The pain came in a terrible rhythm as if an engine was sending a pile driver through my chest. Matron put a pillow under my head and knelt beside me soothing my hair. I felt a sudden wave of terror and self-pity.
Matron said softly: ‘Don’t worry, mon cher, we are all in God’s hands!’ Part of my mind told me that I was dying, and that this event had been lying in wait for me every moment of my existence. I saw a fleeting image of myself being carried in my coffin past the old hall to the little cemetery at the head of the valley. I could see, where I lay, the statue to Saint Joseph in memory of the long-dead Cottonian boy.
Dr Hall, the school doctor, arrived, a dapper man whose dark hair was smoothly plastered down on his scalp. He was wearing a tweed suit and a mustard-coloured waistcoat. His hands smelt of antiseptic lotion. He gave me an injection, and the pain began to ease. He helped me to sit up a little and took off my shirt. He expressed mild surprise at my scapular. ‘And what is the meaning of this?’ he asked as he took it off. He was not a Catholic. The nun explained that it was an item of devotion. I was not happy that the scapular had been taken off, remembering the special indulgence accorded those who died wearing it.
He questioned me in a quiet authoritative voice and spent a lot of time taking my pulse and listening to my back and my chest with his stethoscope. Eventually he said that he didn’t think that I had had a severe heart attack; but he wanted me in hospital straight away. As he went off to make some phone calls, Father McCartie appeared with three hefty members of the sixth form. They carried me downstairs and out through the front door of the old hall to where the doctor’s car was parked. They placed me in a lying position on the back seat.
The doctor drove and Matron sat next to him. As we passed through the country lanes, Matron did not take her eyes off me once; but she chatted a little with the doctor, telling him about her war service as a nurse. After driving for an hour or so I was conscious that we had left the countryside and entered a town. From where I lay looking up at the car windows I could see terraces of dark red-brick houses rising up the sides of the hills. Then there were clusters of strangely shaped chimneys, like fat black bottles, belching smoke. The doctor explained that the town was called Stoke-on-Trent, and it was also known as the Potteries, where china like Wedgwood was made to be sold all over the world. We were destined for the hospital known as the Staffordshire Royal Infirmary.
At the hospital I was placed in a wheelchair and propelled very slowly down a corridor to a room with various machines. A bespectacled man in a white coat came in. He introduced himself as Dr Gardiner and explained that he was a cardiologist, a heart specialist. He placed a number of wires with suction pads at various points over my chest and proceeded to work a machine placed on a trolley. As the contraption whirred and crackled, a paper printout emerged. It seemed strange to see my heart registered on paper as a series of peaks and troughs. Showing Dr Hall the results, Dr Gardiner said that he had never seen anything quite like it before. ‘This boy seems to have angina,’ he said, ‘but he is only fifteen or sixteen years of age.’
Before she and Dr Hall left, Mère Saint Luc asked if I wanted anything. I said impulsively: ‘Please bring me the life of Saint Thérèse from the library.’
Dr Gardiner said that until I was told otherwise I should have to lie flat and not raise my arms above my head. I asked him whether I could have caused my illness by bowling too vigorously. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that we can blame this on cricket.’
I was taken in a lift to a ward on the top storey of the hospital with views out over a residential district – rows and rows of red-brick houses with smoking chimneys. There was a strong smell of antiseptic.
The ward sister came to see me. She was a short woman with an ample figure, wearing a starched frilly cap and a belted blue dress. She had a flat, shiny face, with placid eyes, and she sounded a little dreamy in her voice and manner. She pulled a screen around the bed and told me to take off all my clothes and put on a nightgown which opened at the back. As I did all this in full view of the woman I felt myself blushing with shame. She tied up the strings at the back of the gown and I felt her cold fingers on my back. After I had got between the sheets she sat for a while on the bed with my clothes, as if she had my life and my privacy just casually placed across her starched apron. I had a strong sense of her femininity; she was wearing nail varnish, and had an aura of faintly sweet scent.
When I asked her what was wrong with me, she said with a crooked little smile that I was a ‘mystery boy with a heart disease only suffered by old men’. This frightened me; I wondered whether my hair would go grey and fall out prematurely. As she walked off with my clothes, I felt as though she was taking my freedom and modesty down the ward with her.
