Pilcrow

by Adam Mars-Jones

  It was Miss Reid of all people, whose previous botanising had been so ominously symbolic. I was afraid she was going to take these wonderful plants away from me before I had even seen one, to cast them on the everlasting bomfire. ‘Are they tares, Miss?’ I asked timidly, bracing myself for the worst.

  ‘Of course not, John,’ she said. ‘Why would you think so? They’re wild flowers.’ Reid moved so smoothly between the world of the Bible and the world of nature study that I expect she didn’t know she was doing it, but I couldn’t really be blamed for feeling confused.

  ‘I don’t honestly know an awful lot about them,’ she went on, ‘but I can tell you where they grow in the wild. I thought you might be interested.’ She settled on the very edge of the bed. Miss Reid had her needlework bag with her, and fished out a piece of embroidery. It was soothing to watch her work at it. She glanced up at me from time to time, but there was no danger of her fixing me with the meaningful gaze of judgement.

  ‘Chobham Common is only a few miles away. I believe’, she said as she pulled a thread tight, ‘that two varieties grow there – the round-leaved and the long-leaved. If you are lucky, you may also see some butterworts growing there. You told me last week that your family now has a car. Perhaps you could ask your father to drive you there one weekend.’

  Two varieties of sundew, and butterworts thrown in by nature’s generous hand! If that wasn’t worth Dad’s petrol money, what was? No wonder I thought that the cake of the coming weekend was iced and fully decorated, with Roman candles set around the edge sending up globes of hot light in my honour.

  971 centimetres a second squared

  Mum’s wait-and-pounce plan worked like a charm the next week. Dad’s system, charged with sugar and caffeine, couldn’t muster resistance to the plan. Once we got going, Dad really enjoyed himself, and we brought back some sundews as trophies. I feel a bit guilty about that, but there were no protected species then.

  Chobham Common was a special expedition, and the marshland by the river was for every day. Dad made it his mission to show me that even a familiar habitat could spring surprises. He was good at spotting something in nature and pointing me towards it in the chair. Then he would navigate my eye by landmarks towards what he wanted me to notice. He was very good at getting me to see what he saw. It’s a useful knack. There’s no use just pointing at something (in this case, something that nature has taken trouble to tuck away) if you don’t share an eyeline with the person you want to see it.

  There was a bridge that we had to cross, on our way to the marshy patch which was Dad’s passion. It was very narrow and had no railing, really closer to a broad plank than a bridge proper. The Tan-Sad, as I well knew, had four small wheels and was very awkward to manœuvre. I started to fret as we came up to the bridge. There was only about half an inch of leeway each side. ‘I’ll fall, Dad,’ I whispered. ‘It’s too narrow.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ he said. ‘You will not fall.’ His voice was very firm, very reassuring. ‘What’s over there is well worth going to see. You won’t find it anywhere else in these parts.’

  I put my life in his hands. Then the right side of the chair slipped over the edge of the plank bridge. I started falling sideways at a great rate – at the rate prescribed by gravity (971 centimetres a second squared). I saw myself going into the marsh. Then Dad grabbed the chair as it fell and held its weight. With a great effort he wrenched it back onto the bridge. We were both panting with terror and relief. I could hear him behind me. ‘Not bad, eh?’ he said, trying to sound jaunty. ‘That’s jungle training for you. Lightning reflexes. I told you I wouldn’t let you fall, didn’t I?’

  Once we had reached the marshy bit, he pointed out what I thought were pinky worms that had come out of the ground and had climbed up some nettles to greet the morning sun. They weren’t worms at all. Dad said, ‘What you see there is called dodder, John.’

  A fascinating plant if ever there was one, a parasite which grows on the heads and stems of live stinging nettles, shedding its own roots the moment it finds a host. It would have been greater dodder we found, Cuscuta europæa, which taps into the sap of the nettle using suckers. It’s a specialised relative of bindweed (as indicated by its family, the convulvulaceæ), that demure invader, bane of gardeners everywhere.

