Pilcrow (29 page)

Muzzie gave me something in return for the gift of a nick-name, quite without intending it, just as I’d christened her by accident in the first place. She had always been generous on her visits, and careful not to leave me out of any present-giving. So one day she brought some new clothes for one of Sarah’s dolls, and for me she brought a
little
robot of green plastic, only about four inches high. Plastic toys were just beginning to come in. They were more expensive than tin ones at that time, and had a correspondingly higher status.

Then Muzzie showed me what the robot did. From Bathford days and the Ellisdons catalogue I’d always been strongly prejudiced in favour of toys that actually did something. What the robot did, if you put it on a slope or slightly slanted surface – such as a propped-up book – and gave it a tiny push sideways, was totter downhill, rocking inelegantly from side to side.

I stared and stared at my robot as it did its party trick. Muzzie couldn’t have made a better choice if my guardian angel had tugged on her arm in the toy shop and pointed it out.

The robot could walk. Not smoothly, not efficiently, but
undeniably
. It could walk. It didn’t have hips or knees, it had nothing more than a sort of rocker arrangement for a foot, but under the right
circumstances
it could walk. And so could I.

The problem was for me to find a suitable slope. Of course there was the corridor outside, but that was too far daunting. I set my sights on the ramp to the day room, but even that was ambitious. I was afraid of falling over before I’d managed my first tiny step. I’d seen what happened if you got impatient with the robot and made the slope too steep. It tipped forward and fell onto its front, that’s what.

I got a nurse to stand me up by my bed and be ready to catch me if I fell. Then I set about creating my own slope. It was largely a mental exercise. It was a variation of the way I had learned to ‘lie down’ or ‘sit up’ at will while reclining in the Tan-Sad, fiddling with the
coördinates
of reality since I had so little control over my own.

I charged up my body with a small pulse of energy, as if I was
winding
up an elastic band. I tugged my shoulder up a little. Then I leaned forward and to the side, getting the rocking motion going, and let the leg on the other side inch forward. That first stride was hardly detectable. It was only a stride at all on a technicality, but I was
starting
to believe that I could move by myself, on my own two legs. Without walking aids of any sort, neither the noisy ones nor the ones I couldn’t lift.

My first expedition amounted to no more than six laborious inches. Then I learned to totter from bed to bed, and soon I was tottering around the ward. In my mind I used to stretch the distance ahead of me, and turn the next stopping point into a miniature runway, a
landing
strip that was waiting for me to touch down, so as to please the Dad in my head, the aviation wizard. The other kids’ walks were fast compared to mine, their strides long. My stride could reach an inch and a half on a good day, but I learned to totter fairly fast. Soon I was everywhere, poking my nose into all sorts of things, peeping round corners. My walking was a sort of fiction, but it had me fooled.

One day I got as far as the swing doors, and a nurse coming the other way sent me flying. She knocked me over and she knocked me out. There were portholes in the swing doors, and she had looked through but not down. She would have had to stop dead, go on tiptoe and peer down to make sure that I wasn’t there. My head was below her angle of vision, and so I went flying.

Even in an institution full of the disabled, and at a time when the received wisdom was that such people must be lured away from the seductive ease of their trolleys and wheelchairs, it was easy to be
overlooked
and bowled over. That might have been an advantage of the aluminium-clad tripods – they would have made my progress so noisy that no one could fail to hear me coming, and there would have been no collisions. It would still have been too high a price to pay.

Ansell sent me to Hammersmith Hospital for tests. She was
worried
about epilepsy. I remember having an EEG, with wires attached to my scalp and lots of flashing lights. It was wonderful. I convinced myself that they were hypnotising me, which was something I’d always wanted to happen. The Home Hypnosis Kit was pretty much my favourite item in the Ellisdons catalogue, but Mum would never let me send off for it. And now I was being hypnotised for free, on the National Health. Once Ansell was satisfied that I was free of
epileptic
tendencies, she relaxed her protectiveness. I was allowed to fall over as often as I liked.

