Years later, that frail woman they nursed would go on to write a hugely successful television series that had exactly this kind of nursing care at its heart. If the burning love and compassion for medical practitioners in the writing of Call the Midwife has any true birthplace, it was in that shower room. Their gentle act of care in her darkest time was a medical humanity Heidi never forgot.
Friday arrived, and Heidi continued to improve. The doctors started to be more encouraging. With luck the worst would soon be past. She might be able to move to another ward, away from the intensity of progressive care. The dragonfly’s wings could be heard again.
Then it changed.
Heidi suddenly started to feel unwell. Her temperature spiked in the afternoon. Her attention span started to fade. The nurses began to hurry about, and the doctor was called. I could see their frowns. I could tell their meanings. Vital signs were wrong.
No.
Not now.
Not after all this.
The doctor told me she needed an urgent CT scan to check what was going on inside. The danger had always been there. Relapse. Reinfection. Failed repair. Now it was real.
Heidi was distressed. I held her hand tightly as the nurse wheeled her down for the scan. I watched her helplessly as she was taken into the scanning room. Our eyes met again. I was told to wait outside. I watched the doors close behind her again. Only this time my hope was spent. The box lid had closed on the dragonfly. There was nothing left.
No.
Not now.
Not after all this.
I rushed into the nearby toilet and I found a vacant cubicle. I sat on the seat. I started to sob – great gasping sobs twisting my face and smearing my sleeve. I cried like a baby – on and on and on. I wailed. I’m crying now, just at the memory of it. I will never, never feel so helpless as I did at that moment. Never so alone as in that place. I’d lost her. I could feel it in my bones. The brave one. My beautiful, brilliant, better self. My son would grow up never knowing his mother. He’d never see what I’d seen. What I’d shared. The cruelty of it was something I couldn’t bear. My mind couldn’t comprehend it. I started to pray – dredging up old Catholic prayers from childhood – all those years of comfortable agnosticism thrown aside in my utter desperation and despair. I begged whoever was listening for mercy. I offered any bargain for her returning health; any price I could pay, I would. Just please please don’t make this happen. Not to her. Not now. Not after all this.
It took a while for me to calm myself. Eventually I bathed my red eyes in the sink and went outside to wait. The nurse was there. Judy. She sat with me. She was so gentle. Calmly running through the hopes. I’ll never be able to repay the simplicity of her kindness that day.
The scan was completed, and Heidi was returned to the ward. When the test results came back, they proved inconclusive. It was a mystery. No answer – but no bad news either. Heidi remembers the medics being relieved, but cautious:
They said to me, ‘When you’ve been as ill as you have, your body can experience these sudden crises.’ They were worried about lung problems due to the sepsis – pneumonia, as well as further infection. But they found nothing. The relapse was a bit of a mystery really – so frightening at the time, but ultimately it marked the turning point. The storm before the calm.
That night she had a peculiar dream:
It was the first dream I’d had all week that wasn’t frightening. I was walking through a beautiful estuary – but instead of being a single channel of water, there were little springs coming up through the sand. Beautiful little fountains of life bubbling up all about. In the middle of the estuary was an upturned boat, its hull in the air. As I walked past this boat I remember thinking, ‘I haven’t got to sail on that.’ It was like a Ship of Death. But it was turned upside down. I didn’t have to sail on it. I carried on, walking away from the boat, through the beautiful estuary. Then I woke up.
The next day, Heidi was so much improved that she was able to leave the progressive care ward and move into a general ward. It had light and life and gossiping female patients and a lovely view over Cambridgeshire fields: ‘I remember looking at it and thinking, “Ooh, I can live here.” ’
And she would. It would be another two weeks before she left the hospital, but she’d never go back to the darkness of those previous days. Her body started to expel the mass of fluids that had bloated her when the infection had been at its height. She lost twenty pounds in a few days. The nurses laughed at her shrinking frame. She now had to adjust to a new bowel, a new diet, and a new drug regime to clear her lungs of the detritus left by sepsis: ‘I was going to have to learn some new digestive habits. Living with a modified bowel is quite an enterprise.’