  I was my father’s son. I couldn’t help being fascinated. Dad said, ‘Worth crossing a few bridges for, eh, chicken? And I told you I wouldn’t let you fall, didn’t I?’ I managed not to say, but I did! I did fall. I just didn’t fall all the way down or all the way out of the chair. I was beginning to get a sense of adults and the promises they made. Promises weren’t all the same. When it came to reassurance, Dad’s promise-you-won’t-fall was nowhere near as cast-iron as Heel’s you-don’t-have-permission-to-die-it’s-against-hospital-rules.

  Softening agent

  Sister Heel herself was perhaps less flinty than she had been, the agent of softening being Charlie. Love had transformed her routine. She came on duty as promptly as ever, but after a quick riffle through the paperwork in her office she would slip out into the grounds. We could see her through the ward windows picking the groundsel which grew in such quantities as a weed on the Cliveden estate. Heel had become a budgie expert in her own right. Nurses would be given lectures on the digestive systems of budgies, not strictly part of their medical training, I suppose, but good for their general knowledge. Only Heel was allowed to give him greens. She cleaned his cage on a regular basis, scrubbing tirelessly away, as if she was one of the cleaning ladies on her own ward. She replaced his sand-paper and brought him cuttlefish out of her own pocket. Cuttlefish and the finest millet money could buy.

  She talked to him constantly and taught him many new things. As soon as she opened his cage door, he was on her shoulder talking to her. He gave her love-nibbles on the lips, and told her deeper secrets than he had ever told me. Soon he was putting his head right inside her mouth, to retrieve a tasty bud of groundsel coated in saliva. For a bird who had been rejected from the egg and never known a mum of his own species, of his own family or even his order, I have to assume that this smother love was budgie Heaven.

  Birds know nothing of the womb. They can hardly want to return to a place where they have never been, unless somehow they remember being processed into life by the mammal machine, in lives gone by, suckled and weaned, licked clean by a rough tongue. That was what Heel was offering Charlie when she opened her mouth so invitingly – a womb to be returned to, a warm dark cave of belonging, wet with seeds and endearments.

  The time came when Heel had a week’s leave. She left instructions that Charlie was not to be allowed out of his cage while she was away. One day she even turned up out of uniform, just to make sure he was all right, and that her edicts carried weight in her absence.

  Charlie’s cage was waiting in her office on her first morning back. She said, ‘Good morning, Charlie,’ and he chirped back, ‘God, you’re a dirty bugger!’ If her face hadn’t been shoe-leather brown, it would have turned scarlet. She muttered, ‘I’ll give him what for.’ A trail led straight to the culprit – Charlie imitated his intonations all too well.

  We on the ward had known all about Dr Benny’s small revenge on Sister Heel, not a personal settling of scores, I don’t think, just an attempt to bring the dragon down a peg or two. We knew what Charlie had been learning during his private lessons. His vocabulary had always been large, but now it was being expanded into unknown regions. We were amazed that any doctor could imagine he would have the last word in a confrontation with Heel, but nobody listened to us.

  In CRX the pecking order was strict. Even the lowest doctor ranked higher than the highest sister, but that was only the theory. On Ward One, even registrars quailed before Heel. We counted down the hours till Dr Benny’s next shift and his fatal rendezvous with Heel’s ‘what for’. A cadet nurse, almost as thrilled and alarmed as we were, tipped us off about his hours.

  Heel laid no blame on the innocent bird. Her love for
Charlie was now close to obsessive. It was hard to think of anything he could do that wouldn’t instantly be forgiven. More love grated out of her mouth than ever before. Even deeper secrets were exchanged, while his beak dabbled in her mouth to retrieve the seeds of love.

  By the time Dr Benny came on duty we felt thoroughly sorry for him. He put on a brave face at first, pretending not to notice Heel’s basilisk stare, sweeping past her to attend to a patient immediately. Did he think she would hesitate to use the Tannoy? It wasn’t long before her voice crackled over the system like a whip to summon him to her office. Ten minutes later a bedraggled and crestfallen man stumbled out. He crept off to a little side room to stitch together the rags of his composure. Someone said he had been crying.

