He was a Christian Scientist and said he had only come to hospital because the company he served could take away his pension if he refused. When disease or death was mentioned he would shrug and say, “After all, what is the body? Just fifty cents-worth of chemicalization.”
If a silence lasted too long for him he sometimes broke it by remarking, at random, “After all, the only realities are spiritual realities.”
Beneath his bed were three large cases from which he got the hospital porter to produce, at various times, many electrical gadgets connected with hygiene and grooming, cigars, tissues, a radio, three ball-pens which wrote in different colours, and a steel-barrelled pen filled with spirit ink to which could be fixed several thicknesses of felt nib. He did not converse. He might call one of us by name, but his loud, even voice was clearly addressing our entire half of the ward. Once he called out, “Say, Major! Could you lend me just a small spoonful of that toothpowder of yours and tomorrow l’ll give you back a whole tin of it?”
“What’s that, old man?” said the Major, maybe playing for time.
“Could you lend me one little spoonful of that tooth-powder of yours and tomorrow I’Il repay you with a whole big new tin of it? I got one in the case.”
“Oh you mustn’t give away all your pretty things like that,” said the Major, gently.
“Major, when I’m tired of giving I’ll be tired of living. If people are grateful, well and good. If not...”
He frowned, his mouth sagged into its expression of slightly puzzled vacuity and for some minutes his eyes searched the ward uneasily for something to think about. At last they focused on a point beneath the table where the sister wrote her reports. “Say!” he said, brightening, “That’s the saddest waste-paper basket I ever did see! It’s twisted, it’s all to cock, it needs a new coat of paint ...” and then he ran out of thoughts again and eventually muttered that the only realities were spiritual realities.
We were fascinated by Sweeney because he continually presented himself, which none of us did. At first meeting our accents had shown each other that Sigurdson was a Lancashire seaman, the Major an English army officer and I a well-read lowland Scot. The humorous pre-breakfast chats had confirmed this without adding detail. I knew the Major had commanded the household troops of some Moroccan or Algerian ruler, but had not heard it from his lips. He must have noticed that I was writing something larger than this report but my privacy did not disturb him. Mr Sweeney gave us his whole childhood in half a minute. “For the first twelve years of my life I was reared by my mother and wow, you should have seen me. Blue velvet suit. Satin shirt and necktie. Curly hair down to my shoulders. She had just about made a little girl of me when my pa came and took me to sea with him. She didn’t want it, I didn’t want it, but he said, ‘You’re gonna cry your eyes out but one day you’ll be grateful.’ And I cried. I guess I cried myself to sleep almost every night for six whole months. But after a year I was tough, I was a man, and I was grateful.”
He was not embarrassed by his sexuality. One day the Major asked what he thought of the Japanese.
“I like ’em. Collectively they’re skunks but individually I like ’em. I remember my ship putting into Yokohama in thirty-six. The Mayor entertained a few of us. I like Japanese homes. They’re clean. No furniture; you sit on mats on the floor. Nothing like that – ” he pointed to the top of his locker which, like our lockers, was littered with many more or less useful objects – “All that stuff is kept in a smooth box in the corner of the room. And there’s not much decoration either. But the room is built round an almond tree that comes out of a hole in the floor and goes out through one in the ceiling and the trunk and branches in the room have been given a coat of clear .... not varnish, but like varnish .... “
“Lacquer?” I suggested.
“Yeah. They’re lacquered. Well, nothing was too good for us. They saw we didn’t like their drink so without even asking they sent out for whisky. And when I went to bed, there she was. In a kimono. There are over fifty yards of silk in those kimonos. By the time she’d unwrapped herself I had almost lost my courage.”
One day it was announced on the wireless that President Eisenhower had burst a small blood-vessel in his brain, his speech was impaired and he was confined to bed. Sweeney heard this with unusual gravity. He said, “He’s sixty-two. My age.” and was silent for a long time.
“After all,” he said suddenly, “He’s an old man. What can you expect?”
