by Nina Stibbe
And, if all that didn’t work, I was going to suggest that her constant need to go on the commode might be partly psychological and really because she needed to see another human being, to break the boredom of just sitting there staring at her knuckles in her lap. I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I didn’t want to humiliate her—after all, that’s what she’d been doing for the last seven years. Literally, that’s all. I was simply going to suggest she might not really need to go to the toilet at all and that was why she had so much trouble actually going and that she might just long for human interaction. It was my mother who’d come up with the ‘longing for human interaction’ thing, having longed for it herself a few times before she’d met Mr Holt.
We talked it through and rehearsed it enough times I could have winkled a hermit out of a cave.
It was time to grasp the nettle and on my next duty I went straight upstairs to Room 9 and, after helping Lady Briggs on to the commode, I began.
‘There’s a new patient coming next week, a fussy fellow with a small dog—to convalesce but hopefully stay forever,’ I said.
‘That’s good,’ said Lady Briggs—she seemed genuinely thrilled with this news—‘very good for the business.’
‘Yes, but he needs a private room and his own convenience, and Sister Saleem is struggling to find one.’
‘But he could have my room, couldn’t he?’ suggested Lady Briggs.
‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘yes, that would be perfect. But how would you feel, going downstairs to a shared ward?’
‘I have been waiting to move closer to everything,’ said Lady Briggs.
‘Have you?’
‘Yes, she was going to move me,’ said Lady Briggs, ‘Ingrid, the Owner’s Wife, as soon as a place became available, but nothing came up.’
She’d been the very first patient at Paradise Lodge, she told me, and had been put in an out-of-the-way place to avoid all the noise and dust of the builders. It had always been the plan to move her to a better place, maybe a downstairs room with access to the garden, once the house was fully refurbished, but that hadn’t happened for some reason. And quite some time had gone by.
‘So you’d be happy to move,’ I said, astonished.
‘Nothing would make me happier,’ said Lady Briggs, smiling and thinking and clicking like mad.
As I left Room 9, I checked, one more time, I’d understood correctly.
‘So, you’ll be happy to move downstairs—to a shared ward?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘is there room downstairs for me?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a bed has just become available.’
Moving day was strange. For a start, Lady Briggs had a bath—usually she’d just have a flannel wash unless the doctor was coming. So I had to help her into it, lurk in case she drowned, and then help her out of it. During the bath we chatted in exactly the same way as when she was on the commode, except I was outside the little bathroom and plucking my eyebrows in her magnifying mirror. I asked her if she felt ready for the move.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘it was always the plan when my son brought me up here.’
‘Seven years ago,’ I said.
‘It’s not seven years, is it?’ said Lady Briggs. ‘Please don’t tell me it’s as long as that.’
‘Oh, maybe not,’ I said.
The nurses had celebrated downstairs when I’d told them of Lady Briggs’ eagerness to move and that she wasn’t going to resist or be unhappy. They’d seen it as a good outcome. And I had too, really, because it had been so much easier than I’d expected and with no wailing or woes. But actually knowing she’d been waiting to move all this time—not a recluse at all, but lonely and longing to be with everyone—was very sad. Too sad to think about really.
I helped her out of the bath and dried her feet and chucked a tub of Johnson’s all over her and rang the bell for some help in getting her downstairs.
‘I did just want to say to you, Lizzie,’ said Lady Briggs, ‘I think you really should get yourself an education and not spend all your time here, now I’ll be downstairs and shan’t need you so much.’
‘I know, I should,’ I said. ‘I’m doing my best, but I’ve come to hate school.’
‘Hate?’ said Lady Briggs, admonishingly.
‘Dislike,’ I corrected.
‘You’ll regret it later if you don’t get your certificates, I guarantee it.’ She went on, ‘It’ll come back to roost.’
‘My stepdad is an autodidact, I could always go that route if necessary,’ I said.
‘A what?’
‘Self-taught with dictionaries and encyclopaedias and books in general,’ I said, ‘and he’s easily a match for any graduate.’
‘Golly, I hope it won’t come to that,’ said Lady Briggs, ‘but if it does, I have many, many books and you are very welcome to borrow them, you must help yourself.’
It was very kind of her. I thanked her and helped her with her stockings and Nurse Carla B arrived.
The three of us made our way to the top of the stairs and Lady Briggs rested on the chaise that was there especially for resting old ladies. And then we descended. It was very moving. Lady Briggs sang ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls’ in her warbly voice and everyone gathered in the hall below and looked up, cheering gently as she took each step.
‘You know, I thought for a long time I might be in an asylum,’ she called down, and a roar of laughter went up. ‘No, no, I’m not being flippant, I truly believed I had been incarcerated—you know, a sort of prison where one is punished for one’s strangeness.’
And then she continued with her song and took the last tentative steps downstairs.
Lady Briggs had been allocated space in the communal wardrobes along one side of Ward 2. We brought down her stationery boxes and put them in her bedside cabinet, and her clothing and Chinese jug and bowl. But we threw away the twenty-odd bars of Cadbury’s Old Jamaica we’d found in her tallboy.
That night I fished out her medical notes from the cabinet in the owner’s nook.