  Soon Charlie was spending more time alone with Sister Heel in her office, and less with us in the ward. He was learning to concentrate on genteel topics and a seemly vocabulary. He was still my bird, but that was becoming a technicality. If Heel and I had been at opposite ends of the ward, and Charlie had been let out of his cage in the middle, I was no longer sure which way he would have flown.

  Sometimes Charlie gave our hands a peck, but Sister was always able to make out it was the child’s fault, which suited us fine. And Charlie knew better than to peck her. I prayed a little tearfully to God about Charlie’s transfer of affections, and God simply said, ‘When Charlie flew out of the cage, your main wish was that he should be all right. Remember? So tell me, is he happy now or not?’ God had a point. I had to face the fact that Charlie was very happy indeed.

  When I started to have solo sessions in the hydrotherapy pool with Miss Krüger, I began to understand more about her approach to her work. She would hold me so that my face was just on a level with the surface of the water, and then she would tip me gently back, so that I was just under it. She would hold a position that let the water just begin to trickle into my nostrils. It’s possible to shut your mouth and hold your breath, but it’s not possible to close your nose in the same definite way. Sooner or later you have to let your breath out in any case.

  When I started to choke and splutter she would push me under a little deeper and then bring me up to the surface, coughing and spluttering. Not close to the fact of drowning but brought up close to the idea of it. Nothing about her face gave away what was happening – that she was claiming the power of life and death over me.

  There was no therapeutic basis to the group sessions on dry land, when she made us walk without the support of our shoes, but she didn’t want us to know what she was doing. Here in this more private setting she wanted me to be in on it. She was making it very clear how fine was the line separating life and death. She could see that I didn’t want to cross over just then. She never said anything. She never murmured, ‘It didn’t happen that time … but next time, who knows?’ She didn’t need to.

  While the jaws grind shut

  The first time Miss Krüger held me under the water, I shut my eyes. The second time, I kept them open and tried to read her expression, hoping to see something recognisably human. I imagine people being bitten in half by a shark have the same need to look in the creature’s eyes while the jaws grind shut, simply hoping to see a feeling on that face that they can imagine sharing. Wanting the reassurance of knowing that for the shark, too, this is an emotional experience.

  In this respect Miss Krüger had more to offer than a shark would. She smiled – her face was quite lively. She even wrinkled her nose in a way which on someone else I might have found adorable. I think she must have liked her victims to keep their eyes open. It made the experience more intense for her, though there was nothing that she let show. I say ‘her victims’ although I don’t know in a definite way that I wasn’t the only one to get that treatment in the hydrotherapy pool. But I don’t flatter myself. I wasn’t special. I didn’t talk about it, and I didn’t ask anyone else, but I’m sure my case was not isolated.

  Assuming that I wasn’t singled out in the pool, then perhaps it was part of Miss Krüger’s pleasure that our group should both know and not know what was going on. The child being smiled down on in the pool, fighting the urge to thrash in a way that would do no good and be painful in its own right, could be in no doubt about the nature of what was happening. The children in the walking group, going up on pointes one after the other – ‘Ups-a-daisy, try again’ – knew how much it hurt, but not that it was the opposite of therapy. After all, the occupational therapist wasn’t feeding off our pain when she told us that remedial shoes had to hurt if they were to do us any good (I give her the benefit of the doubt). Miss Krüger was something else entirely. Individually, in the pool, we all knew we were being tortured. As a group, made to walk without support on chronically inflamed joints, we had no idea. Walking was the fetish and watch-word of the place. It always hurt. Miss Krüger’s exercises didn’t seem as obviously insane as they should have.

