Diving into Glass

by Caro Llewellyn

  Six

  The shameful truth was that it wasn’t until my early thirties that I found out about iron lungs, quite accidentally, flipping through a fifties end-of-year-recap issue of Time magazine I’d picked up from a second-hand bookstore. It had never occurred to me to ask my father about the machine. When I was growing up we were all too busy getting on with life and acting like things were normal.

  The issue of Time featured a double-page black-and-white photograph showing rows and rows of what looked like metal coffins in a stark room – the single adornment on the walls a cheap oil painting of the Queen. The only thing that distinguished the metal boxes from coffins was that each had a child’s head sticking out of one end, supported by a headrest the size of a small chopping block. A nurse in a starched white uniform and hat, which reminded me of a nun’s habit, stood at the door with her hands clasped in front of her.

  I didn’t have to read the caption. Polio. The only thing that stopped me searching those boys’ faces to see if my father was among them was that I knew he was one of the last people in Australia to contract the virus. By the time he joined the ranks of polio victims, all the children in the photograph I was staring at were long dead or had gone home to live the rest of their lives with calipers strapped to their wasted and deformed legs.

  I remember thinking the iron lungs resembled not only coffins, they looked like rocket ships. If you tipped one up vertically and set a match to it, you could shoot the kid inside right up to the stars. I bet many of those kids wished to be shot into the stars. I knew that’s what I’d want. My father said being in one was like being underwater in one of the old-fashioned diving suits he’d worn in the navy.

  It’s often surprising what we actually want to know about the unimaginable. There were so many questions I could have asked him, but what mattered most to me was whether he had a blanket over him underneath all that cold hard steel. Of all the things I could have worried about – his devastation, his anger, his pain, his terrible fear – I was worried about my father being cold. Even as an adult the rest was too big for me to comprehend. Who wants to think of their father like that? The thought of him being cold was bad enough.

  He was in ward C4. At the far end of a large room of about thirty metal hospital beds, two iron lungs breathed life into my father and another young man, who had also come late to the disease. I imagined the action of the iron lungs to be like the old wood and cloth bellows we used in winter to blow air on the newspapers and twigs in our fireplace. When I pumped the handles, the little flames grew. Air is fire and life.

  My father always believed that the long delay in getting into the iron lung caused his extreme paralysis. He thought lifting the suitcase had weakened him to the virus, but it was the delay in his treatment that sealed his fate. It is easy to be destroyed by moments like these, by the idea that things could have gone differently. That it was mere chance that led my healthy young father, full of life and in love with the sea, into the last wave of polio victims.

  Instead he learned – and taught me – never to languish in the what ifs, never to look back. But there was a contradiction in this that I didn’t see at the time: while he resolved never to dwell on how things might have been different, he ascribed the utmost meaning to these small moments of agency, these small turning points. That emphasis seemed to suggest that things could have been different: if he hadn’t carried the suitcase, if the matron hadn’t delayed, he might have been back on the water within weeks.

  In this telling, his paralysis was not mere chance, not the result of mysterious cellular changes that no one could predict; it was the result of a few identifiable errors and transgressions. Though he vowed never to ask himself ‘Why me?’ he had, in fact, already answered that question with a few definitive, unscientific conclusions: that by lifting that lady’s suitcases, he’d somehow brought this upon himself. That being true, he could never question his fate, and he certainly couldn’t ever complain.

  Visitors were rarely permitted at the infectious diseases hospital, although close family were allowed to come during specified times for short visits. Inevitably, friendships dropped away. Who except the most loving and devoted would put themselves at risk of infection from a disease that had terrorised a generation?

  For an entire year, my father’s twenty-year-old life revolved almost exclusively around the repetitive routine of his medical care, the nurses’ attention and daily visits from his mother and father, who drove an hour each way to sit at their son’s bedside.

  Once visiting time was over and his parents had retreated through the heavy swinging doors at the end of the ward, there was little he could do but stare at the ceiling and study its cracks. Under the strict watch of the ward’s matron, staff were discouraged from interacting with patients, so mostly he had to be content with the distant fragments of conversations from the nurses’ station or monitoring their comings and goings by the squeak of their rubber-soled shoes along the corridors.

  Treating patients in the infectious diseases hospital was part of nursing training, so every few months there was an influx of young women in white uniforms working through their medical education. These young women in my father’s ward – still teenagers in most cases – faced a room of male patients with leprosy, scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Then, at the end of the room, there was my father, tucked away inside his metal box.

  One of those young nurses caught my father’s eye. Rumour had it my mother didn’t behave like most people thought nurses should. She was tall and good-looking and had a reputation for standing up to her superiors. ‘The fact that she was unaffected by authority at this point interested me greatly,’ my father remembered one day, sitting with me in the sunroom of his beachfront home, looking at the sea.

  Once she brought him a bunch of long-stemmed roses, which she arranged in a vase and set on his metal bedside table. ‘I hope these will cheer you up,’ she said, smiling.

