She really inspired me. She made me realise that we’d only been scratching the surface with our previous efforts. We needed to raise our sights, to be more ambitious. There was a world of pipe-cleaner modelling to be explored.
We would show ingenuity all right! We would set every Hive buzzing with envy. We would get the recognition we deserved if it killed us, if it left our fingers in ankylosed knots. What we were planning was so exciting. Raffle fever came back upon me doubled and redoubled, and Mary in her more selfless way became wildly keen too. Steroids give people a moon-faced look with prolonged use, but even when there was a touch of the chipmunk about her cheeks it didn’t blur Mary’s alert look. Cortisone couldn’t filch the merry flicker from her eyes.
After sessions of hydrotherapy boys were dried off behind a separate screen from the girls. I was still wrapped in my towels on a slow dry. Mary was being dried off much more rapidly, for a reason. She was going to have a long weekend at home with her parents, who lived in a big house in their pocket handkerchief of a county. They were picking her up later that afternoon. Even rapid drying had to be done carefully, to avoid jarring the joints, but the bustling of the towels to and fro around her shoulders made Mary’s voice wobble in a delightful, musical way. She wasn’t singing, exactly, though this was a very happy moment, but the wobble in her voice made her drag out a word like ‘p-i-i-i-i-i-pe-clea-ea-ea-ea-ner’ as if she was one of the lady singers on the surplus-stock opera records Decca had been kind enough to send us, reaching the end of her aria. One fine day. When I am laid to earth. The towels massaged her vowels and stretched them out.
Mary had been looking forward to her long weekend away from Ward One, but just then she seemed reluctant to leave. What we were planning had really fired her imagination. ‘John,’ she said, ‘I have to go now, but Tuesday first thing we’ll carry on with this and start making proper plans. Don’t tell the others! We’ll really make them sit up and take notice. ’Bye! I’m really looking forward to it.’ She waved and I waved back and she moved off, the energy of The Plan giving her a sprightly lift. But then her walking was always much better than mine.
That was the last time I saw her. The staff nurse (in a yellow uniform) who packed the medicines for her put the wrong ones in, or else wrote out the dose wrong. Her trusting parents faithfully kept on administering a lethal dose. When they realised things were seriously wrong they rushed her back to CRX. By then everyone on the staff was in a panic. Even the Tannoy lady sounded really desperate and upset. Mary was whisked into a side ward and the doors were shut behind her. We were told not to try and look inside. Geraldine did, and caught a glimpse. She said Mary looked like a ghost.
The ward was hushed that night, but I couldn’t bear to keep quiet. I kept asking, ‘What happened to Mary? What did she look like when she looked like a ghost?’ I wouldn’t shut up, however the nurses tried to silence me. I went through the whole procedure. None of it had any effect. I was given a warning, my bed was pulled out into the middle of the ward, and finally I was dragged into a side ward, where I stayed till morning.
I can’t say I blame the nurses. My carrying on was upsetting the other children, the ones who were subdued rather than frantic. It was worse than the time Mary had gone beneath the surface of the hydrotherapy pool. This time she never came back to the surface.
I knew the next morning I would be getting a rocket from Heel. Fearful scoldings they were too. Their blast could be heard all over the ward. I was quaking when I heard her come on duty. One of the cadet nurses, who may not have known what had happened to Mary, sniggered, ‘You’re really in for it now!’ Then Heel came in and just looked at me. She seemed to have run right out of scolding power. The batteries which supplied her with so much chastening energy had been drained of their charge. In a voice which cracked like her brown leathery face she asked if I had had a good night’s sleep. I suddenly realised that if strict sisters could cry, Heel would be crying now. I understood that she wasn’t allowed to cry, the same way Charlie, whom I missed like mad just now, wasn’t allowed to have nostrils. She just walked quietly off and I was returned to the ward without even a pretence of punishment.
The lessons of another life
Mary was a pure creature, who would no more have taken a cut while organising a raffle than she would have rubbed sweets against her bum or done murder. I heard one of the nurses say she was ‘too good for this world’, which almost captured my sense of the thing. It wasn’t quite right, though. The world was good enough to have Mary in it, but only just. Life had been lucky to have her. And, logically, perhaps she was better off out of it. I tried to understand that this was not a tragedy but a progress, which is what I believe to this day. Her soul needed only the lightest polishing, and I can’t imagine her being required to learn the lessons of another life.
For a long time after she died, though, I was terrified. I thought it would be me next. It seemed to me that if Mary died, when her walking was so much better than mine, then my life must be hanging by a thread. I’d got it into my head that the reason we were always being bullied into walking was for our own good, because if we didn’t walk we would die. As a theory it did at least fit the facts, and nobody had ever actually explained why walking was so over-ridingly important an activity for children who were so ill suited to it.
At this stage I was getting information and advice from two different quarters. Wendy and her gang were explaining that there’s a Death Bed. That’s why you die. Anyone who sleeps in the Death Bed will die. Mary slept in the Death Bed, and that’s why she’s dead. Nothing to do with any medicine. And now, according to them, I was sleeping in the Death Bed, the same bed in which Mary had died. The last time I had gone home for the weekend, the staff had switched the beds around. Hadn’t I noticed? And now I was in the Death Bed and it was my turn.