I’ll never forget the day I brought Dominic in to see her again. He’d become a proper walker now, and toddled along the polished corridor in those same little blue boots we’d bought him that day. When he saw his mum in bed I lifted him up and he hugged her. Knowing she’d been unwell, he patted his little hand on her back comfortingly – the same way we always did with him when he was unwell.
‘Aaah,’ he said. ‘Poor Mum-mum …’
‘Mummy’s better now, darling,’ said Heidi.
She really was.
There were regular appointments – weekly at first, then monthly as she gradually improved. By summer Heidi was told that it was safe for her to go on holiday. We booked a little trip to Crete, and I was able to watch the miracle of my wife playing in the water with my little son, unimaginable just months before. Not an estuary, but just as good. His laughter was like fountains of life bubbling up. It was a precious moment:
I remember playing on that beach. That’s when I truly felt better. As the mother of a toddler I’d felt anxious and disenfranchised because of my illness. So much of mothering a toddler is about catching them or lifting them – putting them in cars, prams, chairs. Having a fourteen-month-old is as physical as mothering gets. They still won’t walk everywhere, but they can run if they want to! After my surgery I didn’t have the physical strength to be the mother I wanted to be for him.
There was one more sweet moment of mothering she did that summer. Dominic was growing fast, and those little blue boots were beginning to feel tight on his feet. One day Heidi put him in the pram and strolled down to the shops:
It was a warm, sunny day. Just me and him. I took him down to the children’s shoe shop and I bought him a new pair of T-bar sandals for the summer.
The little blue boots that began it all were now outgrown – like the experience they’d led to. It was time for a new pair of shoes. New shoes for a new chapter.
*
Present day. Nineteen years on. The memory of it still has the power to stop our breaths. Heidi sits beside me on the sofa. So much life since then. So much estuary walked. I ask her how she thinks the experience changed her. She’s silent for a moment:
There are times when I’ve looked back on it and thought, ‘My goodness! I could have died. You could have been a widower with a fourteen-month-old baby, and that baby would never have remembered me, except for a few photographs.’ It was a very striking thought for a while, but now I can hardly believe it happened – I can hardly believe in that alternative reality. The great miracle of the experience was that life continued afterwards.
The simplest thing I can say is that it stops you being so afraid. When you’ve dealt with something completely terrifying and come out the other side, you can reflect on it and think, ‘Well … I came back.’
Sometimes all you need to know about life is that there can be another chapter.
And me?
I still feel shock and a rush of raw gratitude when I remember it. And I’m grateful that a part of me will always be sobbing in that cubicle – stripped of all distraction, understanding clearly at that moment what was most important. To reduce the world to the simplicity of an outward love.
Every day we live is the cleansing storm before the calm. Every day is a day tha
t the boat doesn’t sail. Every day is beautiful and fragile. Every day has the possibility for love. Every day has the delicate filigree of the dragonfly’s hopeful wings sewn into its fabric.
The boat will sail. For all of us. Eventually it will. But for each day that it doesn’t, life’s estuary is such a beautiful place to walk.
EPILOGUE
2017. I’m lying in my bed before a new day starts. One more to add to the breadcrumb trail of days stretching back to the early 1960s. Running total increasing. Final total unknown.
My name is Stephen McGann. In two weeks I’ll be fifty-four years old. I’m the registered owner of the vehicle parked on the gravel outside my bedroom window. I’m listed as the joint owner of the house in which I’m lying. I have a pension number and a legal will. I have a credit rating and an undergraduate son. I have a wife sleeping beside me to whom I’m next of kin. Published books and television scripts have my name on them. Broadcast television programmes have my name in the credits. My voice can be found on commercially recorded music, and on archived recordings of old theatrical shows. My medical record lists a perforated ear, a dodgy knee, and minor aches and pains in my lower back. My doctor calls this ‘wear and tear’ – a polite phrase meaning ‘normal for my sort of age’. I am now ‘my sort of age’; someone for whom a malady can be considered a natural outcome. I’m registered for council tax and listed as the patron of charities. My master’s degree certificate hangs on my office wall. My passport contains stamps from different continents.
