Flying Free (6 page)

OK. I do not ask you to believe that I awoke, Scrooge-like, from a reverie of my own death and was instantly transformed.  

I wasn’t dead (there is another sentence which I seldom have cause to write), in part thanks to Adolf Hitler’s pet designers and their invention of the motorised computer mouse
avant la lettre
. A vertical radiator grille would surely have killed me.

I wasn’t even strictly unconscious for long. My notes, of which I caught a glimpse in hospital, declare me to have been ‘lucid but aggressive’ as the ambulance decanted me from a very wet impromptu nativity scene on the pavement into A&E at Bromley General. My doctor on the night tells me that, when first he approached me to perform an examination, I told
him, ‘Oh. Right. Yes. Listen, mate. Get me a cab, will you? I’ve had quite enough of this, thanks,’ before passing out again.

They could not operate on me until my blood alcohol levels had declined, so they sedated me, for which, I think, I have cause to be grateful because I was a right mess. Then, I assume, came the general anaesthetic and the hours under the knife.

I was very surprised when at last I awoke. I did not really do hangovers at that age, but if this was what they were like, temperance suddenly seemed alluring.

First there was that sensation of something bound very tight about my temples. Then there were the discords inside my skull. For some reason, you never get a tuned-up orchestra playing a lush, harmonious, Brahms symphony-type chord. You always get the oboes and clarinets with frayed reeds tuning up whilst an obsessive timpanist pounds away. I was getting the Portsmouth Symphony orchestra let loose in the Radiophonics Workshop.

The certainty that you are dying because of acute but obscure pains and wriggling things in chest and bowels? Check. And the dead leg because you’ve been lying on it for too long? Check.

I was mildly surprised that the leg was in that position, though.

Perhaps above all, my mouth was causing me distress. This was in part, I was to discover, because all my teeth had been knocked loose. It was also in part because I had had a very hot curry and a great deal of drink last night and nil by mouth thereafter, leaving my mouth feeling like Queen Nefertiti’s gusset.

I opened my eyes. Only one opened. The other appeared to be buried beneath a lot of upholstery which had not been there before.

The monocular view explained a certain amount, which was nice.

The explanation wasn’t.

No, the reason for the daft little fantasy section above is simply that that was what was playing in my head in quiet moments over the next three months, during which I was occasionally visited, occasionally fed semolina
(for a long time the only solid food permitted to pass my lips) and spent much of the time fretting.

First I fretted because they thought that I would lose my left leg which was pretty much pulverised to north and to south. If they saved it, they said, I might just be able to walk – well, OK, hobble – short distances, but even that would take a long time.

I fretted because I was not at work. Billions were being made, and not by me.

I fretted because I could neither laugh nor cry because of the broken ribs, nor turn over and curl up in a foetal position because my left leg was raised high above me. My recovery position was that of a chorus girl in Pompeii when the lava hit.

I fretted because of tinnitus which continued after the orchestra had left and continues to this day. Though some may dissent, the doctors assure me that my graceless landing on the kerb had caused no enduring
brain-damage
once the cuts were healed and the swelling went down. The echoes, however, persist. Dwarves mine for gold in there, and occasionally whistle happy diatonic tunes…

Above all, I fretted because of the Halford Hewitt.

It is given to few fully to understand the intensity of that fretting. Only sixty-four schools play in the matchplay foursomes tournament for the Halford Hewitt Cup, which takes place at the Royal Cinque Ports and Royal St George’s (known to all simply as ‘Deal’ and ‘Sandwich’) every April. Others wait poignantly outside, their privileged noses pressed against the pane, yearning in vain for admission.

As for us whose schools are eligible, we spend the winters doing
sit-ups
and playing solo surreptitious rounds of golf in the freezing dusks or dawns in hope of the call from our Captains. If that call does not come, we conclude that our active lives are done, don slippers and lay in supplies of Viagra and cadet Country Cousins.

I was hoping to play for Dulwich this year. Instead, I was in traction mumbling on semolina. I resented this.