I didn’t believe Ivy and her gang the whole time, and Geraldine was saying something different, but it wasn’t much more consoling. Geraldine was saying they tell us dirty lies. They told us Wayne was going to a different hospital, but if they took him to another hospital it was a funny stretcher they took him away in. Because on a normal stretcher you can see the bump of the person on top, but when they took Wayne away the top of the stretcher was flat and there was a bag hanging underneath it, and that’s how we know he’s dead and the staff tell dirty lies, so don’t believe everything they tell you, not by a long chalk!
I got some comfort, during this period, from a hymn the monks sang in the chapel.
This joyful Eastertide
Away with sin and sorrow,
they sang. But I was deep in terror for a long while. I tried to be brave and fight my own battle, but it’s quite hard when you’ve not long been old enough to take your own money out of your Post Office Savings Account and girls are ganging up on you, telling you you’re in the Death Bed, you’re going to die next and it won’t be long.
I tried to put on a brave face when Mum visited, but she could see something was making me unhappy, and she asked ever so kindly. I crumpled and ended up telling her what the girls had been saying. That was all I told her, not about hearing little kids crying in the night, and then the next day they were gone, and what Geraldine said about the different stretchers and the lies.
After I’d opened my heart to her, or most of it at any rate, Mum went to see Sister Heel. She was in the office for a long time, talking. Eventually I was summoned to join them. My heart was pounding. I waited to hear what sentence would be passed on me.
Sister Heel had found again the scolding power she had temporarily lost. It filled her sails. She gave me an epic talking-to which included the words, many times repeated, ‘John, you are not going to die! Is that quite clear? You are not! NOT!! NOT!!’ It was the routine with the mugs all over again, except in reverse. She wasn’t saying I was going to be smashed, she was saying I wasn’t. I wasn’t cracked. I didn’t need smashing. I was safe.
Geraldine may have been right about the staff and doctors
being a bunch of dirty liars, but Heel wasn’t one of them. She always spoke the truth and we knew that. Now she talked at length about how she knew about dying. She had been with many people when they died, and yes it is very upsetting, especially when it is children. Especially when it is children you care for.
It was true that Sister Heel’s face was brown and cracked, like the leather on Mum’s favourite shoes, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. Those shoes, after all, were past their best but Mum could never bring herself to throw them away. Heel talked in a funny way that was called an accent. She might even have come from the same part of the world as one of the cleaning ladies, Dora, who scowled and shook her mop when Wendy did a wee on the floor just to make work for her, but no one would ever play tricks on Sister Heel.
On the ward, dying was one of the most fascinating and most feared of all life’s events, and here was someone talking with authority about it. She said Mary’s case was quite different from mine. As for my idea that the less able you were to walk, the more likely you were to die – that was all my eye and Betty Martin. That was the purest codswallop from top to bottom. My cards weren’t nearly up. My cards had only just been dealt.
What it came down to was that I didn’t have Sister Heel’s permission to die. An absurd argument, but at the same time the evidence supported it. Heel WAS the Ward, and everything within those walls was subject to her say-so. I wouldn’t dare to die without her permission. This was a wonderful lesson, and a wonderful scolding to have from her. There was no trace of the oppressive Heel who had squashed me flat with the invention of Ninday. This was the fiercest scolding I had ever had, but I felt much better for it. I think the whole episode set me on the path of my life-long love affair with scolding. Scolding which is mostly awful but can be heavenly.
Calcutta superdragon
There have been a number of dragons in my life (Miss Collins, who was really a paper dragon, being I suppose the first), but Sister Heel showed herself to be only partly dragon. She was partly St George. If she didn’t slay the dragon of mortal fear in my boyhood self, then at least she boxed its ears and made it hang its head. Perhaps the social conditions for the creation of dragons don’t exist any more – the War that was then so recent, rationing more than a memory, strong public services. When a phenomenon like Mother Teresa comes along, we’re all baffled – but the Calcutta superdragon rang a bell with me.
One day Mum simply arrived with Gipsy, not because she had forgotten that pets weren’t allowed but because she thought it more important to cheer me up. She must have felt that she had earned her own immunity from Sister’s scoldings, but I wasn’t so sure. The first I knew of Gipsy’s presence was a wonderful scrabbling noise, as she lost her footing on the highly polished floor. All the children on the ward gasped in wonder as Gipsy came skidding and skating into view. The moment she had righted herself she made a dash towards me, where she leaped not onto the bed (her training was too good for that) but onto one of the chairs left out for visitors.
Mum had intervened successfully with Sister Heel about whether I had permission to die, but now I was afraid it had gone to her head. She seemed to think that she and Sister had an understanding. I winced and waited for the explosion, as the Heather imbalance in her character inevitably led her to overstep the mark. It wasn’t more than a minute before Mum trespassed in a big way. She waited until Sister Heel came by my bed, and then she said, without even a token apology for Gipsy’s presence in the second visitor’s chair, ‘I think John needs cheering up, don’t you? He misses his budgie Charlie, and Charlie’s not the same without him. Can’t Charlie come for a weekend?’