I was the youngest person in the ward and found myself in a bay facing a man in his late fifties, called Mr Raymont. He told me that he was waiting for an operation on a ‘delicate part’ of his anatomy, but that when he was under the anaesthetic they would also take away an unsightly little polyp. He pointed to a red blob on the side of his nose. ‘I’m much more interested in losing this horrible thing,’ he said with a cheerless laugh. He wanted to engage me in conversation, but I felt too sad and tired.
The sister had told me that a nurse would come and give me a ‘blanket bath’ and I would have to use a bottle and a bedpan. I had earphones to listen to the radio, but I had nothing to read. I lay for along time rapt in my thoughts, watching the comings and goings on the ward, and looking out at the view over the rooftops. If I was going to die, I thought, it would be a lonely death.
There was a ward maid called Hilda. She grumbled to herself while she cleaned around with a feather duster. I couldn’t possibly be dying, I thought, while a woman grumbled and cleaned under my bed with a ludicrous-looking set of feathers on a bamboo cane.
As it was getting dark Dr Gardiner appeared on the ward with two other younger doctors. Sister was in attendance. He told me that I was very ill, and that I must take great care not to put a strain on my heart otherwise there would be a recurrence of the attack I had experienced at school. He was not sure of the diagnosis, he said, but there were various possibilities. My symptoms were identical with those of angina pectoris caused by lack of blood supply to the heart muscle, but it was also possible that I was suffering from a disease known as pericarditis. He explained that the heart floats in a sac known as the pericardium and that sometimes the membrane becomes infected and inflamed, creating pain, palpitation and the build-up of fluid around the heart. He was hoping that it was pericarditis, but he was not taking any chances. He suggested that I now sit up a little, propped up by my pillows, rather than completely flat. On no account should I get out of bed until I had been given permission to do so, nor should I raise my hands above my head or strain myself.
‘Am I likely to die?’ I asked him.
He smiled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we won’t let that happen.’
From that moment I put all thoughts of death out of my mind.
72
THE FIRST DAY passed in a painless routine of meals and blood tests. I had no recurrence of the pain and tightness in my chest, except for several isolated occasions when I strained, against advice, to reach things on my bedside locker. One afternoon, early in my hospital stay, I was tempted to stroke my penis. But I felt the palpitation coming on, and stopped. A male nurse named Eamon gave me a blanket bath later that day. When the flannel reached my private parts he said: ‘Right young fellah, you do that bit for yourself, I think.’
With nothing to read, I listened to the Light programme on the radio. Tony Bennett’s song ‘Stranger in Paradise’ was being played over and over. I felt especially isolated at visiting times as there was no one to visit me and the nurses seemed to vanish too. I thought to myself: this is what it must feel like to be a leper.
On the third day Father McCartie arrived bearing the autobiography of Saint Thérèse. He sat on a chair at the end of the bed. His face was expres
sionless. He talked about the weather at Cotton and how Father Piercy had got the swimming pool in operation, but he soon ran out of conversation. Then he looked at his watch and said that he had to get back. When he asked me if I needed anything, I said that I would like a rosary. He fished into his pocket and brought out a substantial black and silver one. ‘You can have this,’ he said. ‘Keep it.’ Before he gave it to me, he blessed it. I thought to myself that he was not so bad after all. It occurred to me that he hated being at Cotton and longed to have a parish.
The next day Father Doran appeared in the ward outside visiting hours. He set up two small candles and a crucifix and said prayers in Latin before giving me Holy Communion. We both sat in silence as I made my thanksgiving. Then he said that the local Catholic hospital chaplain would bring me Communion regularly now. He told me that he had written to my mother and that she would come to see me, but there was a problem with funds. ‘Your bishop,’ said Father Doran with an edge of severity, ‘will arrange for a postal order to be sent to her to cover her expenses.’ I felt ashamed. I hated to think that I was being a cost to the diocese on account of my illness.