Me as data. A mountain of accumulated facts and natural outcomes. Running total increasing. Final total unknown.
I rise and go into the bathroom. I’m confronted by my reflection in the mirror as I enter. I see my dad’s face looking back at me. I smile. He smiles back. One of his dry smiles. ‘You don’t know you’re born, lad.’
He’s right. I don’t. I love him for that. I love him for many things.
I’ve started to look like he did at my age. That same dark hair with flecks of grey. The same crow’s feet around the eyes. I love the feeling of seeing him there in my face, his ghost inhabiting me, rather than having him disembodied in my memory. I love my fifties, too. Better than any age before. I’m so much more comfortable in my skin. Nearer to my end, but more secure in the value of the life that preceded it. I’m a happy man, because I now know why I’m a lucky one.
My siblings are showing similar signs of age. The creaking joints, the flecks of grey, the crow’s-feet smiles. My mum is in her eighties – frail but fit, and sharp as a razor. Every week I telephone her at the same time. Every month the family gathers from all parts of the country to share a meal together. We laugh and talk and think and smile, all old harmonies realigned. Middle age is an undervalued prime – a time when we amount to the things we’ve done, and not simply to the estimations and fashions of others. We are who we seem, crow’s feet and all. There’s honesty to it.
My son is away at university. My wife and I have spent our first year as ‘empty nesters’ – watching for signs of lost weight in his posted photographs, and waiting for the odd text or phone call to fill the new space left after decades of close parenthood. He’s thriving – he is funny and kind and talented. We watch him perform in student musicals, and wipe sentimental tears onto our sleeves in the tender moments. There are many tender moments.
I smile into the mirror, and run the fingers of one hand through my hair in an attempt to untangle the grey-flecked mess of sleep. Then I spy that unmistakable genetic watermark. My uneven, rough-hewn nails; crooked veins wriggling over the tendons – the wrinkled, chicken-legged flesh and the coarse hairs. Prematurely old looking, even when I was a child. I have labourer’s hands, although I’ve never laboured on anything more taxing than a tricky theatre script.
They’re my dad’s hands. They’re his dad’s hands. And his dad’s hands. Backwards through time in a single straight line to the beginnings of me.
Once, in the nineties, I was filming a love scene for a period TV drama in Austria. As the sexual tension rose, the American director suddenly stopped the camera. ‘Get those filthy hands away from her!’ he shouted. I was confused. He’d just directed me to place my hands on the female co-star’s décolletage. I’d simply done what he asked. I realised that he was objecting to my particular hands. Their rough appearance was out of keeping with the genteel nature of the seduction. It looked like she was being assaulted by a peasant, rather than wooed by a gentleman. Which, genetically speaking, I suppose she was. We did the scene a different way.
There’s always a different way that the things we’re born with can be accommodated.
I look at my hands, and feel the echo of that ancient restlessness of the newly arrived. The tyranny of hope without the ease of expectation. My family was only ever a few meals from starvation. Only ever one wrong turn from a lifeboat in the ocean, or the removal of the front teeth by a rifle. And yet there’s a thrill to that kind of restlessness. A motivating force that drives my family on and on – the stomach-churning thrill of a trapeze in flight without a safety net to catch us. Every meal is a victory. Every job is our last. We’re no longer hungry, but we’re always hungry for something.
My life is blessed by this focused hunger. It has a motivation. A curiosity. Because I can’t keep still, I roll forward. My life is a gift from those who came before me, and a tribute to those who couldn’t make it. Their hunger gives me purpose and direction: to endure, so that the ones who follow me might sing a gentler song, so that my son might enjoy the princeling’s privilege of not knowing he’s born, as my dad would say.