The funeral scene was just light relief from all this fretting. At first I blamed all the mourners (and particularly Vanessa) for being so insincere.
Slowly, however, the ridiculous notion percolated through to me that perhaps I was missing something, that I might have given a little more of myself to my endeavours to date, that perhaps I wanted more from life before the next car hit me.

It was only a thought, but it was a new one on me…

It was a good thing that I had generous friends with a better line in medicines than the doctors. They saw no reason to bring mere grapes, skins, pips, stalks and all, when they could bring them already stripped down and distilled to their very essences. They brought them in quantity. I was soon providing medicinal cheer to the other poor sods in my ward, more hopeful than confident that I was helping them rather than killing them but, as ever, allowing them to make that decision for themselves.

What? I am meant to have renounced my wicked ways and become an ascetic saint overnight because of a mere prang?

Look, the people who wrote the Bible didn’t concern themselves much with psychological verisimilitude. Papyrus was expensive and time short, what with the Second Coming and Armageddon expected just as soon as they’d swept the wrong sort of sand off the rails. It was easier for them to stick to the headlines.

A lot of miracles might not have been quite so miraculous if we’d had detail. The evangelists might have gone into other recorded cases of catatonia, novel resuscitation techniques, Lazarus’s hangover, the therapy which he had to undergo and what his wife and the life-insurance companies had to say about it all. But no. Lazarus dead, Lazarus alive. That’s all we get. Miracle.

So we know that Saul (a European Commissioner if ever there was one) ran into some pretty impressive
son et lumière
stuff on his way to Damascus and subsequently decided that maybe these Christians were on to something, but the notion that he at once gave up all his former convictions, ambitions and friends is just downright silly.

At a guess, he drank rather more than usual, told himself that he must have eaten some dodgy matzos, found that the fun had gone out of a good stoning, became thoroughly grouchy and had to fake his laughter when they told the one about the praetor, the Philistine actress and the
X-shaped cross, discussed the whole business with his mistress and only over months or years became a pain in the arse within the Christian camp rather than without.

Augustine’s ‘Make me good but not yet’ is far closer to the mark, to judge by my own experience and all the recovering alcoholics, junkies and reformed rogues whom I have encountered. We all live by our faiths, however mundane, and if Saul abandoned his and his fellows for the sake of a few fireworks (like formerly Eurosceptic politicians within days of winning power), he was a berk. Had I been the ghost of a Christian put to the sword by him, I would have been affronted to have died for convictions so paltry.

So the novel experience of being tenderised by a car may have been instructive and thought-provoking for me, but it did not cause me to renounce my loves and loyalties to date.

It caused me immediately, however, to do two things which thousands of wounded soldiers have done in reality and in fiction. First, I fell in love with a warm smile, competent, jolly affection and Nature’s guarantee of a future: my nurse.

Well, Carol Vorderman (
Countdown
was the daily boon amidst the drabness) and my nurse…

Carol was not available, so my nurse bore the brunt.

I don’t want to imply that Clare Hayes was merely a symbol, nor that I fell for her solely because her warmth and vivacity contrasted with the monochrome routine of hospital life. She was a great girl who was to make me happy for several years. At twenty-one, however, immature and only barely aware of prospects beyond those on my very near horizons, I was unfit for marriage and would surely never have considered it had it not been for my brush with death.

I left the hospital in late January, still in a full cast. I was to remain in half-plaster until November.

My brother Andrew was now working for a paper company near Waterloo and was the proud owner of a 2CV. He therefore chauffeured me daily to and from my work. This gravely circumscribed my social life. As I half-sat, half-lay in the back seat of the Gallic rattletrap, I thought that,
were we to have an accident, I would be lucky to have ten mourners. To have started the job with a VW Beetle and to have finished it in a 2CV would surely have marked me forever as a failure.

I saw a lot of Clare that year, but then I could not spend much time in pubs and bars, not dressed up as a chalk with my younger brother, constantly checking his watch, in attendance.

