For a while she would go easy on me, till it almost seemed that I had got away with my crime of being equally attached to both parents. Then she went back onto the attack. Finally one day, when she came over to hug me, I caved in. I did what she wanted. I whispered into her ear that I loved her more than Daddy. She was my darling. At the same time I sent off a prayer, begging forgiveness for telling what I was almost positive was a lie.
Perhaps it was as a reward for my knuckling under that Mum came up with a new sort of treat. To be fair, she and Dr Duckett were always putting their heads together to come up with some form of entertainment that would somehow fall within the proper bounds, warming the brain without heating the heart. Being in charge of a telephonic grocery order was no longer the privilege it had been.
‘I Spy’ had lost its charm, and our games were becoming more sophisticated. The family re-jigged Grandmother’s Footsteps to suit me – I would hold a hand-mirror up, a little one from Mum’s handbag, instead of physically turning round. I always had to be Grandmother, of course, there was no taking of turns. In the family version, it wasn’t at all easy for anyone to get within reach of the bed (to give me the lightest possible tap), even after Gipsy had been sent out of the room. She had to go, otherwise she would bark. There was something about the heightened atmosphere of the game which set her off.
The only way for me to lose was by consent. I would relax my vigilance just long enough to be tagged, otherwise I was invulnerable. That may have been the whole virtue of the game, that it humoured me by giving me some experience of humouring others, while Gipsy softly scrabbled at the door to be brought in from the long seconds of exile.
Pelted with woven snakes
A more exciting game, with a definite element of transgression, involved one of Dad’s treasured accessories, the Brummell Tie Press. It could only be played while he was away and Mum out of the room. Peter would fetch the Brummell Tie Press from Dad’s dressing table. It was a box of dark-toned Bakelite resembling a small radio, except that it had an opening on the sloping front panel and a single large knob on one side. You turned (or rather Peter turned) the knob and carefully fed a tie into the interior, where it was wound round a central drum and kept free of creases. When you wanted to retrieve the tie, you pressed a lever on the front which released the spring. The tie was projected out of the opening with great force and a loud whirring. Properly aimed, it could cross the room.
I wasn’t able to do the winding, but Peter scrupulously gave me turns at the exciting part, the dramatic discharge of Dad’s formal neckwear. Illness hadn’t deprived me of seniority, only the means of enforcing it. Peter never challenged my status. He would aim the loaded Brummell, and all I had to do was release the catch. If we aimed the tie towards Gipsy, she would bark madly at the noise and the fright of being pelted with woven snakes, and then the game acquired a hectic second phase. Peter must dash out of the room with the tie press, and return it to its place on the dressing table before Mum came to investigate.
Windfall panorama
One morning Mum asked, out of the blue, ‘John, how would you like to go with Dr Duckett on his rounds?’ Any child would be thrilled by such an offer, surely, let alone one who had been living in horizontal exile. I was all agog. Between them, Mum and Dr Duckett padded the front seat of the car for my benefit, and Dr Duckett drove very slowly. Gipsy rode in the back seat. I didn’t mind about the slow speed, though. ‘I’ve never been in a car before,’ I told Dr Duckett, and he smiled at me, though it can’t quite have been true. I didn’t walk all the way to Manor Hospital to have my bones scraped, did I?
I liked being close to Dr Duckett, who was sort of a dad away from Dad, though he was much more likely to touch me. I was disappointed, though, that when Dr Duckett actually arrived at a patient’s house I was left in the car. I’d thought that I would be involved in the consultations. Not that I would be giving advice or choosing medicines, but at least I’d be able to frown and nod my head in unison with the doctor, as I had been so plentifully nodded and frowned over in my time. I wouldn’t talk about what was wrong with people. I could keep secrets.
I took advantage of my novel surroundings for the rest of the trip by playing ‘I Spy’ with the doctor. B is for Bus, P is for Puddle. I was growing too old for the game, really, but it would have been mad to waste this windfall panorama.
There were things I would have liked to ask Dr Duckett, things I couldn’t talk about to Mum or Dad. I had been thinking about the unchanging ‘I’ burning deep within. The body went through states of pain and ease, of nice and nasty, well and sick and sicker still, but the ‘I’ didn’t change. It was like a brown candle, or like the bulb of my sailing-boat night-light showing through the deckled parchment sails. By ‘brown’ I mean the colour you get when you close your eyes and take in the light that filters through the lids. I understood that I would still be John if I lost a finger, but did that mean I would still be ‘I’ if I lost my whole body? Yet I must have sensed that this was not truly a medical question, because I never actually raised it with dear Dr Duckett.
At the end of our rounds Dr Duckett taught me a long word and a useful exercise which wouldn’t hurt me. The word was quadriceps, which meant the muscle at the top of the leg, and the exercise involved flexing it. He put my hands on his quadriceps, so that I could feel the movement involved, and his hands on mine to see if I was imitating him. We flexed our leg muscles together. He said I should do this several times a day – whenever I was bored. Through the cloth of his trousers I could feel the edge of his pocket, warm and swollen with coins. I liked touching Dr Duckett’s leg. It made a deep impression on me. It was intoxicating, that broad leg with the power in it, at a time when I was on only the most distant terms with touch. Whenever I did my dutiful flexing, I thought of the warmth of his leg through the thickness of his trouser-cloth.
