and saying something reassuring. ‘Don’t worry,’ he was saying. ‘We’ve heard it all before.’ Heard all what before? I didn’t understand.
Eventually he was able to get through to me. It turned out that when I started to come round I used every swear word I knew. I didn’t know many. I had had very little experience of using swear words, since the time at Woodlands camp when I had learned a useful word and for a few days fucked everything that fucking moved. I had no real feel for the grandeur of the expletive, and there wasn’t any artfulness involved in what I howled. I didn’t swear like a trooper, I swore like a raw recruit to the world of taboo slang, howling the same thing again and again.
My untutored combination, though, had found favour with those who witnessed my agonies. ‘“Fucking buggers!”’ said Jack Juggernaut appreciatively. ‘That’s downright catchy. Once you’ve heard it you can’t get it out of your mind. We have to watch ourselves round Sister these days. In case it slips out.’
Jack Juggernaut felt the need to reassure me about my swearing because when I wasn’t swearing I had been apologising for swearing. I’d go, ‘Fucking buggers fucking buggers,’ and then, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ And then ‘Fucking buggers fucking buggers,’ the same rough music as before. ‘I’m so sorry,’ all over again. Jack wasn’t trying to stop me from swearing, only from apologising.
Rabble of shits
What Jack Juggernaut told me showed that even when I wasn’t fully present in mind and able to control my language, I was ashamed of its foulness. It wasn’t just middle-class scruple – there was something else involved. In spite of the dominance of the pain, a part of me remembered that swearing isn’t a real recourse for the disabled. You can achieve a brutal short-term effect with foul language, you can make people reel back a bit, but you incur a great loss of prestige over time (and your prestige, however forlorn, is your trump card). It’s not remotely fair but that doesn’t stop it being true. Whatever goes for women goes twice over for the disabled. A foul mouth isn’t ladylike, and it isn’t disabledlike either. People will make way for you all right, if you bellow, ‘Fuck off and clear a path, you rabble of shits.’ The wheelchair will meet no further obstruction – but it’s not the best bargain you can strike with the world of your fellows.
Swearing is dirty, and we’re above it. That may be the mechanism. Swearing is powerful. We’re not entitled. Perhaps the two notions converge in some way I don’t see.
Mum took the bus to Slough from Bourne End. We might live on the desirable Abbotsbrook Estate, but we were like poor relations in that prosperous parish, and Mum relied on public transport unless a friend with driving skills happened to be free. She was on her own this time, but she still talked mainly about Audrey, sounding variations on the old theme of I’m-at-my-wits’-end. After Mum cut her hair short, Audrey developed a new obsession – the hairpins she had once hated so much for putting Mum’s hair out of reach. Now instead they represented what she had lost, hair that c
ould be worn either up or down. Now hairpins became relics, almost fetishes. She exhumed rusty hairpins from where she had hidden them in the garden, and wore them herself. Finally she insisted on having her own hair cut short, and the hairpins lost their poignancy for her. This whole period of her development was just mourning after mourning – a trailing after symbols that had only ever been symbols of other symbols. This is the pathology of attachments. No wonder psychiatrists are so busy! Sensible religions set out to break attachment before it starts, to nip it in the bud.
Talking to anyone, even Mum, was like trying to concentrate on a chess problem while someone applied a soldering iron to my bones from the inside. Asking about Audrey became as much of an achievement as it would be to work out a dazzling move (RxKtch!), with the smell of burning marrow in my nostrils making me want to retch up my empty stomach to the last square inch of its lining.
My wounded hip was reluctant to heal. It was very sorry for itself, and couldn’t forgive the insults it had received. After a time it even started to weep. It cried thick tears of pus. I was put on antibiotics, but they didn’t help. Finally the command was given to wheel the bed outside, thereby exposing the damage to sunlight and air. The effect was miraculous, on the hip and the whole person. I think the crucial element was actually breeze, the movement of air. The sense that I was taking breaths from a live environment, a larger world that was going about its business without any intention of leaving me behind.
By the time I was moved back to CRX for my rehabilitation I had made a little breakthrough, discovering my own trick for fighting pain. At times when my medication was beginning to wear off, but there were still hours to wait until it was topped up, I found that by concentrating on my breathing I could get a certain amount of relief. The technique may have gone all the way back to my years of bed rest, in which case I was only dusting it off and putting it back into use.
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