That divinity which shapes our ends and in which I do not believe now got seriously cross with me. He or She had gone to all that trouble, admittedly on a pitifully low-budget, with the late-night car accident, and I appeared to have paid no attention.

‘OK, then,’ they said on Olympus or wherever they meet these days, ‘let’s see if the little bugger gets
this
message!’

I went to work on Boxing Day 1986, just one month after the plaster was at last removed. On my return to Downe, I hobbled on that atrophied leg into the Queen’s Head. I had got as far as ‘Good evening, and a Happy—’ when an invisible larding-needle was stabbed directly down through my kidney and into my left testicle. I said something memorable like ‘Fuck!’ and doubled up in excruciating pain.

Back in hospital, I was painfully examined by four doctors. They resolved that I was suffering from testicular torsion, also known as ‘Winter syndrome’ because scrota which have sagged in warm beds tighten abruptly when their owners arise in the cold air, causing snarled up spermatic cords to tighten into blood-knots.

I was about to be wheeled into theatre when an Indian consultant (upon whom may eternal blessings shower) stepped forward and dissented with the diagnosis. Surgery was cancelled. I was released. The pain, which had abated by then, returned. My left testicle swelled up, first to the size of a golf-ball, then to that of a tangerine.

I went to my GP, who was baffled. A City colleague reminded me that my terms of employment included comprehensive BUPA cover. I took a taxi to Harley Street. I was given an ultrasound scan. The consultant shook his head slowly, clicked his tongue and told me, ‘Oh, Mr Farage, I do hope you’re not planning to go anywhere too quickly…’

I had testicular cancer.

In early February 1987, I was admitted to the Princess Grace Hospital in Marylebone, I signed a form consenting to any mutilation deemed apt and went under.

Last time I did this, I awoke monocular. This time I awoke monorchid.

I knew, of course, that Nature (again I was grateful to evolution) doubled up on truly vital organs such as kidneys, lungs, ovaries and testicles, providing us with a spare of each against just such emergencies. I didn’t need two, but I had quite liked the sense of security which the extra one had provided, besides which, as Eeyore had said of his tail, I had been attached to it. Nonetheless, when they offered me an artificial one to supply me with greater social confidence, I refused.

I had had a teratoma (‘monstrous tumour’ in Greek). These not only have a nasty habit of moving about the body at alarming speed but tend to like company in the lymph-glands and other areas. I was advised that I was likely to have secondaries in my lungs and stomach. I underwent a comprehensive CT scan.

I believed that I was going to die.

In common with all others so persuaded, I thought this unfair. I reflected on all the things that I was never after all going to be able to do but which I had hitherto assumed to be my birthright. These included being married and having children. Clare had the misfortune to be the only one of my friends not only to be female, attractive, affectionate and on the spot but to be able to treat my afflictions with brusque professional amusement rather than with terror or hilarity – which I suspect to be the same things.

On Friday 13 February 1987, I was sitting with Hugh LeFanu, a friend and fellow broker, watching the racing in my private room. We had cigarettes and large straight malts in either hand. Peter Harper, the oncologist, strolled in. He leaned back against the wall and waited politely as Peter O’Sullevan gabbled the last rites over several hundred of our pounds. Then he stepped forward. ‘You will be delighted to know, Mr Farage,’ he said with a small smile, ‘that the scan has uncovered no further anomalies. You have, for now, the all-clear.’

Hugh whooped, slurped more Laphroaig into our glasses and pressed a toothmug of whisky on the consultant.

‘Hmm,’ said Harper. ‘Some of my patients after such an experience spend the rest of their lives drinking carrot juice and avoiding all excess. A few go the other way. I suspect that you belong in the latter category.’

He then laid down the conditions of my release. Instead of chemotherapy, I was to turn up at London Bridge Hospital twice a week at 8.00 am to have my alpha-fetoprotein count taken. Should it rise by an iota, I would be whisked back into hospital and subjected to every indignity which technology had yet devised.

In early March, I played thirty-six holes with such proficiency and
bloody-mindedness
that I was selected to play for Dulwich in the Halford Hewitt.

I was back on track.