Lady Briggs was admitted in 1969 after a small procedure at Kettering cottage hospital. She had varicose veins and a history of constipation for which she self-administered senna. In 1975 she was diagnosed with conjunctivitis and was given antibiotic eye drops.
She’d requested a room with a view over the farm—not the reservoir. Her interests were listed as reading, theology and horticulture. She declined a portable television.
Her next of kin was listed as ‘Harald T. Anderssen—son’.
I thought I’d try to track down Harald Anderssen and arrange for him to come to visit now it turned out she wasn’t a recluse. But the notes were patchy and there was no address or telephone number listed, save those of Paradise Lodge.
‘Would you like us to invite your son to visit you?’ I asked her as we arranged her things in the bedside cabinet.
‘Where?’ she asked, ‘in here, no, I shall see him later, I expect.’
‘Do you have his telephone number?’ I asked. ‘I can’t find it on your notes.’
‘You’ll find him in the sitting room, dear,’ she said.
In honour of Lady Briggs coming downstairs, Gordon Banks finally brought his video machine and played us The Sound of Music on telly during the afternoon. It was a big deal, not just because of us watching telly during the daytime but because Gordon couldn’t carry the machine on his own and Sally-Anne had to help and was too shy to be so close to a person, especially Gordon Banks, who might or might not have been the Gordon Banks—but probably wasn’t, I’d decided by then (having seen the real one in a newspaper saying he was settling well in the USA).
I think it was an early VHS but it might have been Betamax. No one remembers. But we had it anyway and the ladies were thrilled to bits (not so much the gentlemen). Even the nurses on duty were allowed to sit down and watch. I sat in Emma Mills’ old spot and what made it doubly sad was that I sat in her wheelchair and could smell the 4711 they all used to mask the s
mell of wee.
I’d seen The Sound of Music a few times and never thought much to it, but that day my heart was breaking. It wasn’t just Lady Briggs being down among us—it wasn’t Lady Briggs at all, actually—it was that Mike Yu was affecting me and changing me. I’d been a straightforward thinker before I’d looked into his tear-filled eyes when Grandpa Yu had passed. Now I was just an idiot full of stupid dreams and ridiculous fantasies, such as this recurring fantasy that evolved over a matter of weeks and went something like: I am in a big, scary warehouse and the leccy has blown, and I’m on my own and I’m terrified. There’s someone or something in the warehouse with me and I can’t see anything because I don’t have a torch. Mike Yu drives by in his Datsun Cherry and senses something wrong (maybe he sees my bike outside). He does a safe three-point turn and pulls up outside the warehouse and by chance has a torch on him. He makes his way inside the building and finds me—slightly injured and very scared—and he lifts me up into his arms and carries me to his Datsun. I don’t know what I was doing in the dark old warehouse, but there you are.
And that day, watching The Sound of Music, when it got to the really awful bit where Liesl sings with Rolf and Rolf is so hideous and anyone with an ounce of sense can see he’s going to turn out to be a Nazi and Liesl is putting herself down saying what a flibbertigibbet she is. But still, I could hardly stop myself crying, watching them in the gazebo and wishing it was me singing that I was sixteen going on seventeen and Mike Yu responding that he was seventeen going on eighteen, and would take care of me—except I was fifteen going on sixteen and Mike was twenty and he was a colleague’s boyfriend and definitely not a Nazi. I began to get a bit fed up with ordinary things being hijacked by my love for Mike Yu. Every book I read, every song and every film I saw. It was all-encompassing.
Lady Briggs was overwhelmed too but not because of an illegal romantic obsession. For her it was seeing the film and hearing the songs that she remembered and being part of this whole vibrant event. She sat quite close to the screen and kept talking and the other ladies didn’t hold back on their disapproval. Miss Brixham told her to ‘belt up or go back upstairs’.
At the end, numerous folk were in tears and Lady Briggs was fast asleep with her mouth open and, because I hadn’t got her to the toilet in time, she’d wet the chair.
23. Kawasaki Z1B 900
An ambulance clattered into the drive.
‘It must be Mr Godrich,’ said Eileen.
‘Since when do convalescent patients travel by ambulance?’ asked Sister Saleem, and she went out to assess him before he was brought in. She then came back inside and telephoned the cottage hospital to ask about his condition. The sister in charge there told Sister Saleem that Mr Godrich’s operation had gone fairly well, but he’d picked up something afterwards and had coughed so hard he’d broken a rib and it had gone a bit downhill from there. But he showed every sign of being on the mend now, and his family had wanted him to move on so that he could have Rick the dog with him and be that bit closer for their visits. Sister got off the phone to confer with Nurse Eileen. Neither of them wanted his lurgy coming to us and agreed he should not be admitted until he was off the antibiotics.
Sister spoke to the ambulance men and told them to take him back to hospital. And then phoned the hospital to let them know he was on his way back.
Shortly after that, the relatives arrived with Rick the dog. And began arguing politely with Sister Saleem. She told them she was very keen to welcome Mr Godrich, but not until he was a bit better.
‘We don’t take patients as poorly as your uncle,’ she said, ‘we’re not a hospital, or hospice.’