I look up, and catch my face reflected in the mirror again. This time it’s Owen’s face looking back at me, with Susan and the children at his side. Billy is there – his toothless skeleton smile smirking wide from ear to ear. Iron love smelted in defiance.
‘We are the ones that hunger couldn’t kill. The ones that love and blood made immortal. Your life is our reward.’
I smile back. One of my dry smiles. I leave the bathroom and walk back out into the bedroom where my wife sleeps. I bend down and kiss her forehead. Love in the silence. Running total increasing. Final total unknown. I go to the window. I look down through the leaded glass onto the little graveyard swaddled by bare trees. The crooked gravestones, each with their faded dedications to the people buried there.
Mary Jane Bassett. Died in 1933, aged only three years. A child so loved and cherished she was carried to her grave by fellow innocents. A story woven by those who still carry her memory.
So who am I, finally? What does my little life mean when measured against the vast ocean swells of life and death that have come before me, and roll on through the centuries after I’m gone?
I am a single beat in the story of the family that bore me. The tiniest of plot twists in a narrative that thrusts the endless drama of our shared flesh and blood through time. I’m that man on the lifeboat, shivering. I’m my father running for dear life up a beach in wartime France. I’m my son, an infant, looking up at me with love in his eyes. I’m action and choice in response to challenge. I am will and decision made in the face of larger things. I’m more than the records that describe me – I’m the response that gives those records meaning. I’m part of a myth that writes itself into form from the chaos of history. The drama in a much larger story. A love poem to my own quiet creators, and a parting song to those who follow me.
The flesh and blood that love makes immortal.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. My mother Clare in 1953. A sheltered eighteen-year-old.
2. My dad Joseph at eighteen in 1942. He entered the war as a navy conscript, and served as a ship’s telegraphist before joining the Royal Naval Commandos for the D-Day invasion in June 1944.
3. Mum and Dad on their wedding day in 1956. She was just turned twenty-one. He was eleven years older. ‘I was expecting him to show me the ropes.’
4. 1963: my first summer as a bonny baby, on a family outing. The Beatles a
re topping the UK charts for the first time. Dad holds me in his arms, with brother Paul on our left.
5. The four boys on the front wall of the house in Birstall Road, 1965. From left: Paul, me, Joe and Mark. I’m the blond with the ice lolly.
6. Birstall Road, 1966. The earliest photograph we have of all five siblings. From left: Mark, Joe, Clare, me, Paul.
7. Butlin’s holiday camp, Minehead, 1972. The McGanns are plucky runners-up in the ‘Happy Families’ competition. Back, from left: Dad, Joe, Mum; front: Paul, Clare, me and Mark. The consolation prize was a year’s supply of pickled chutney. I still can’t eat a ploughman’s lunch without a lingering sense of thwarted ambition.
8. My first year as a grammar school pupil in 1974. Before life got complicated.
9. Newly arrived in London, 1982. I’m nineteen years old, and about as brave and scared as I’ll ever be.
10. The siblings singing together in an aunt’s house in the late seventies. Clockwise from bottom left: Paul, Joe, me in the background, sister Clare and Mark on guitar. Our harmonies were always there when other forms of unity eluded us.
11. The Four Musketeers: the McGann brothers on the opening night of Yakety Yak at the Half Moon Theatre, London, 1982. From left: Paul, Mark, me and Joe as an irreverent reverend.
12. The last time my family were photographed all together. A newspaper shoot in Hyde Park, 1983. I’m far left, Dad is kneeling in front, Mum is centre and my sister Clare is behind her. It was my first year as an actor, and my father’s last year of life.
13. In between performances of Blood Brothers at the Albery Theatre, London, 1989. Exhausted but in love. I’d drive up to Liverpool every weekend after the show to be with Heidi.
14. Full circle: Owen McGann’s descendants – Mark, me, Paul, Joe – starring in the Irish famine drama The Hanging Gale in Donegal, Ireland, 1994.
Flesh and Blood Page 26