He fiddled with his hands a great deal, as if he was longing to smoke a cigarette. He was not looking at me, but gazing out of the window. At last he got up to go and shook my hand. ‘Now get yourself better and back to Cotton as soon as you can,’ he said.
73
AT THE BEGINNING of the second week, there was a new staff nurse on night duty. She was appealing without being pretty or beautiful; she had a neat figure and auburn hair done up in a bun under her little nurse’s cap. She was very pale and did not wear make-up. She went around the ward speaking to each of the patients in turn before going about her normal ward business. When she came to me, she spotted my copy of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux on the locker. She picked it up with a faint smile about her lips.
‘Oh, are you a Catholic?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m a Catholic, too. Where do you go to school?’
‘I’m at Cotton College.’
‘Oh, you’re a seminarian.’
‘Yes.’
She seemed embarrassed and yet pleased at the same time.
When she brought me my pills, she leant against the bed a little. ‘How are you feeling, John?’ Most of the staff called me ‘laddie’ or ‘young man’ or ‘son’. This young woman, who seemed to be in her late twenties or even older, spoke to me directly as an equal. She told me that her name was Philomena, that she lived in Burslem, and that she would be working nights for several weeks.
I had not been sleeping well at night as I often dozed during the day. At eleven o’clock, after most of the patients had fallen asleep and the ward was in darkness, I was saying the Rosary. The beads lay outside the bedclothes. Philomena came by and stood for a while, as if trying to work out whether I was asleep in the semi-darkness. I gave a small wave with my free hand and she came over.
‘Still awake, John?’
‘Yes.’
‘Saying your Rosary?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t sleep?’
‘No.’
‘How would you like a hot milk drink?’
‘That would be nice.’
She came back several minutes later with a mug of cocoa and two biscuits.
She sat on the bed, smoothing out her apron. She seemed a little nervous. As I sipped the cocoa she asked me a lot of questions. Our conversation was conducted in whispers. When did I first have a desire to become a priest? What did my mother think? What did my father think? What about my siblings? I gave her carefully edited answers, designed to enhance an idealised picture of myself and my family. That’s what I thought she wanted; and I wanted her to like me and to stay talking with me.
She asked about my prayer life, and my favourite saints. She was curious about Cotton and the routine of the day, and the discipline, and how I liked it. As I answered all these things, I was conscious of her gazing at me in the semi-darkness, her body and her face very taut and very close.
Eventually she looked at her watch and said that the night superintendent would be making her rounds. I must try to go to sleep and she would come and see me in the morning.
Several times in the night, Nurse Philomena came by the bed and stood looking at me. I watched her through half-shut eyes, pretending to sleep because I did not want her to be concerned about me.
One day Father Armishaw turned up. He had come to the hospital on his motorbike and was wearing his dashing leather flying jacket. He pretended to be gruff, almost unsympathetic, as if I were a malingerer. ‘So what’s all this, Cornwell? Decided to take a little holiday, eh?’ But I could tell that he was really concerned. He had brought me a book: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey. Instead of sitting on a chair some distance away, he sat on the bed quite close to me. He asked about my condition, how I felt, what sorts of drugs I was taking, and whether I slept at night. He told me that he had spent time in hospital when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. He had suffered, he told me, from a perforated ulcer. He gave a strange guffaw as he explained in detail what happened when the ulcer burst. ‘I had to have an operation,’ he said, ‘and they give you a drug that makes you feel completely at ease before you take the anaesthetic and go under the knife. When we came to the lift to go to the operating theatre, I remember thinking…I couldn’t care less if they threw me down the lift shaft. Now isn’t that strange! The power of drugs over the mind.’ When Hilda came around with the tea, he said that he would like nothing better than to try her cake, but he had to get back to duty. She looked at him awestruck, as if he was a film star.
He stood at the door of the ward and waved before he left. A moment later he appeared again, and waved once more. Then he did it again. It was a good joke, and I laughed. He had a broad grin on his face. He gave me a big thumbs-up sign and really went.
My talks with Nurse Philomena had become a regular fixture: gentle, clandestine, whispered. Night after night, she came to my bedside. Eventually, she waited until the night superintendent had done her first round so that we had longer to talk. Our conversations would last for as long as two hours, and there would be cocoa, and more cocoa, and biscuits, and more biscuits.