It was an awful moment. I was going to lose face with everyone, not just Wendy and Ivy but Geraldine and Sarah, because Sister Heel was about to destroy the budgie fantasy for good, the fantasy which had bolstered my position on the ward for so long. Wendy must have smelled blood, because she called out, ‘Yes, Sister, John keeps saying his budgie’s going to come and live here. He goes on and on about it.’
Sister Heel frowned and said, ‘What have you been telling people, John? Everyone knows pets aren’t allowed on the ward.’ In the pit of my stomach I could feel my status going on the slide as my lies were exposed to the world. I heartily wished that Mum hadn’t chosen to meddle with things she didn’t understand. Why didn’t she stay at home where she belonged? If she wanted attention there were always waiting rooms and bus stops.
Then Heel said, ‘Still …’ At this point it was as if someone else had taken over the operation of her mouth. She said something completely unexpected. From the look on her face, she was at least as surprised as the rest of us.
It was like the ventriloquism lessons from Ellisdons that I had wanted to send off for. This was precisely the effect I would have hoped to achieve, but at my first attempt and without benefit of a single lesson! No one saw my mouth move while the magic words were uttered – not only that, but Sister obligingly moved her lips to coincide with the incredible syllables. ‘I suppose a weekend wouldn’t hurt.’
This first attempt at throwing my voice was a total success, even if all of us were startled by what Sister Heel had said. She herself looked stunned, like a medium coming out of a trance, violently shaken by the departure of her spirit guide. I suppose it’s possible that the whole scene was cooked up between Mum and Sister Heel, but I don’t really think so. It was hardly Mum’s style to make nice things happen and take no credit. Besides, Heel was genuinely astonished by what she heard herself saying.
What happened next, of course, was that she fell in love with Charlie. At the end of the weekend one of the other nurses asked when he would be going back. She said, ‘He’s not. He’ll cheer the whole place up. It’s not just John who will benefit. Budgies should be prescribed on the National Health, that’s what I say.’ Naturally enough, the next question was, ‘But isn’t it against the rules? Won’t they make him leave?’ And the answer to that one was, ‘Just let them try!’
Before entrusting her budgie to the care of the dragon, Mum had issued dire warnings about not leaving any windows open if ever Charlie was allowed out of his cage. Sister Heel took her seriously. A window decree went out to the nurses, constantly repeated and underlined. At the best of times Heel regarded nurses as inherently unreliable, leaky vessels needing to be topped up with frequent scoldings, and she dreaded them exposing Charlie to the temptation of freedom.
At first it was an enormous treat when he was let out during rest time – for us as well as for him – but then it became part of the daily routine. Soon he was flying freely around the ward, which was an ideal half-way house for him. The outside world was too hostile for him, and the rooms at Trees a little cramped. Within this converted Nissen hut Charlie could fly from one end of the ward to the other and really spread his wings. First he would sit on the curtain rails, and then he would honour the kids with a personal appearance. He sat on little girls’ heads and made them giggle with delight. He was only a runty blue budgie, but he brought as much colour to the ward as a whole flight of kingfishers, darting and diving in the arrowhead formation.
Heel was right about the general benefit. Charlie made a huge difference to the emotional health of the ward. He had miraculous powers. I saw it happen any number of times. There was no shortage of witnesses to the wonders he worked. Every time he landed on a finger he made someone St Francis for a moment.
He was everybody’s friend, but he would come to me when I called him and sit on my finger. No lover’s nibbling kisses on the lips could be more tender, no secrets chirped in my ear could be more sacred. Gang hostilities were forgotten from one moment to the next as I became the most popular boy on the ward – also the only boy, admittedly, in my little Still’s group at the time. I certainly made the most of the boosting of my status.
God in the telephone
Miss Reid taught Scripture as well as music. The first thing she told us was that God was everywhere. A marvellous lesson. God wasn’t just in the sky,
God was in the walls and in the telephone. This was the first thing anyone had said to me about God which made any sense. God was omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. I was very happy with that assessment.
Latently I had a huge reservoir of love towards teachers. My tutor Miss Collins hadn’t tapped into that. If anything she had capped it off for a time, even if the reservoir was still there, fed by invisible springs. It made sense that teachers should be greater even than doctors or scientists or priests, since didn’t doctors and scientists need to be taught? My academic love burst out in fierce little gushes at CRX.
Then one week Miss Reid taught us about sin. She read something about gardening from the Bible and explained what it meant. There was wheat and there was chaff. Wheat was like Shredded Wheat at breakfast – wheat was good. But chaff was useless, worse than useless. It would go into the fire to be burnt. There were some things called tares as well. Tares were even worse than chaff.
These bulletins really shook me. I felt myself go very red in the face. Miss Reid seem to be looking directly at me as she expounded her botanical model of the moral universe. Guilt flared, because I had used bad words, I had forgotten to say my prayers as often as I did in the Bathford days, I had neglected to brush my teeth but had wetted my toothbrush to fool Mum. I had ganged up with Wendy against Geraldine. I thought also about general and specific thrills. My admiration for uniforms, my games with taily. I knew then that I was going to Hell.
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