Milk running down abdominal grooves
Of course I was romanticising my own status dreadfully. The apparent exotica belong to exactly the same order of things as iron-nature, limestone-nature, cow-nature. There’s nothing wildly abnormal about mercury or pumice or platypus, they just don’t seem to fit the standard categories, lazy preconceptions. There’s mercury in thermometers, pumice in many bathrooms, and platypuses … well, in the zoo or on television. Even in Tasmania I suppose you don’t exactly fall over them, but you might see one if you were swimming in a stream there, and actually if it was a male he might give you a nasty dig with his venom-spur – and serve you right for thinking it was your stream and not his. It’s entirely normal for platypuses to be the way they are, that’s the point. There’s nothing unnatural about lactating through the pores, without benefit of nipples, and having the milk run down abdominal grooves for your young to lick up, it’s just not the human style of motherhood. Still, we’d rather treat ourselves to a shudder of wonder than make a little more room in our pigeon-holes.
At the time I was attuned to a cruder logic. Since I was debarred from so many ordinary activities, it seemed to follow that I would have a special affinity for the esoteric. That would balance the cosmic accounts nicely. My bailiwick would be the occult and the perverse.
I thought Mouni Sadhu might have written another simpler book, and pestered Mrs Pavey through Mum until she came up with a much smaller volume called In Days of Great Peace, which was more like an autobiography and didn’t really engage me. I read about Mouni Sadhu’s visit to a spiritual leader in Southern India called Maharshi, whose face expressed endless friendship and understanding, how Mouni Sadhu dissolved into tears which washed away the stains of multiple incarnations and so on, and I thought ‘how nice for him’ without going any deeper.
Discreet off-stage cough
I must have read the sentence, ‘He walked with difficulty, as his joints and knees were affected by acute rheumatism’, and yet felt no particular quickening of interest. What else was I looking for, if not a guru with arthritis? The fit was incredibly close, yet I missed it. It was as if I was being protected by a sort of lightning conductor, from premature contact with energy of a high order. I put the book aside unaffected, at least on the surface. In this way a leading player in my life gave notice of his existence with a discreet off-stage cough, waiting in the wings, years before he made his entrance proper.
People value what they pay for. The things they get for free, such as a national health service, tend to be under-appreciated. I wasn’t going to make that mistake. Morale is important. I was deeply in debt to a system which was the envy of the world, and I didn’t want anyone to imagine they had inserted a metal hip into an ingrate. As soon as I decently could, as soon as there was a chance of being believed, I had been saying how pleased I was with the operation. Despite everything I passed congratulations on to the surgeon who had done the work at Wexham Park – Mr Arden – saying how marvellous it was to have a hip that worked, a hip that didn’t just sit there. Modern medical science was wonderful, just wonderful. I was a new person, with my new hip! Hip hip hurray!
But maybe one Hip hurray! was celebration enough. When a little time had gone by, I started mentioning that of course the other hip, the one that hadn’t been replaced, had never been as bad as the one that had. Which was true, but all the same I was working up to something in my naïvely devious way. It was rather a waste of money – of people’s taxes, when you came right down to it – to operate on the other hip, when really I was fine now.
Then Ansell came and sat on my bed and routed my little scheme. She said, ‘John, you do know that you’re going to have to have the other operation, don’t you?’ A doctor sitting on a bed in Men’s Surgical didn’t mean you were dying, as it had when I was on the children’s wards, but it wasn’t exactly relaxing. I was in for some sort of scolding.
I tried to bluster, but blustering doesn’t really work from a horizontal position. It helps if you can loom. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was thinking that maybe I’m all right the way I am now.’ I was being partly truthful. There’s nothing like having a sore new hip that has to be coaxed into the slightest movement to make you fall in love with the good old fixed one. Rigid, dependable, everything a hip should be. ‘The physios have been super, and I can do such a lot more now than I ever could. I can’t help feeling that there are other patients who have much more to gain from the operation than I do.’
Ansell wasn’t fooled for a moment. ‘And I don’t suppose this is about the pain, is it? The pain that I said you wouldn’t have, and turned out to be so severe?’
I didn’t have the strength of character to deny it outright, so I just put my head on one side by a few degrees and raised my eyebrows, as if I was considering something that had never occurred to me before.
‘Next time at least you’ll know what you’re in for. And I couldn’t in all conscience encourage you to stop now. You’ve had half the pain already, but you haven’t had more than a tenth of the mobility that we can give you with two good hips.’
Hip honeymoon
I gave it a good thinking-over. The new hip worked extremely well. The increase in my ability to live up to my biped pretensions was tremendous. But I wasn’t convinced that a second operation would bring about a second transformation. It seemed to suit my gait to have one hip fixed and the other mobile. Would I really be able to manage without a stick after a second operation? Somehow I couldn’t imagine a future of walking without aids of any kind, and a stick was a relatively discreet accessory. It could be tucked tidily away when it wasn’t needed. I was having a hip honeymoon now, certainly, but it wouldn’t last for ever. Sooner or later I’d just have to get on with things, but would a second operation really bring me the life I dreamed of?