‘No,’ said Nurse Eileen, ‘patients come here to live, not to die.’
‘But, the dog?’ said Mr Godrich’s nephew, holding Rick up for all to see.
‘We’re not a dog kennels either,’ said Sister Saleem.
The owner butted in and said we’d be happy to take Rick while we waited for Mr Godrich, for a small fee—to be agreed with Sister Saleem. And so Rick moved into the owner’s quarters. And we all clamoured for sightings of Rick. It turned out that Rick stank to high heaven, as if he’d rolled in something rotten. The owner was immune to it, for some reason, but the all-over smell made it difficult for the rest of us to pet Rick and in the end my sister gave him a Badedas bath and cleaned his teeth with Pearl Drops until he was like a Hollywood star.
It was lovely having a dog around. It always is—even a small, nervy one with minty breath. Rick brought the owner to life. He would pop him in the pocket of his dressing gown and take him for visits to the day room. And he would talk to him and say how sweet he was and how handsome. He was a huge hit, especially with Lady Briggs and Miss Brixham.
Sister Saleem felt differently. She had nothing against Rick, per se, but thought it indulgent to have dogs inside as pets. ‘Is he going to guard us against intruders?’ she asked and, because it was rhetorical, answered herself, ‘No, he is not.’ She tolerated Rick, though, because she was charging him £3 a week plus food.
Mr Godrich arrived finally, one morning, in a taxi this time, and Matron quickly asserted herself as a dog specialist and reclaimed Rick from the owner and told Mr Godrich she’d see to his feeding and toileting (Rick’s)—thinking it the quickest way to Mr Godrich’s heart. Which it probably would have been under normal circumstances, but I wasn’t actually sure Mr Godrich was hearing her.
Mr Godrich, the man himself, was a bit of a disappointment. He had absolutely no vim in him. And apart from occasionally hawking up and spitting into a dish, he did nothing but lie in bed staring at the ceiling, propped up by a special catarrh pillow.
There was much discussion about his condition. Matron considered him to be on the mend, and truly believed he’d bounce back after one of her back rubs, but Sister Saleem began to suspect that he was much worse, health-wise, than his relatives had made out. And, if that was the case, there’d have to be a meeting with them and a recalculation—the fees having been calculated on the basis of him being in basic good health and with no extraordinary medical needs. Nevertheless, here he was at death’s door—or so it seemed—and we’d banked on two months’ money minimum and forced Lady Briggs into moving. Although, as it turned out, that was a good thing. And Sister said she didn’t want Matron to give him, or anyone, a back rub.
At team talk one day Sister Saleem told us that Mr Godrich would never recover sufficiently to live independently. ‘That man will never be able to look after himself and a dog,’ she said. And in all likelihood, he’d remain at Paradise Lodge.
I watched Matron taking all this in as she buffed up her china teacup and saucer.
‘He needs round-the-clock care,’ said Sister Saleem.
Sister Saleem wanted us to make the most of ourselves. Not just regarding our looks, but professionally too. She’d often ask if we were satisfied with our work or whether we thought we could improve etc.
Sister Saleem wasn’t afraid to tackle even the thorniest of issues. She was disappointed that our love lives were so immature and there were no wedding plans. No one asked her for her status, we thought of her as neutral.
‘You girls are all swollen and fat because of your contraceptive pills and drinking so much alcohol.’ It was true, the nurses were all chubby due to being on the pill—except for Carla B who was on a low dose specially devised to not cause weight gain. But she didn’t tell everyone—it giving her the advantage, figure-wise.
‘What medications are you taking?’ she asked Matron.
Matron looked mortified at this. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said.
‘I have been wondering what you are taking, I notice your skin is sensitive to sunlight and you have some muscle twitching,’ said Sister Saleem.
‘That’s none of your business,’ said Matron, and she bustled out of the room.
I was thrilled one day when the talk turned to facial features and Sister Saleem said I had nice eyes. Having nice eyes, she said, was a great thing and cou
ld make up for awful defects.
‘If you have pretty eyes,’ she said, ‘you can get away with a flat behind or hairy arms or even spots—but having not very nice eyes is a curse.’
We all discussed this and agreed, the worst kind of eyes being dead eyes which don’t sparkle. The deadest I knew of were Nurse Hilary’s, which looked like a fish’s eyes, or Miss Pitt’s—who looked like she’d poisoned you but you didn’t know it yet. The nicest eyes were almond-shaped, but not like Sister Saleem’s which, although almond-shaped, had purple skin all around—which my sister said was the colour of a man’s resting genitals, but not in front of her.
Anyway, even with mediocre eyes you could improve them with care and a bit of make-up and putting your chin down, said Sister Saleem, and not looking down your cheeks at someone.
Sister Saleem said the most alluring look for any type of eyes was the ‘on the brink of weeping’ look but not with actual tears, just the facial expression. Smiling was nice but could be off-putting and look crazy.
I vowed not to smile quite so much at Mike Yu. I didn’t want him to think I was crazy, but then again I didn’t entirely like the idea of looking as though I was ‘on the brink of weeping’—especially as I often was when looking at him and could easily tip over.