I don’t know what would have happened to me, as a non-walker in an institution that was fanatical about walking, if I hadn’t come up with my own method, thanks to Muzzie’s gift. That robot opened many doors for me. Even so, my progress was very slow. It didn’t even look as if I was getting anywhere at all. Nobody paid me any
attention
. I seemed to be trapped for ever in the middle distance. And then – as I imagined it, anyway – the nurses would look up and ‘suddenly’ I wasn’t there any more. Gone. Gone walkabout.

It was high time I took a good look round the hospital. A robot my size would have made no end of clanking, but I could be pretty quiet. I was particularly attracted to doors with machinery behind them. The best doors had signs on them, saying things like PRIVATE, NO ENTRY or DANGER – ideally all three.

Doors could be a headache. All the same, I reasoned that any telling-off I got for straying into a restricted area would have to be diluted with praise for having covered such a distance. Deep down, wasn’t I doing what I was always being told to do, walking at any price?

I was particularly attracted when a room was being fumigated, as sometimes happened, for instance if there had been a case of
dysentery
. The procedure involved sealing up the room with brown paper, and then releasing fumes from some sort of hygienic bomb. This was all very exciting, the combination of a bomb and a forbidden area, and I hung around as much as I could. I could never quite work out how the bomb was detonated inside the sealed room. Perhaps it was a time bomb. I just knew it would release something even more wonderful than a smell you could almost see.

Once I found my way into a broom cupboard full of mops and buckets and couldn’t get out again. It was a surprisingly long time before anyone came looking for me. I was bit cheesed off about that. Weren’t they supposed to be keeping an eye on me? I mean, anything could have happened, for all they knew. So by the time I started
hearing
voices calling my name I decided I wouldn’t make it too easy for them – I wouldn’t answer. The searching noises and calls became a bit desperate, and finally the cupboard door was flung open. If I’d been able to jump out like a jack-in-the-box I would have done it, but there was nothing to stop me shouting ‘Boo!’

I was taken to Ansell, perhaps to get an earful, but Ansell couldn’t stop smiling and said, ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with his spirit, I’ll say that for him.’ I didn’t even have to play my trump card, saying plaintively, ‘But Doctor, I thought you said you wanted to get me walking …’

My marginal new mobility enabled me to give the nurses the slip, but it didn’t have the same effect on Wendy and her charming gang. In fact they were able to escalate their campaign of terrors free from the inhibiting presence of staff. They would ambush me, or simply out-totter me. Their walking wasn’t good, but mine was much worse. In these special Olympics I was never going to be a medallist.

Wendy Keach had a knife which she kept hidden under her dress while she was in view of any nurses but would point menacingly at me. I don’t know if she wanted to do actual violence or simply to get me into a state. She may even have timed these little episodes so that the arrival of a nurse would ‘thwart’ her, but I had no reason to
suppose
she wasn’t being serious when she hissed, ‘Next time I will not miss.’

Ivy Horrocks’s blindness dictated a division of labour, whereby Wendy looked after the physical side of things and Ivy was in charge of the psychology department. Ivy had a very effective trick of staring straight ahead of her while I toiled past her bed, and then suddenly focusing on me and hissing, ‘Don’t think I can’t see you!’ Even now I’m not sure how much she could actually see, but she certainly
managed
to get mileage out of her condition. Up close she smelled of wee, not because she was incontinent but for more complicated reasons. An earlier operation had restored her sight, but Mr Smiley the surgeon told her it was only for a few months at best. Then she would be blind again. The doctors advised her to walk around the ward as much as possible while her sight lasted, memorising the geography of the place. Then she would be able to get around later on.

It was a lot to ask of a child – to spend her eyesight, while she had it, preparing for a future in the dark. Ivy became despondent and withdrawn. When her eyesight failed she wanted a wheelchair, but was told off for that. Just because her eyes were worse, it didn’t mean she was allowed to abandon the great project of walking. So she sat on an ordinary chair, and when she wanted a wee she would call for help from a nurse. Nobody ever said it was wrong to call, but it was
certainly
disapproved of. There was always a long wait involved, to rid you of any idea that the nurses were your personal servants. And by the time anyone came to help Ivy to the toilet, it was too late.