The style of exercise that he taught me that day later became generally popular under the name of isometrics. These were exercises you could do at your desk or while waiting for your bus. I never saw the appeal, for those who had the option of actually using their limbs in real life, but it was the only sort of exercise that I was allowed.
Not the king of hugs
By this time, my left hip was entirely fused, and my right hip had only the ghost of movement, though there was still muscle there. Dr Duckett’s flexing game wasn’t actually called ‘Let’s Not Get Atrophied!’, but that was very much the thinking behind it.
If I remember Dr Duckett as being tactile, I’m only recording the fact that he touched me more than Dad did. Touching the patient is a diagnostic requirement, so it doesn’t follow that Dr Duckett was an intrinsically tactile man, and it’s no sort of reproach to Dad that he was not the king of hugs. Strictly limited horse-play may have had a rôle in some boisterous, high-spirited families, in privacy, but in the 1950s, men didn’t touch their children except to smack them, ruffle their hair or carry them from burning buildings.
The first time I tried Dr Duckett’s quadriceps exercises I somehow wet myself for a second or so, until I regained control, and was terribly ashamed. I was moving the wrong mental lever, the one connected to the bladder. After that I was in control. At home I treated myself to one more round of ‘I Spy’ with Mum. I might be getting too old for the game, but that was no reason to pass up the pleasure of stumping her with Q, that rarity of an initial letter. Q for Quadriceps. A new word for something that had actually been in the room all along.
Sometimes peace broke out between my parents, when their temperaments dovetailed for once. Mum had always been a skilled and adventurous knitter, but there were times when a pattern didn’t work out. Sometimes it looked very much as if there were mistakes in the instructions, but Mum said that as a rule the pattern was right and the knitter wrong. On some evenings she and Dad would put their heads together to find out why a particular pattern was running into trouble. I loved those evenings, because Mum and Dad were likely to stay up late – past their b
ed-times. Finding the cause of the problem took as long as it needed to take. During the investigation, time took a back seat. There was an unwritten rule that the error must be run to ground on the day the problem was discovered. If that entailed a late night, then so be it.
I loved knitting-pattern-problem nights. Something was really happening. There was activity in the house, and a warm and busy feeling. Mum and Dad were happy without trying for it or even necessarily realising it. Their characters meshed for once and I basked in the glow. Dad became absorbed in the quest for a solution and forgot that by definition he had better things to do.
Knitting-Pattern Man
The idea occurred to me that God had sent along this problem as a way of uniting them, and I started to pursue some promising ideas about Him. When I visualised Knitting-Pattern Man I had always given him a big beard and white robes anyway. Not a badger-coloured beard like Dr Duckett’s but a proper snowy one. I knew that it would be God and not Jesus who would do this sort of thing (I could never get to grips with the Holy Ghost). God was older and knew a thing or two about the way people worked. His Son was greener and less sure of himself, more like a big brother or youthful uncle, really. He was even quite chummy, almost to the point of being a playmate, and you could talk to him about anything without being made to feel silly. He said, ‘I don’t know,’ to a lot of my questions, but always added that we would find out together, which was all part of the fun.
The usual outcome of Mum and Dad’s battle with the knitting-pattern was that though everything looked terribly wrong, it all fell into place if you just kept going and completed the design. It was difficult to tell which was the greater triumph: Mum being Right and the Pattern being Wrong, or the other way round. At first sight, it was fantastic if Mum found a flaw in the Pattern, but then Dad would say, ‘You should make your own patterns and sell ’em, m’dear!’ Which was supposed to cheer her up, but unsettled her instead. ‘Oh Dennis, don’t talk like that, please! The Pattern just can’t be Wrong. It’s probably only a slip-up at the printing stage. And I bet the Maker was absolutely furious when he found out!’
The Pattern just can’t be Wrong – The Pattern just can’t be Wrong. How close Mum was coming to a genuine mystical experience at that time. How narrowly she dodged enlightenment. She was only a step away from realising that she had been handed a key to the apparent miseries of her life. If something as simple as a knitting pattern could look wrong and yet be absolutely correct, then why shouldn’t the same be true of larger matters, of her life and mine?
One day Mum came back in floods of tears after a horrible conversation with an Indian gentleman at the bus stop. She’d been in Heather overdrive, pumping her miseries into a virgin ear at a terrific rate, when he said exactly the wrong thing. ‘Dear lady,’ he said, ‘you are so lucky. God must have a special purpose for your son.’
‘How could he be so cruel?’ – the Indian gentleman she meant, not God. Mum fed on sympathy drained from strangers and here was starvation. The last thing she wanted was to be offered a fresh perspective. She didn’t take kindly to being comforted, at the expense of her tragic prestige.