  Physical punishment wasn’t part of the régime at CRX, but it wasn’t easy to tell. This was because the régime itself subscribed so fervently to an agenda which forced children to fit in with an able-bodied world at whatever cost. Pain wasn’t administered with specific intention, but it was certainly part of daily life. There was a certain amount of incompetence too, perhaps. The lady who fitted us with built-up shoes, grudgingly stuffing them with cotton wool if we went on complaining, might not have dared to say in Dr Ansell’s hearing that they were meant to hurt, but we weren’t sensitive to these crosscurrents of hospital culture. We didn’t know that there were two schools of thought at the time, one of them less severe.

  Tough love, love so toughened as hardly to be recognisable as such, was part of the mission of the hospital from its foundation. Those converted Nissen huts were impregnated with a tradition of untender tending. Nancy Astor herself, mistress of Cliveden, was very much present in the early days of the hospital, in that first War. Her speciality was the unsympathetic handling of those, desperately scarred or damaged, who couldn’t be rallied by the conventional means. They were at death’s door. She merely held the door open and bowed ironically, hoping to shame them. After you. She thought of it as ‘gingering them up’.

  It may be that the nursing staff had reservations about this approach, which strayed rather far from Nightingale principles. If so, they were hardly likely to say anything. Not only was Nancy Astor their landlady, she was their employer. Nancy and her husband Waldorf paid the wages of the Medical Officers, nurses and orderlies. They were stuck with her, this lay matron who came alive around the dying.

  Her bedside routine regularly included unstrapping her watch and placing it on a patient’s bedside table. ‘I bet you this watch’, she’d say, ‘that you’ll be dead this time tomorrow. You’ve pretty much thrown in the towel. I’ll leave it with you for now – it’s a nice little watch. I don’t know if you’re hungry. Probably not. Still, they say a condemned man is allowed a last meal, so order anything you like from the kitchens. I’ll make sure you get it. And I’ll be back for my watch this time tomorrow.’

  Her style was harder than Heel’s, her method more paradoxical. Instead of withholding permission to die, she gave it freely, so as to goad the moribund into defying her.

  She lost that bet and that particular watch, but I wonder if there were some bets she won that we don’t hear so much about, disfigured amputees who couldn’t quite be gingered up the Nancy Astor way. Sometimes she went in for a refinement of the same approach, a sort of jingoistic shock therapy. Hearing from the nurses that a couple of young airmen with burns all over their faces and bodies had lost any will to live, she approached their bedsides and bent down so they could hear her, through the grease that kept the bandages from touching their war-cooked flesh. ‘You’re going to die,’ she said, ‘and so would I if it meant I didn’t have to go back to Canada.’ Sprinkling salt on their wounds, for their own ultimate good. ‘If you were a Yank or a Cockney or a Scot you’d live, because – unlike you – they’ve got guts.’

  The mutilated boy
s tried to defend their country against these insults, as best they could through charred lips. In this way they were tricked into regaining the will to live, gingered up in spite of themselves. Brusqueness and an almost contemptuous mobilisation of the life force were part of the fabric of the place.

  I was a veteran of pain by that time, as we all were, and had had various types of relationship with it. The best sort of relationship to have with pain is a contemplative one, when the pain itself is constant, and distance from it can be maintained by homespun meditation and yoga breathing. Then it’s easy to remember that pain is unreal, and the ‘I’ which burns underneath everything is made of a substance impervious to it.

  At other times the pain pounced without warning, when for instance Mum was doing her Noh-drama rough-housing and my back clicked. Then the relationship was necessarily confrontational, until I could bring my thoughts under control. But this was the first time that a person had intruded on my relationship with pain. This was my first experience of pain with an agency. Pain with an agent: cruelty. Miss Krüger claimed an obscene intimacy, by watching us in our pain, and making us watch her watching. It hadn’t been cruel when Dad had gone on reading his paper when I fell over practising my walking – all he wanted was for me not to be in difficulties, and the closest he could get to that goal was refusing to acknowledge them, absenting himself from the scene. That wasn’t cruel, but this was. This was cruelty itself.