I tried to visualise my walking style with two mobile hips. Perhaps my body would go bendy in the middle, if I didn’t have the muscle strength to brace myself and hold myself steady in the proper posture. Then I’d be sorry that I’d said yes to the second operation.
After all, who was the one who knew most about the management of this body? I was so sure it was me, when apparently it was the ones who walked around with all their parts well-formed and smoothly functioning. They knew more about the subject than I could ever hope to. I rehearsed my objections to Mum, who said I must take it up with Dr Ansell. Ansell just said, ‘We can’t have you going through life without being able to walk correctly!’ So overall the argument of ‘it just isn’t on’ won the day, despite not being an argument. I voiced my worry about ‘going all bendy in the middle’ and was told that although that might be the case for a few days, my muscles would soon strengthen up and I’d wonder at my silly doubts. I still wasn’t convinced and asked, ‘What if I really can’t manage? Can’t I at least try life with one hip and see how I get on? I feel so well set up …’
Dr Ansell had the grace to consult Mr Arden on this point. The message relayed back from him was that if I really didn’t get on with a mobile right hip, he could do another operation to set things permanently, ‘at any angle you want’.
Somehow I knew that the right hip wouldn’t be such a success, and I told Ansell so. ‘Don’t be silly, John,’ she said. ‘What makes you think you know better than the surgeon? You’re always saying he did a good job on the left hip.’ Once the burning spiders had gone to sleep, that is.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just feel it in my bones.’ Then Ansell looked at me with a very strange expression, as if after all this time she still didn’t know what to make of me.
Anyway, that was me dished and dashed. In all honesty I couldn’t go against the doctor who’d done so much for me. I had to bite the bullet. One day soon I would have to go to sleep in a hospital, knowing that I would wake up feeling like a piece of playground equipment that has been methodically vandalised by people who should know better, trained health-service professionals. Grown-ups. Perhaps this time the anæsthetist wou
ld get in on the act. Let everyone have a go, the porter, the lady from the canteen, the whole bang lot. Last one on John’s hip’s a sissy.
Only one thing made me submit to a second assault, and it wasn’t actually reverence for Ansell. I had gone against her in the past, when she had devised walking aids for me that I refused outright, and I could do it again. But until the second hip was done I wouldn’t be able to adopt anything close to a conventional sitting posture. I wasn’t worried about taking tea with the Queen. I would rely on her, when the time came, to put me at my ease – isn’t that her job? But with two working hips, even in the event that one worked less well than the other – as I so confidently anticipated – learning to drive came a lot nearer. Still a long shot but not a flat impossibility.
I quite see the comedy of someone who had always resisted mechanistic accounts of the universe deciding that his life wasn’t complete without a car. On the other hand, if I didn’t grab the steering wheel with both hands, the joke would be on me for all time. I’d never be able to take charge of my own life. If I didn’t make it to the driver’s seat then I would never be more than a passenger, dependent on the good will of others. A finite quality, as I had already understood. The people who looked after me had limited stocks of patience, and for all I knew they were more forbearing than most. I had never experienced what it was to carry a burden – and that was the whole point. My only experience of burdens was of being one, and I couldn’t claim to have unlimited patience either, in that rôle.
Yod Hé Vau Hé!
By the time I returned to Wexham Park for my second dose of agony I was armed with new expletives. I didn’t want to amuse the staff with amateur swearing a second time. When the pain came I would try, however distressed and disoriented, to invoke the symbolic tetrad as explained in The Tarot, represented in the Mysteries of Memphis and Thebes by the four aspects of the sphinx (man, eagle, lion, bull) and also by the four elements. I planned to cry out Yod Hé Vau Hé, visualising the seductive shapes of the Hebrew letters in the book. I practised writing them out on the backs of envelopes and leaving them round, just to show that doctors didn’t have a monopoly on mysterious scribblings. I too could play that game.
I left The Tarot conspicuous by my bedside when Mr Arden the surgeon came to give me his pre-operative briefing. This was a pep talk which didn’t leave me with much pep, now that we both knew the flintiness of the material that was waiting for him beneath the veneer of skin. I remember him saying, ‘Orthopædics is a fairly brutal business.’ He was apologising in advance. He promised he would use the saw wherever he could, and only break what he must of my concrete hip. If he noticed the book he didn’t say anything. This was rather disappointing, but it’s the sad fact that high professional accomplishment doesn’t necessarily broaden the mind. The Top Man in Granny’s sense, someone who had soared so high in his medical specialty that he had transcended Dr and become mere Mr again, could still be almost mediocre, viewed in his other aspects. No doubt there were times in my teens when I was downright snooty. I was working very hard to feel superior to the man who planned to crack open one of my hips for the second time.
The pre-operative ritual had changed by the time of my second hip-cracking. It was no longer necessary, apparently, to shave my groin ahead of time.
There was no explanation given. By then I should have realised that explanations were not available on the National Health. It seemed a bit odd, all the same. If it was such a vital procedure last time, then why not now? What had changed? Perhaps I’d gained some immunity from infection along the way. If so, how did they know?