He complained of headache. The nurse on duty told him it would go away. “But what’s causing it?”
He called the sister, then the matron, who both told him a codeine tablet would cure it. “I won’t take dope!” he cried, “You aren’t going to dope me!”
He huddled silently under the bedclothes for over an hour. “After all,” he said suddenly, “He’s old. He’s not indispensable, even if he is the president. He’ll be replaced one day, just like the rest of us.”
He clearly wanted to be persuaded that what he said was untrue. The Major and I kept glancing at each other with furtive, delighted grins, but we were glad when Eisenhower got well enough to make a speech and Mr Sweeney felt better. He was more entertaining when he was confident.
The trustees may wonder why I have spent so many words describing this man. I do so for reasons that would have made me describe Toledo, had I reached Toledo. He displayed a coherent kind of life. I admired his language, which was terse, rapid, and full of concrete detail. I realized this was part of his national culture and found an impure form of it in an American magazine he read each week with great seriousness. “Everything in this is fact,” he explained, “lt prints nothing but the bare facts. Other magazines give you opinions. Not this one.”
I borrowed it and read a report of the British Labour Party conference. One of the leaders had tried to persuade the Party that bits of Britain should not be leased to the U.S.A. as bases for their nuclear weapons. Under a photograph of him looking pugnacious were the words “Number one American-hater, rabble-rousing Aneurin Bevan”.
But I admired Mr Sweeney quite apart from his national style. With energy, skill, and a total absence of what I thought of as intellectual reserves (a developed imagination, analytical subtlety, wide reading) he had managed ships and men in two world wars and the Korean war. He had worked and enjoyed himself and taken knocks among the solid weights and wide gaps of the world I would not face. Death worried him now that his body was failing, but since the age of twelve he had never been embarrassed by life. And by wrestling with the fear of death openly and aloud he made it a public comedy instead of a private terror. Aboard the Kenya Castle, when I was afraid of dying, my fear did nobody any good.
Of course, I had to face the world in the end. Only everlasting money can keep us from doing that, and mine was being used up. Each day in hospital cost me twenty-one shillings and I had been over three weeks there. When to that was added the train fare to London, and cost of lodgings there, boat fare to Gibraltar, ship’s hospital fee, the price of the ambulance journey and being X-rayed for tuberculosis, and the small sum I had forced upon lan, I found I had spent, or else owed, more than half the scholarship money. I recalled, too, that I had never been discharged from hospital feeling perfectly well. It was possible that something in the nature of hospitals pandered to my asthma after the worst of an attack had been cured by them. I asked to see the head doctor and explained that, for financial reasons, I must leave next morning. He shrugged and said, “lt cannot be helped.” He advised me, though, not to leave Gibraltar until I felt healthier, and even so not to go far into Spain in case I had another attack, as in Spain the hospital charges were extortionate, especially to tourists, and the medical standards were not high. This seemed sensible advice. I asked the nurses for the name of a lodging which was cheap, plain and good. I heard there was an armed-forces leave centre in the south bastion which usually had spare beds, was run by a retired Scottish soldier, and easy to reach. Next morning I dressed, collect
ed my rucksack, left the hospital doorstep and struck with my feet the first earth I had touched since the port of London.
I was on a road slanting up from the town of Gibraltar to the rock’s outermost point. The day must have been clear because across the sea to the south I saw the African coast looking exactly as Africa ought to look: a dark line of crowded-together rock pinnacles, domes and turrets with beyond them, when the eye had grown used to the distance, the snowy range of Atlas holding up the sky. The modern hospital behind me, the elegantly towered building in front (a lunatic asylum) stood on a great slant of white limestone rock interspersed with small tough twisted trees. I turned right and walked to the town, breathing easily because I was going downhill. I came to a wall with an arch in it just wide enough to take two cars, and beyond this the road became the main street of Gibraltar. A small lane leading to the left brought me almost at once to the south bastion.