  But when the matron caught a glimpse of what she was doing and recognised the roses from the hospital grounds, she bellowed across the ward, ‘Those are my roses you have stolen, Nurse. I will put you on detention for this.’

  My mother wasn’t fazed at all. ‘Surely, Matron,’ she replied sweetly, ‘since I picked them from the grounds, they are public property.’

  On her birth certificate, my mother was Kathleen Jill Brinkworth, but she never liked her first name so everyone called her Jill. When she married my father she became Jill Llewellyn. Decades later, after my father left, she changed her name officially – she dropped Kathleen for Katherine, moved Jill back to being her second name, added Sky (it cost the same amount of money to add another name) and became Katherine Jill Sky Llewellyn. When she became a poet, that all changed again. She became Kate Llewellyn.

  One of her closest nursing friends remembers the first time she met my mother. ‘There was a nurse who everyone had ganged up on. You know, the group has to find its scapegoat. Well, one night we were sitting around and the most popular girl among our group started up about nurse X and just as everyone began to chime in, your mother called her out. “Stop being so nasty,” she said, and we were all taken aback. I never forgot it.’ All the other nurses, wanting to be accepted as part of the group, followed the leader, but my mother didn’t care for it, not if acceptance came at someone else’s expense. She made that very clear and the taunting stopped.

  Lying in his iron lung, my father couldn’t believe his luck. Here was a beautiful young woman who treated him like any other young man. She didn’t handle him with kid gloves – she handled him, that’s for sure – but she never treated him like he was sick. What a blessing for a young man who was very, very sick to have a beautiful girl flirting with him, trying to make him feel every bit as hot-blooded as he had been before his hospitalisation.

  The other blessing they had in their favour – the greatest and most miraculous blessing of my father’s illness – was that as his nurse, my mother had occasion to notice early on that the pol
io had not interfered with his sexual function.

  If she was in the ward alone at night, they fooled around. And when she was assigned to bathe him, they’d do the same. It was their own special kind of courting. Being strictly forbidden and against the rules, it played to their rebellious natures, giving their dalliance all the more allure. But it gave my father more than just sensual relief and release. Crucially, it gave him back some of his former sense of agency. Here he was, immobilised yet still able to get a pretty girl to do what he wanted.

  As luck or circumstance would have it, he happened upon the right girl, enlisting charm and charisma to do the work his body couldn’t, and it worked.

  That’s not to say that he lied or misrepresented himself to my mother. There wasn’t much about the truth to be denied or ignored, and she was anything but stupid. It’s simply that with two options in front of him – anger on the one hand and ‘let’s salvage what we can of this’ on the other – he decidedly chose the latter.

  It was only after spending a week in a hospital, unable to feel my legs, that I looked back at these scenes of my parents together. For the first time in my life, I actually wondered how it could have happened. Some days I was unable to even drag myself out of my state-of-the-art hospital bed or face visitors. The thought of trying to seduce anyone was the furthest thing from my mind. In fact, I had already decided that part of my life – seducing or being seduced – was irrevocably over. And I wasn’t even lying in an iron lung. My body – from the outside at least – still looked more or less like it always had. My father’s body on the other hand, inside and out, showed every sign of the massacre that had besieged him.

  It was only then, facing my own calamity, that I found myself unable to live out my father’s example of constantly moving forward. I looked again at that scene in the hospital, nine years before my birth, and wondered: what gets a game, beautiful young nurse on her knees, polishing brass at the command of a patient in an iron lung? How could it be that a young woman with many other suitors chose to visit him regularly, even when she was no longer assigned to his ward? A man who would never walk, who would never be able to hold her or their children, or protect them from physical danger. What did he say and do to draw her in?

  It is hard to know, but shortly after her time in the infectious diseases hospital, she told her nursing buddies back in the dorms that she’d met the love of her life.

  On my father’s twenty-first birthday, recently out of the iron lung but still hospitalised, my grandparents arrived at his bedside with a neatly tied-up box. My grandfather had tried to tell the girl at the department store not to bother with the bows but she paid him no heed.

  With the box perched in my grandfather’s lap, he undid the satin ribbons and lifted its contents – a Philips portable radio – above my father’s weak chest so he could see it.

  The radio had a battery, a power cable and a set of headphones so my father could listen to it privately. The headphones were a ploy to get around the matron’s decree that he couldn’t have a radio because it would disturb the other patients. As if they’d have cared. My father can’t have been the only one who needed some intellectual stimulation and fun.

  ‘I wish I had kept it,’ he said decades later, like a man proudly describing his first car. He often said he thought it’d be a collector’s piece if only he’d hung on to it. More likely, and perhaps only one of a handful of moments when sentimentality outstripped his devotion to commerce, it was for its emotional significance that he wished he’d kept it. What my mother was giving him was private and strictly between them; the radio was the first taste of public freedom he had.

