Untold Stories (80 page)

Even though the NHS nowadays draws on more and more agency nurses, you are still much more likely on the NHS to be nursed by a regular team, or by nurses who have seen you before and are familiar with your case. Nurses in private hospitals seem to change from day to day. They may familiarise themselves with your case, but it's from your notes, not from personal observation.

It's my impression, too, that whatever the rates of pay in the respective sectors, one is more likely to meet with a degree of selflessness in the NHS than in the private hospitals. At UCH and the Middlesex I still had a sense that for most of the nurses this was a vocation; in private hospitals one is never sure it's not just a job.

And yes, the loos may not be so clean, and you don't have your own private facilities, but it's not worth
£
500 a day or whatever the premium BUPA extracts in lieu. And (no small recommendation in my book) with the NHS there are more jokes.

Jokes or no jokes, though, cancer was hard to forget, and though it often seemed more like a predicament than the siege it is always represented, what brought it home was any circumstance that required projection into the future. Having recently acquired a bus pass, shortly after being diagnosed I had to renew it. Looking at the expiry date a couple of years hence, I realised I might not be alive by then, and that was a shock.

Not long after the operation I remade my will, though without making any of those far-reaching, tax-saving provisions I could have made had I
felt able to project a future running to at least seven years. This, as it turned out, was foolish, but I was so convinced of my impending death, I could not see the point. My solicitors and accountant were handicapped by my presumption of an early departure and a little embarrassed by it, though it's a situation that solicitors, in particular, must often find themselves in. Would-be testators often lived for years with such a diagnosis, they assured me; better to take the longer view. I would have none of it, made my dispositions as if they were shortly to be executed, got on my bike and cycled briskly home.

I wish I could record that the prospect of death threw open the creative floodgates, but it was not so, and short of the autobiographical scribblings which became the TV series
Telling Tales
, and which I thought a bit of an indulgence, I found it no easier to write.

When the expected apotheosis didn't happen, I kept reminding myself that time was short and I should behave accordingly, even enjoy myself, though how I wasn't sure. I had no wish to travel or to see exotic parts of the world; the round-the-world odysseys that Aids sufferers tended to take were not for me. A neighbour in Yorkshire, diagnosed with the same condition and around the same time, had spent Christmas in Bali. I'd no desire to do that or anything much outside my usual routine.

Nor did the prospect of impending death seemingly improve the character. Always grudging in my appreciation, benevolence did not come to me in a rush and I was as wanting in magnanimity as ever I was: a good review for a fellow playwright could still make me grieve, football fever depress, the
Telegraph
incense, when all this, as I had understood it, was supposed to fall away. So there was none of the expected serenity, or the disengagement from the world: just more of the same.

Before I was ill, I had more or less completed a second series of the
Talking Heads
monologues, and even before the operation these were hurriedly put into production. But so far as future projects were concerned, plots came no easier nor did my pace of writing quicken, as I felt it was only fair it should. But cancer has never had much to do with fairness, or death either, so instead I began, I suppose, to tidy up.

I have kept a spasmodic diary since the early seventies, extracts from which I regularly publish in the Christmas number of the
London Review
of Books
. The bulk of the diaries, though, remained untranscribed, many of them written in my not easily decipherable longhand. So another consequence of the diagnosis was that I put in hand the transcription of a quarter of a century or so of these journals in the hope that I would at least be able to correct as much of the typescript as I could while I was still around.

I've never envisaged publishing the diaries in their entirety, either in my lifetime or posthumously. They will require stringent editing, not because of the scandalous material they contain, but because so much of the stuff is tedious, complaining and workaday. A substantial endeavour when it was begun, Kathy Burke and Susan Powell, who have done the job, are now nearing its completion, confirming me in my assessment that much of it is banal, but worth doing for all that.

Unexpected, though, at the start was a sense of luck. This didn't come out of any moral effort or a determination to count my blessings; I've never been very good at that. It came, I suppose, partly from not actually feeling ill, and so being able to enjoy the time I thought I had left, particularly with Rupert. Visits to Yorkshire, always a treat, now became much more so, and evening visits to the empty National Gallery, which had always been a privilege, were now doubly blessed.

As time went on, this unlooked-for sense of good fortune has tended to fade, though it has never entirely gone away, and helps to mitigate what is an habitually depressive temperament. Though I'm far from jolly, I suppose I feel, as I suspect many people do, that they have both had less than their due, but more than they deserve, and always, in my case, a lot of luck.

These would nowadays, I suppose, be called ‘positive feelings', the sort one is supposed to try and generate in ‘the battle against cancer'. In my case, they didn't come out of any striving, and always with misgivings that they are an elaborate form of self-deception, a front put up by the self to shield one against approaching pain and extinction. But I don't think so.

Not long after I'd been diagnosed and operated on, I compared notes
with a friend who was in the same boat and, like me, was in no current discomfort. She said how surprised most people would be to find that cancer isn't a constant companion, and that for long periods of time one forgot one had it – or had had it – the uncertainty about the tense encapsulating the uncertainty about the disease.

Still, as I wrote in my diary in that unforgettable July: ‘This is a real bummer (and in every sense of the word).'

There were to be other blessings, though. I have never lived with anyone in my life, and I was so set in my ways (some would say spoiled) that even having someone briefly staying in the house I found irritating and disruptive of my routine. When I was diagnosed in 1997, Rupert Thomas and I had been together for five years but he had never moved in. Now there was no choice. I could not manage alone, or at least not until I was over the immediate effects of the operation.