Once upon a time, I was told, Ivy had been a cheerful little girl. Everyone would call out, ‘Oh cor blimey, ’ere comes Ivy!’ when they saw her. It was only after the second blindness that she became so nasty and enlisted as Wendy’s lieutenant. She took drastic measures to put herself beyond the reach of pity. She got her wheelchair in the end, but that wasn’t enough in itself to reverse the changes in her character.

On a good day I could get into the toilet. There was no soap in the basin, so I decided I would make some. I just wet my hands and rubbed. Bubbles came, masses of them, until the whole basin was full. I decided I could do magic, and showed off very successfully to various of the girls on the ward. Then one day the talent disappeared and never came back. I suppose the most likely explanation is that there were soap residues all round the basin, and that was what was generating the magic bubbles, until one day some bathroom zealot made a proper job of the cleaning, but I’m not quite convinced. In the back of my mind there’s always the possibility that the talent will come back.

A while after I had made my breakthrough by basing my
movements
on a toy robot rather than a fellow human being, I heard a
couple
of nurses talking about my being a ‘strider’. I was thrilled that they paid such close attention to my progress, and tottered up to them to bask in the glory of it all. They went quiet and actually seemed embarrassed. It took a lot of wheedling to get them to explain what they had been saying.

Apparently I was known at CRX for my night noises. If your movements are restricted by day, they’re not going to be any better at night. My sleeping posture was relatively inflexible – flat on my back. I hadn’t known that my snoring was conspicuous, since nurses had tactfully been using the technical term. Not ‘strider’, silly,
stridor
. Medical Latin. A whistling noise produced during respiration.

There was no treatment proposed for my snoring. No clips were attached to my sleeping nose, no operation was undertaken to widen the passages, and for that I was grateful.

After I had been walking for a while the physios tried to get in on the act. I didn’t take too kindly to that. I’d discovered my own
technique
for getting around, and now they wanted to horn in on all the glory, when they hadn’t really helped.

They didn’t even seem to understand the workings of my gait. If my stride was only a couple of inches, the actual height of each ‘step’ I took was minuscule. The physios measured it once and recorded it as a quarter of an inch. They told me that I must try harder, must increase the height of each step. They never explained exactly how increased height could be achieved with totally fused hips. I wasn’t raising my leg at all, I was only leaning away from it.

‘You do have a bit of movement in your spine, you know, John,’ said the physio supremo Miss Withers, which was true but didn’t make my hips work.

She was actually very nice, with a deepish voice and tufts of hair that sprouted from moles on her face. Never one to let a good style of nick-name go to waste, I dubbed her ‘Withie Boy’ and got everyone else to call her that behind her back. If she gave me pain she always said first, ‘If it hurts too much let me know. The pain should not be allowed to become too great. Your body is giving you a warning.’ This was an interesting interpretation of pain, though I couldn’t take it all that seriously. If pain was a warning, then my body had been on red alert for years.

In some parts of the ward the lino hadn’t been stuck down properly. It curled up half an inch or so, just enough to make it a perfect
John-trap
. When I was walking with the grain of the lino, by which I mean from the curl to the flat, the change of level added a little extra thrust to my totter. When I came from the other direction I would fall, often quite badly. I was always being told on those premises that pride came before a fall. It wasn’t just pride. Absolutely anything could come before a fall.

My falling at that spot was a common enough event to spark
controversy
among the staff of the ward. Should they replace the lino, or should they train me to adapt to the ward better? It would be most inconvenient and expensive to do anything about the lino, and where would they put the children while it was being done?

It was decided that the cost of replacing lino to save me from injury was too great. The physios would take me in hand and make me, again in the same unspecified way, able to raise my foot above all obstacles. I don’t think Withie Boy would ever have taken such a tough line, but she had ’flu at the time and her deputy, Miss Clipworth, was in charge. It happens very often that deputies are more authoritarian than their bosses. Flexibility seems a form of weakness unless endorsed at the highest level. So really it was the inflexible giving the inflexible a masterclass in being unbending.