  With the nurses’ help, he worked out that if they wedged the radio between his upper arm and the metal railing of his bed, and they bent and positioned his arm to the right spot, he could turn it off and on and change the station himself. It’s only when you’ve lost everything that these simple, absolutely unremarkable daily activities take on huge significance. That being able to change the station on a radio is a pleasure and a success that a young man will remember for the rest of his life.

  ‘The other thing about that radio,’ he said, laughing at the memory, ‘was that as soon as the matron left the ward, the nurses pulled out the plug on the earphones and turned it up full blast and everyone who could jumped around dancing.’

  One of those dancing nurses, of course, was my mother. ‘I got to know her quite well and when she finished her term in my hospital, she came back to visit me and we developed a relationship, which became very important in my game of being able to go home,’ he said, sounding more ruthless than he may have intended.

  He knew back then that marriage was the only way for a person with a disability to get independence. Before the days of caregivers and support workers, wives or husbands were the only alternative to mothers or institutionalisation. My father knew, if he ever got out of hospital, he was destined for the Home for Incurables or being cared for by his parents. Neither of those options pleased him.

  My mother was fun and clever but, more importantly, he knew she was defiant. He could see that she was the kind of woman who would throw it all to the wind – every sensible reason there was to not be with a man in his situation – to be with someone she loved. She didn’t care about the odds. In fact, I think he could see she quite liked them stacked up against her.

  My mother was the most reckless person you’d ever meet, but in this instance, that was the best thing my father could have wished for.

  It’s one thing to be struck by polio after you’re married and have the vows ‘in sickness and in health’ to tie you together. The chances of finding someone when you are in the eye of the storm of an illness like my father’s? Well, that was simply miraculous.

  For a long time, I didn’t ask myself if benevolence was enough to account for her choice.

  Seven

  A few weeks after getting out of the iron lung and being transferred to a standard hospital bed, my father was moved to the male geriatric ward. There he lay awake at night, unable to sleep with the snoring of thirty old men and the scent of death. He was a 95 per cent paralysed 21-year-old seaman, lying in a geriatric ward, plotting his future.

  He was now in a wing of the hospital called C3, which was a completely different environment to C4, where he’d been during his time in the iron lung. The matron here was happy for the nurses to chat with the patients when they had time. Under these new conditions my father’s health began to improve further and he put on weight.

  His principal carer was a Czechoslovakian nurse he called Mother Checky. When he was finally well enough, she determined they should try to sit him up. Mother Checky spoke to my father of her plan and involved him in the decision-making about how they could best take this big step. After more than a year lying down, this was going to be no small thing, and my father was grateful for the warning. Even so, it didn’t go well.

  On Mother Checky’s count of three, she and two nurses lifted my father’s head and limp torso up off the pillows. Then the nurses each scooped one of his thin legs over their forearms and swivelled him around on his bottom so his legs dangled over the side of the bed.

  ‘I can still remember the shock of it. It was one time when I thought I really should give up hope,’ he told me. ‘There I was thinking to myself that sitting up meant I was about to take a huge step forward in my recovery, but when they swung my legs over the bed and sat me up straight for the first time, I looked down to see I had an enormous, distended and sagging stomach. It was grotesque. I was devastated.’

  All the muscles in his stomach had dissolved during his hospitalisation and there was nothing to support his organs, which felt like they wanted to fall out of his body. The pain was excruciating. Breathing was so difficult he couldn’t stay upright for more than a few seconds. The moment he was laid down again, and the nurses left to continue their work, the aftershock and realisation of all that he’d lost finally struck him. He wept. My fearless father was
terrified.

  They bound his waist tightly in bandages before they tried sitting him up again. The wrappings held his innards in place and, over many days, they incrementally increased the time he was able to remain upright. Eventually he was strong enough that a nurse who lived very close to the hospital pushed him in a wheelchair to her home, to see her pet cockatoo.

  But if he was to sit upright for any length of time, he needed to have his legs held straight out in front of him so his weakened heart could pump blood to his feet. No wheelchair existed that enabled this. When the doctors told him that he’d be able to go home for weekends if he could sit upright, my father petitioned hard to have a custom chair made. Along with a change of scenery and a return to some normalcy, most importantly going home would afford him time with my mother ‘on private territory’, as he discreetly put it.

  That special chair was six months in the making.

  When it finally arrived, a weekend at home was arranged and carefully orchestrated. My father was delivered by ambulance to my grandparents’ place on a stretcher like a dead body. The orderlies carried him into the house and laid him down in one of the two single beds in the back bedroom. It was the same room where my brother and I slept during our visits, many years later. There he stayed until the designated time the following Monday morning when two other men with a stretcher came to take him back to hospital.

  My father had the customised wheelchair, but my grandfather was not strong enough to lift him on his own, or he was too scared. Each of these weekends the chair sat parked in the corner and my father spent the entire time flat on his back.

  There’s nothing like necessity to fuel invention. During one of these weekends at home my father got the idea for a lifting machine. An old friend of his brother, who lived across the street, came from a long family of engineers. Bob Todd could make anything he set his mind to and my father happened to know Bob also had a functioning workshop in his backyard.