That time came and went and, my convalescence ended, we found that living together by necessity we had evolved a way of going on and so more or less settled down. Of all the mercies – I would not say side-effects – arising from this affliction, this unlooked-for conjunction has been far and away the most blessed.

The condition seldom had to be named. Excusing myself from some speaking engagement, I would explain that I'd just had a serious operation. If this didn't do the trick, I added that I wasn't sure how well I was going to be, and how soon. Only then, when the person concerned persisted, did I open up with the sixteen-pounder, and say, ‘Listen, I've had cancer.'

It always seemed unfair and almost cruel, so instant was the withdrawal and total the embarrassment.

I never at any point looked satisfactorily ill, and some weeks after I'd been in hospital I ran into a neighbour who enquired how I was.

‘I've just had an operation.'

‘Really? Well, you look very fit on it. I should have another.'

I didn't enlighten her and, indeed, outside my own immediate circle, told few people that I had (or had had) cancer. This was for an assortment
of reasons, chief among them the desire to keep it out of the newspapers. I had no desire to become a celebrity cancer sufferer, or to occasion supposedly caring articles headed ‘Playwright Fights Cancer'. There had been very little fighting so far anyway, though of course the mere question of facts wouldn't deter such as the
Daily Mail
, the favourite trick of which is to pick up an item of news, illness, say, or the break-up of a marriage, and present it as if the person concerned had gone to the paper and wept on its ever-caring shoulder.

The
Mail
did, indeed, get wind of it, and a couple of times sent a reporter round who, having enquired of neighbours, then rang my bell. My face, like my father's, is always red, sufficiently so to deceive and disconcert this nervous youth (‘I hear you've been ill?'). Despite having the door shut in his face, he must have reported sadly that I was still in rude health and so never came round again. The
Daily Mirror
tried the same tack, a young woman this time, ringing up to say, ‘I hear you're fighting the battle against cancer. Would you like to tell us about it?' The startled yelp of journalists when they realise the phone is being put down on them never fails to please.

The truth was I did not want to die in the pages of a newspaper as, say, John Diamond had died, or Ruth Picardie, or, however good the cause, Roy Castle. I read some of the literature their deaths occasioned and I did not want to write it. I had no more wish to give newspapers copy in death than I had in life.

Others struggling with cancer at the same time as I was included the actors Michael Bryant, Nigel Hawthorne, John Thaw and, more lately, Harold Pinter and Alan Bates. Michael and Nigel I knew, and had worked with, but disinclined as I was to belong to any kind of cancer club (as I think they were too) I did not contact them or check on their progress, just hoping they were faring as well as I seemed to be. Both their deaths came as a shock and brought home to me my own luck, as did, latterly, the death of Alan Bates.

Another reason why I was anxious to keep my illness to myself was that, like many writers, I imagine, I get letters from readers, the number
varying on how much I'm putting out, but a significant element in the day's work for all that. I have no secretary and answer most letters in longhand, so even though readers' letters often call for no more than a postcard, they add to the burden.

There was no doubt in my mind that if the news of my illness got out this correspondence would swell and its content would change. The letters I usually get are what might be called letters of fellow-feeling, readers writing to say that my stuff has rung bells, or that my experiences have chimed in with theirs. Learning that I had cancer, readers would, I'm sure with the kindest of motives, write with similar experiences of their own and with advice as to how to cope and – a particular dread – their foolproof remedies.

To be bombarded with suggestions for alternative treatments, dietary regimes or mental exercises seemed to me a predicament best avoided. A cancer patient feels particularly vulnerable to suggestion, never sure that he or she might not be neglecting the one bit of advice that might lead to a cure. However well I felt I was doing, I did not trust my own strength of mind to resist the well-meant and passionately held blandishments of my readers.

For the same reason I tended not to read articles about cancer in the newspapers, and only someone who has suffered from the disease will know how many that is. I do not use, and would not know how to use, the Internet, so that is another source of information I was not tempted to explore. Five years down the road I still find the contemplation of cancer quite hard, and even hate having to write the word.

I realise that there will be other sufferers who will regard this self-
blinkering as cowardice, and who may have found comfort and purpose in immersing themselves in the whole culture of cancer – mastering the facts regarding its forms and their treatment and, of course, its myths, in a course of action which the Internet has made feasible and available to all.

But to go down that road seemed to me to succumb to cancer in a different way. I did not see cancer as a way of dramatising my life, the lurid light of approaching death endowing even the most trivial event with a long shadow. Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

I cannot remember when I was last in a fight, from early boyhood my natural instinct always to walk (or slink) away. Even the metaphorical fight that cancer obligatorily involved, at any rate if the newspapers were to be believed, seemed inappropriate, the metaphor in my case not of struggle and engagement, but evasion and absence.

There was nothing adversarial in it for me. Once I'd had the operation and the chemotherapy that followed, I just hoped to edge by and to go unnoticed. In my case the metaphor was nearer that of crime, or of enemy occupation. I wanted to be ordinary, dull, my papers (and my results) not worth a second glance. I was a quarry, I knew that, but I still tried to evade the round-up, if only by not registering or identifying myself as a sufferer. Life became warier, more circumspect, but I hoped to slide by and to pass as cured (which is to be cured, perhaps).

I did not say so, or put it into words at all – I was too superstitious for that, one concomitant of cancer that I became much more superstitious. And, in retrospect, I seem to have done so little it didn't amount to much more than keeping my fingers crossed.

But I ducked the fight, which is a strategy like any other, and which some might see as not so much combating the disease as colluding with it.