This was a stone-built cliff protecting the town from the sea. The townward side was pierced by vaulted chambers. The lower ones, which had been barracks, were entered from a narrow piazza; the upper, which had been munition storerooms and gun emplacements, were entered from a balcony. All windows faced the town. High tides had once lapped the other side of this bastion but now a broad road ran here with docks on the far side. The guns and gunners had shifted elsewhere long ago and the chambers were used as a guest-house by the Toc H. The Toc H (I never learned the reason for that name) developed in France during the First World War, among British soldiers who wanted spiritual communion and found the official army priests too sectarian and not always near when things got tough. The only communion service was to light a brass oil-lamp in a dark place and pray that human pain would one day produce happiness and peace. Apart from that the organization existed to share extra food, clothing and shelter with whoever seemed in need. Jock Brown, formerly of the Highland Light Infantry in Flanders, was the Toc H man in south bastion. He was small, balding, mild-faced and wore a blazer with a white cross badge on the breast pocket and flannel trousers with bicycle clips at the ankles. His instincts were all turned to being mildly helpful. He believed that youth was a beautiful and noble state but was not surprised when young soldiers brawled, contracted venereal diseases and stole. He liked lending them cameras, books and records in the hope that they would come to enjoy using these instead. With the help of Isabel, a Spanish maid, he kept the hostel tidy and clean, the meals plain yet tasty, the general air of the place as mild as himself. I once heard him called “an old woman” by somebody who thought that a term of abuse. The critic was a man of Jock’s age who had not been very useful to other people, so wanted to believe that everyday kindness was an unimportant virtue.
On that first morning Jock led me up a ramp to the balcony and into the common room, a former gun emplacement with a triangular floorplan. A hearth was built into the angle facing the door so that smoke left by the hole through which shells had been fired. The interior stonework was massively rough except for seven feet of smooth wall on each side of the hearth, and later I painted mural decorations here. Jock showed me to a dormitory next door holding four beds and introduced me to room-mates who had not yet risen. These were a private on leave from the Royal Surrey regiment, and an Australian and a German who would both be departing by ship next morning. I unpacked my things into a locker beside my bed then visited a bank in town where I uplifted the second part of the Bellahouston Scholarship money, the first having been received in Glasgow. I pocketed a few pounds and hid the rest in a plastic envelope containing my shaving-kit.
That night, to obtain sound sleep in a strange bed, I decided to become drunk and found a big crowded bar nearby where I would not be conspicuous. The customers were mostly soldiers and sailors but there were women among them. A small plump one approached and asked if I would like a companera? I said I would. She sat beside me, called a waiter and ordered a glass of pale green liquid, for which I paid. She was Spanish and her English was too poor to tell me much else. She tried to be entertaining by folding a handkerchief into the shape of what she called pantalones and unfastening the flies, but I did not find this exciting or feel she wished to seduce me. With each green drink I bought, the waiter handed her a small brass disc. When she went to the lavatory I tasted what was in her glass and found it to be coloured water. I got the waiter to refill the glass with green chartreuse but when she returned and sipped this she grew thoughtful and depressed, then left me. Clearly the management paid her no commission on the real drinks I purchased. So I drank by myself and listened to a small, very noisy band. It played a round of tunes chosen to cause nostalgia in as many customers as possible: Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner, Men of Harlech, Galway Bay, etc. The Scottish number, I Belong to Glasgow, was repeated every ten minutes. It is not a tune I normally like but in this place it induced an emotion so heartrending that I had to grapple with it as if it were a disease. However, I stayed drinking until I was sure my head would lose consciousness as soon as it touched a pillow, then returned to the dormitory (which was in darkness), undressed, put the shaving-kit under the pillow, my head on top of it, and did indeed lose consciousness.
I wakened late next morning feeling brighter and healthier than I had done for many weeks. I also felt guilty (the straw mat beside my bed was crusted with vomit) but I knew that a day of brisk sketching or writing would cure that. The English private remained curled below his blankets, the Australian and German had already left to catch their boat. I took my toilet things and the straw mat to the lavatory and washed the mat and myself perfectly clean. Then I dressed and breakfasted, then climbed by an iron ladder to the esplanade on top of the bastion and sat on a shaded bench planning what to do. I still owed money to the hospital. I took my wad of notes from the shaving-kit and found it contained twenty pounds. The rest had been removed.