I felt pretty silly asking why I wasn’t having this intimate service rendered – as if I was anxious to go under the barber’s blade as well as the surgeon’s. I certainly had more of a crop of pubic hair than I had had the previous year. My personal experience didn’t put me in a position to refute the old-wives’-tale that shaved hair grows back with twice the force.
Fingers in the till of oblivion
There was something I thought I remembered about the anæsthetist on the first hip operation – not the time I had had the intravenous dose to which I was so disastrously allergic, but the second try with gas.
I remembered the anæsthetist having a lovely big beaky nose, a real schnozz, and he said cheerfully, ‘I’ll just make sure this mask is the right size for you!’, slipping it playfully over his own giant conk before fitting it over mine, taking a good old sniff in the process. Was I remembering right? Could that possibly be professional conduct?
Of course anæsthesia distorts perception of its very nature, and after I came round I was too busy trying to surf the waves of pain to be sure of my memories. This time I determined to notice everything, to participate in the experience to the fullest degree and forget nothing that happened, right up to the moment that the mask of consciousness slipped from my face.
I remember the mask itself seeming to grow huge as the gas took effect, and everything becoming unreal and full of echoes. I even think I struggled, trying to kick and move my arms to fight the anæsthetist off.
But it was the earlier bit that was more interesting. This time he didn’t say he was testing the fit of the mask, he said he was testing the flow of the gas, but yes, once again he took a good sniff on his own account before it was my turn.
Later, after I had crawled out of the trench of pain into which Mr Arden, summoning up all his professional skill, had tenderly lowered me, I asked Mum about what I had seen. She didn’t seem at all surprised. Apparently it’s a well-known professional hazard, liable to catch up with you in the long run. Anæsthetists don’t exactly fall asleep on the job, but they can’t always resist the temptation of dipping their fingers in the till of oblivion.
I think I kept to my resolution of using Mouni Sadhu’s The Tarot as my own personal dictionary of mystical expletives. I believe I kept ‘fucking buggers’ up my sleeve for other emergencies. The nursing staff looked at me a little strangely, which was probably no bad thing. I wanted to sound in my agony like an Adept uttering words of power rather than a schoolchild howling.
The man in the next bed when I was installed back at CRX was Mr Thatcher, a nice man who was recovering from having his gallstones out. He had been promised they would give him the stones in a jar, to take home with him when he left. He offered to let me take a look when they did. I was looking forward to it. Apparently there’s a lot of individual variation in the size, colour and texture of gallstones. ‘Some people,’ he told me, ‘have just one, but it looks like a mahogany doorknob. Other people just have a handful of gravel.’ Somehow it was immediately obvious that he was over towards the doorknob end of the gallstone spectrum.
Glottal-stop gurgle
Most of my conversations with Mr Thatcher revolved around gratifyingly adult subjects: sex, money and alcoholic drink. Because I was anæmic and underweight, Ansell prescribed me a bottle of beer every evening. She had upped the stakes from wholemilk yoghurt. Now it was up to Mackeson to build me up.
I didn’t like the beer, it was nasty stuff, but I loved having it. Ansell must have known what a thrill it was for a teenager in a-certain-amount-of-discomfort to be downing beer on doctor’s orders. Mr Thatcher was certainly jealous of my evening prescription, the medicine which came with a bottle-opener, and a nurse to work it.
When my medicine arrived, Mr Thatcher would launch into a lip-smacking rendition of the familiar advertisement for Mackeson. ‘Looks good …’ he would say, in slow tempo and countryman’s tones, ‘tastes good … and by golly it does you good.’ Imitating in fact the tones of Bernard Miles, unforgettably frightening Long John Silver on stage and patron of the Vulcan School. Obligingly I would make a glottal-stop gurgle as I swallowed the beer, which was so peatily sweet it did indeed taste like medicine.
I think Mackeson’s was one of the first products to fall foul of the Trades Descriptions Act. For a while the company retained the script, omitting only the last four words, so that the false claim
went on sounding in the ears of the faithful.
I was aware that drinking stout was a rather Coronation Street thing to be doing. That was something else we did, Mum and I, besides covertly reading the Mirror, as a way of wincing at the disgustingness of the working classes. It was certainly a different world – in those days the Northern accents were much thicker. When Mum told me with her nurse’s knowledge that ‘milk stout’, which characters like Ena Sharples always seemed to order at the Rovers’ Return, was so called because it was thought to promote lactation, I was fascinated. So that was why working-class women were so big up top! But somebody should have told Muzzie and Caroline, posh mother and older sister of my dear friend Sarah on the children’s ward, before they overindulged in the elixir and became so shamingly buxom.
Mr Thatcher had definite ideas about sex. This was at the time when the Sexual Offences Bill decriminalising certain acts between men was making its way, stage by stage, towards reality. ‘Homosexuality is a sad condition,’ said Mr Thatcher (I held my breath), ‘but what can society expect if there are schools with no girls in them? When boys from schools like that come into puberty, they’ve lost touch with their instincts. They don’t know what they’re supposed to do.’ Co-education would solve that particular problem in a generation. Satisfied, Mr Thatcher moved on to the next social issue in his newspaper.
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