Despite her immediate distress at the time of meeting the Indian man, Mum rapidly re-jigged her attitude. She calmed down after a while and even managed half a smile. ‘Well, maybe he knew something we can’t see,’ she said. The incident even became part of her repertoire, for all the grief it had brought her when it was fresh. It gave her a way of ending the story on a wise and reconciled note. She began telling everyone that maybe this man could see something we couldn’t. There might be an Unseen Hand working, to push together this valiant mother and an enlightened Asiatic. Providence was always busy behind the scenes, wasn’t it? Mum developed a new, far-away look to accompany this new repertoire of ideas.
Since I spent so much of the day in a half-state of under-stimulation, it was inevitable that I should be much awake while others slept. It was always frustrating when Mum and Dad went to bed and left me to the watches of the night. To the night and Jim’s watch, whose glow never failed me, and the vigilant dozing of Gipsy. However much she was brushed, she brought a welcome whiff of the outdoors with her. I would pray to God very hard at night, and was sometimes saddened when I didn’t seem to get an answer. In the morning Mum would say, ‘I expect he’s very busy – but he’ll see to it sooner or later, that’s for sure!’ Then she said perhaps I should try praying to Jesus specifically, since he had more free time and was generally easier to approach.
I tried to interest Jesus in my questions about the ‘I’, but they weren’t really his cup of tea. He was more involved in relieving pain and suffering, which was all very well, but just relieving the pain didn’t solve the problem, did it? If we could find out how the pain had got there in the first place, we could stop it from even starting. But I suppose that wouldn’t leave much for Jesus to do, it would virtually be handing Him his cards, so then I’d have lost a useful friend of last resort, and it would be back to me and God, Who was far too busy and didn’t seem terribly hot on the milk of human kindness side of things, which was why Jesus got the job in the first place. It was all very confusing. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of the Trinity.
I could hear trains but not see them. Trains started early in the morning and ran till very late at night. There was a different rhythm every seventh night, which I later learned to call ‘Sunday service’. Perhaps inactivity was sharpening my hearing. I could certainly tell Dad’s night noises from Mum’s. His snoring was dry and enquiring, hers sounded like a throatful of bees.
The night splints on my hands were supposed to keep my fingers reasonably straight despite the skewing heat of the fever. You’d think I’d be sick of rigour and restriction, what with willed immobility by day and splints by night, but perversely I wanted more. I wanted to go to sleep with my left arm straight – not only straight in the sense of unbent, but straight up in the air. Straight up, like a flagpole waiting for a flag to fly. If my arm was going to stick in one position I wanted to decide which position it would be. It looked as if I was going to have to live with a useless arm, and I wanted to exercise my power of choice as much as possible. There was something obscurely satisfying about that particular posture. Naturally Mum and Dr Duckett said, ‘Bring it down or you’ll stay like that,’ which of course was the whole point. ‘You have to bend it,’ they said, but I didn’t want to. I wanted there to be at least one part of me that wasn’t out of true.
Die-hard little Nazi
It can’t have helped that my chosen position had overtones, however innocent, of a lying-down Hitler salute. I must have looked like a die-hard little Nazi, waiting for my Führer to bring me a bunch of grapes and read me a story. Of course they were right to discourage me, even if it sounded like being told that if the wind changes and you’re pulling a face, it’ll set there rigid for ever. But still I wanted to sleep with my arm straight, even if it meant I’d wake up unable to move it. And this turns out to be an old and rather austere yoga posture. There are ascetic mystics who have kept their arm straight in that posture for years, without any help from stiffening joints. It’s a recognised practice, and there’s even a special stick some yogis use, called a dhandam, to help them with the task of fixing their limbs.
When I could get to sleep I dreamed vividly, and it’s not surprising that my night-pictures should have been of movement. Running, soaring. Dreams take up the slack of the day, and in my case there was much to play with, basic fantasies to fulfil. There was a lot of grey existence to balance with floods of colour, a lot of powerlessness to redress. Mum had told me once about the Indian Rope Trick, and I had seen it in my mind and loved it. Now I dreamed of doing it myself, shinning up a hawser that writhed like a snake and vanishing while Mum looked on goggle-eyed.
I dreamed of lying in bed, obeying doctors’ orders to keep still, but at the same time using magic power from my hands to make a massive steel ball move around the room, landing anywhere in the room, until I bec
ame famous for my abilities and people queued up behind a rope to watch and wonder.
I had other, stranger dreams, seemingly quite wrong for my situation. They were nightmares of health. I dreamed of running in the garden, without pain, of pushing Peter over and making him cry, and being fiercely told off for that, in a way that made me cry too. I dreamed of refusing to go to bed, for fear that if I did I’d never get out of it again. I dreamed of actually hiding under the bed so that Mum couldn’t get me, despite which she hauled me up and plonked me roughly down on it. I dreamed that she locked me in my room then, and that I lay on the floor rather than the bed and woke up shivering. All this seems curious night-time traffic in a mind that didn’t have to worry about those particular things.
One day Granny came to stay, bringing honey from her own hive. I liked bees. I liked wasps too. In summer, when the window was open, bees or wasps would sometimes fly into the room, and I didn’t mind. I let them walk on my face if that was what they wanted. I even opened my mouth so that they could walk around inside. I really quite wanted them to sting me, but they never did. My appetite wasn’t for pain but for drama, and I didn’t raise the stakes by closing my mouth while they were walking around inside it.
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