I rarely saw her face clearly as we always talked in the halflight. She spoke rapidly and self-consciously. She shut her eyes frequently for a few moments as she spoke. He expression, as far as I could tell in the twilight, was usually bland; she did not smile much or laugh much. She did not use her hands when she spoke. They usually rested on her lap. She spoke in an earnest monotone.
One night she brought in a replica of an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, which she placed on my bedside locker. On another evening she brought in the Miraculous Medal on a very fine silver chain. She asked me to wear it around my neck.
After she had satisfied herself with questions about every detail of my life and my vocation, she began to talk rather than question. She had a lot of stories about the power of prayer, patients brought back from the brink of death, patients relieved of incurable diseases, and brought out of comas. Then there were tales of saints and martyrs. She told me about a Franciscan friar in the South of Italy called Padre Pio who could tell penitents’ sins in confession before they had admitted to them. His advice to all Christians, she said, was: ‘Pray! Hope! And don’t worry!’
Every time she came to sit on my bed she started by saying that she had been praying for me. One day, after looking at me for a long time in silence, she said: ‘You are going to make a wonderful priest. I can tell.’
74
TWO WEEKS INTO my hospital stay, I had been sleeping after lunch and woke up to find Mum standing by the bed. She was dressed in a floral frock and had a peculiar flat hat pinned into her stiffly permed hair. She was wearing a lot of make-up and looked quite glamorous. She bent over and kissed me, her eyes smiling, and said: ‘Aren’t you the poor little soldier!’ I was overjoyed to see her, and I wept a little. Sh
e dried my eyes tenderly with a handkerchief that smelt of lavender water.
She sat on the bed talking, stroking me with one large, firm hand. Every so often she would plunge into her shopping bag to bring out another item. Apples, biscuits, comic books, a bottle of Lucozade. Each time she delved into the bag, she would say: ‘Oh yes, and I’ve brought you this…’ as if to stretch out the gift ritual. She talked about the adventure of her journey from Euston to Stoke-on-Trent, and the huge cost; then there was the latest saga of her job at Wanstead hospital; then she went through every member of the family one by one. When Hilda appeared with the trolley she offered Mum a cup of tea and a piece of cake, for which she was effusively thankful. She told Hilda that she worked in a hospital too, on nights.
Eventually she said she had to catch the train back to London, but she must see the consultant before leaving the hospital. She gave me a strong hug, and she was gone.
That evening Dr Gardiner appeared and said that I could get up and try to walk. At first my legs gave way under me, but I soon found my feet and began to stroll slowly up and down the ward in a hospital dressing gown under the watchful eye of the placid-faced sister. There was no recurrence of my chest pains.
That night Philomena was off duty and I began to read Travels with a Donkey. It seemed like a gate into an enchanted world, and yet the account of the author’s arrival at Our Lady of the Snows seemed familiar too: I could imagine every incident with an intensely tangible and visible reality. I became so gripped that I read by my night light until I fell asleep. I awoke briefly as a strange nurse took the book softly from my hands and turned out the light.
75
THE NEXT DAY I was allowed to sit out in the early summer sunshine on a balcony at the end of the ward. A patient named Geoff, an ex-soldier suffering from kidney disease, was there smoking a cigarette. When one of the nurses, a short dark-haired trainee, came on to the balcony to take our temperatures, he addressed her to her face as ‘Gorgeous Gussie’. After she left, he said: ‘Has Gorgeous Gussie ever given you a blanket bath? I made ‘er blush. My prick stood up like a flagpole on a parade-ground.’ And he gave a wicked laugh. My heart missed a beat when he said this. Then another nurse appeared, a staff nurse I had always thought to be strict and prim in manner. ‘Oh,’ said Geoff, ‘here’s Sweetie Pie.’ To my surprise she smiled and blushed, then ruffled his hair and told him not to be cheeky. After so much isolation, I was reminded by his banter with ‘Sweetie Pie’ that I had watched the nurses coming and going with a quiet subterranean interest of my own. I felt a pang of jealousy when the staff nurse ruffled Geoff’s hair.
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