Miss Clipworth watched me at my tottering and then asked me where I focused my eyes.

‘Well, on the next bed, of course!’ I said. ‘If I see where my next stop is I can walk that far. I make believe it’s a runway, and I’m a plane that can’t land until it gets there. My Dad’s in the RAF. It starts off hard, but it gets easier and easier as you go along because the distance gets shorter. That’s how I worked out how to walk.’ I felt rather proud of explaining my method.

‘Then no wonder you keep falling over!’ she said. ‘What an absurd idea! If you’d wanted to learn how to walk properly, you should have come to me.’

She told me not to concentrate on the next bed, but to keep my attention on the floor. I obeyed, and keeled over after three steps. I lost confidence without being able to concentrate on the next bed, the vista that kept me going. She caught me, then roughly lifted me back to the vertical and told me to try again. The same thing happened again, and although she didn’t let me fall I was very shaken. My heart was beating away like mad, and I started to cry. She said coldly, ‘You’re too old to cry – you don’t want people thinking you’re a sissy, do you?’ If I’d been less upset I might have answered that most of them already did, but I just wanted to apologise for all the trouble one little person was making for everyone who tried to help him. It was frightening to realise that Miss Clipworth was angry with me. She was being rough, but that wasn’t the worst of it, it was knowing that she despised me for the difficulties I was having.

I didn’t hear the approach of righteous footsteps. All I knew was that I was caught in a whirlwind of starched uniforms. Sister Heel had snatched me from Clipworth, but it took me a few moments to grasp what was happening. I was still being roughly treated, but oh what a difference! Heel was absolutely cross, but not at me, she was cross at the way I had been treated. Her strong arms held me to her. It was painful in its own right, and there were sharp edges to the hug, her belt buckle perhaps and the watch she wore pinned to her front. It was a hug against a barrier of starched hospital linen. It was very far from anything you could term a cuddle, but in its own way it was sheerly loving.

Heel gave Clipworth something as close to a scolding as the absence of direct authority allowed. ‘I don’t know what you hope to gain, Miss Clipworth, by torturing your patients.’ She was shaking with feeling as she said this. The tremors passed deliciously through me.

When Clipworth answered I could feel her emotion as a great wave of heat against my back, all that pride and shame and territorial resentment. ‘Physiotherapy is my area and my responsibility, Sister Heel. You must allow me to know best in these matters.’

‘Allow you to know best fiddlesticks!’ cried Heel. ‘This must be taken to arbitration.’

This was marvellous. I thought I knew CRX better than anyone by now, but I had no idea who or what Arbitration was. Sister went to her office, still holding me in her arms, and made a telephone call. Then she told me I should leave her. ‘You can manage, can’t you? I’m sorry Miss Clipworth is so disappointed in your walking. I think you’ve done rather well.’ And this time the wave of heat came from inside me.

In less than a minute the Tannoy lady was announcing, ‘
Dr Ansell to Sister Heel’s office, please … Dr Ansell
.’ Soon Ansell was conferring with Heel in her office. At the time I was disappointed not to learn anything about Arbitration, but I knew Ansell would do the job just as well. I hung around the door and listened. This wasn’t strictly necessary – when Ansell was on the ward, everybody heard her anyway. Soon Clipworth was summoned to the office. She must have been taking a series of deep breaths as she approached the show-down – this was
High Noon
in Bucks (or Berks) – or she would have scolded me as she passed. I hadn’t been able to come up with an innocent reason for hanging around the office, and was picking off flakes of cream gloss paint from a crack in the wall.

What I heard from my listening post was a terrible piece of adult ganging-up – a coalition of Ansell and Heel against the physio. It was Heaven. Heel asked, ‘Do you have any idea what effect your actions are having on the emotional development of the child?’

Clipworth must have known from the start that she was outgunned but she shot back with, ‘I’m simply trying to do the job I was trained to do. I am also aware of what it would cost to pull up the lino and re-lay it.’

Apostle of walking though she was, she had just made a false step herself. Heel let her voice go almost sugary as she asked, ‘Since when have physios been so interested in the doings of the Costs & Maintenance Department?’