My instinctive reaction to a painful event is to sit quiet for a very long time, and as I brooded on my position this struck me as an intelligent thing to do. The thief must be one of three people, two of whom were at sea. If I could persuade the police to act for me, which was unlikely, they could do little but spread to others a nasty feeling I had better keep to myself. The thief had left me enough to live on for a while. Although my father was not rich he had some money banked. I wrote him a letter explaining all the circumstances except my intoxication and asking for a loan of the stolen amount, which I promised to repay by taking a regular job when I returned home. He posted the money to me as quickly as he could. The asthma returned. It worsened and improved, then worsened and improved. I remained in the hostel for my twenty-fourth birthday, and the New Year of 1958, and another two months. I wrote five chapters of my book and painted a Triumph of Neptune on the common room walls.
And I made friends with other rootless people who used the hostel: a student from the Midlands who had left Britain to avoid national military service and seemed to live by petty smuggling; a tall stooping bronchial man, also from the Midlands, who hovered around the Mediterranean for health reasons; and a middle-aged American with a sore back who had been refused entry into England where he had gone to consult an osteopath of whom he had heard great things. He kept discussing the reasons for the refusal and asking if a slight tampering with the datestamp on his passport would make entry easier if he tried again. There was Cyril Hume, an unemployed able seaman with a photograph of a cheerful, attractive-looking wife in Portsmouth who “realized he needed to wander about a bit”. I think it was Cyril Hume who learned that a ship would be sailing to the Canary Isles from a port on the African coast just opposite. Apparently the fare was cheap and the cost of living in the Canary Isles even less than the cost of living in Spain. My health was improving at the time so we all decided to go together. We took a ferry across the bay to Algeciras in Spain, and another ferry from Algeciras to Africa. There was a bright sun, a strong wind, waves ran fast with glittering foamy crests. The jumbled rocky African coast, a steep headland with a medieval fortress on top looked theatrica
l but convincing. Cyril Hume had bought us cheese, celery, bread. Standing in the prow of the ship it suddenly struck me that cheese, celery and exactly this chalky white bread was the best lunch I ever tasted. Slightly breathless, I produced and used my asthma hand-pump inhaler. The surrounding crowd turned and watched me with that direct, open interest Ian McCulloch had found upsetting. I enjoyed being a stranger who provoked interest without even trying.
The port we reached was Ceuta, a Spanish possession. It looked just like Algeciras: whitewalled buildings and streets bordered by orange trees with real fruit among the leaves. The ship we wanted had left for the Canary Isles the day before so we returned to Algeciras and took lodgings there. Next morning, having slept badly, I decided to stay in bed. After my friends had left a maid entered the room and began making the other beds by shaking up the feather quilts and mattresses. I am allergic to feathers and started suffocating. I cried out to her but had no Spanish and she no English. In my notebook I hastily sketched a feather and told her it was mal – I hoped that the Latin root for evil was part of her language too. She smiled and repeated the word with what seemed perfect comprehension and then, when I lay back, relieved, she returned to violently plumping out the quilts. I gripped my hypodermic needle to give myself a big adrenaline injection but my hand trembled and the needle broke short in my flesh. The maid and I both panicked. She screamed and a lot of women ran in and surrounded me, jabbering loudly as I pissed, shat, and grew unconscious.
I wakened in a hospital managed by dark-robed, white-wimpled brides of Christ. A doctor came, gave me pills of a sort that can be bought cheap from any chemist, and charged dear for them. My friends arrived, discharged me, and escorted me back across the bay to Gibraltar and the Toc H hostel, where I stayed in bed for a week. I now had slightly more than ten pounds of money left: enough to buy a cheap boat fare back to London.
Of Me and Others Page 9