His landlady answered right away, and she remembered me. “The little granddaughter,” she said. I’m not little, and it feels weird thinking of Sam being my grandfather. I already have Grampar, the position isn’t vacant. I like Sam though.
After a moment he came to the phone. “Morwenna?” he said. “Is there something wrong?”
“Not exactly wrong, only I’m at the Old Hall convalescing and I thought of you and wanted to speak to you.”
“Convalescing from what?” he asked, so I told him the whole thing and how I thought it had made me worse. “Maybe, maybe,” he said. “But sometimes healing hurts, had you thought of that?”
“They won’t tell me anything,” I said. “Dr. Abdul wanted to talk to Daniel, he wouldn’t say anything to me. I could be dying and they wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“Daniel would tell you, I think,” Sam said, but he didn’t sound sure.
“If they’d let him,” I said.
Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe I’ll come down and see you,” he said. “I have an idea. Let me talk to Daniel.”
I had to call Daniel then, and explain, and he sent me off to bed and talked to Sam for a while. Then he came up and told me Sam was coming to see me tomorrow, on the train, and he’d pick him up in Shrewsbury.
It seems odd to think of Sam going anywhere, and odder to think of him here, but he’s coming tomorrow! Daniel says he’s getting to be a very old man and seldom goes anywhere, so I should think it a privilege, which I do.
Monday 21st January 1980
Sam brought me a tiny bunch of snowdrops from his landlady’s back garden. “They’re just starting,” he said. Despite the long journey by train and then car—Daniel met him in Shrewsbury—they were in very good shape and had that special scent. Mor used to love snowdrops. They were her favourite flower. We planted some on her grave, I wonder if they’re out yet? One of the aunts put mine into a tiny crystal vase that matches the decanter and I have them on my bedside table.
Sam also brought some more Plato—The Laws and Phaedrus, which I’ve been wanting because it’s the one they read in The Charioteer. They’re not new, he’s clearly had them a while, but he must have spent ages rooting around to find them. He also brought a little blue Pelican paperback book called The Greeks by H. D. F. Kitto, which he says will give me context. It’ll give me context for Mary Renault as well as Plato. I hope it’s interestingly written. I still haven’t started the Churchill history I got for a prize.
The other thing he brought was a pot of comfrey ointment, which smells very weird. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but I brought it anyway,” he said. I rubbed some on my leg and it didn’t help at all, except for making it smell peculiar, but I appreciated the thought.
Sam’s real thought though was that I should have acupuncture. There’s a kind of magic about Sam, not real magic, but he’s very solidly himself. It would be hard for any magic to find somewhere to start doing anything to him. It was interesting to see him with the aunts; he’s impeccably polite to them but he treats them as if they’re not important, and they don’t know how to deal with that. He has no cracks for them to get into. If they’d suggested acupuncture, which involves sticking needles into people, I’d have resisted as hard as I could. As it was, they were very opposed to the idea.
“It’s silly Chinese superstition, you can’t possibly believe in it,” one said.
“Morwenna’s terrified of needles, she wouldn’t even have her ears pierced,” another put in.
“What good could it possibly do?” the third finished.
Even this kind of thing doesn’t bother Sam. “I think we should try it. What harm could it do? Morwenna’s a sensible girl, I think.”
He had found a place in Shrewsbury, and written the address down. He wanted to go there right away, but the sisters managed to persuade Daniel that we should phone for an appointment. He made an appointment for tomorrow morning.
Sam spent the afternoon in my room, talking to me. He’s an old man and he’s had a strange life—imagine finding out your whole family had been killed. It would be as if Wales sank under the sea this minute and only I was left out of everyone. Well, Cousin Arwel’s in Nottingham, but just the two of us out of everyone I grew up with. It was just like that for Sam. When he went back after the war they were all gone and strangers were living in his house, and the neighbours pretended not to know him. He saw his mother’s bread-bin on the neighbour’s table, but she wouldn’t even let him have that.
“And they mean nothing to you,” he said.
“Not nothing.”
“They’re strangers. Even I am a stranger. But my family were your cousins. They’re talking, different governments have been talking for years about giving some compensation. But how can anyone compensate me for my family? How can they give you back your cousins that you never knew, and your cousins who were never born, the ones who would be your age now?”
That made me feel it. I could write a poem about that. “Hitler, give me back my cousins!”
I think Sam’s a bit sad that I’m not Jewish, that his descendants won’t be. But he didn’t say so, and he isn’t reproachful about it at all. He said he didn’t stay in Poland because he could feel the dead everywhere, as if they could come around any corner. I understand that. I almost talked to him about magic, then, about the thing I did to have a karass, about Mor wandering around with the fairies. I might have if there had been time. But Daniel came in and said they should be going to catch the train, so I said goodbye.
Sam kissed me, and he put his hand on my head and said a blessing in Hebrew. He didn’t ask, but I didn’t mind. At the end of it he looked at me and smiled his wrinkled old smile and said, “You’ll be all right.” It was remarkably reassuring. I can hear it now. “You’ll be all right.” As if he could know.
I can smell the snowdrops. I’m so glad he came.
Tuesday 22nd January 1980
Sam was right about the acupuncture.
It is, in fact, magic. The whole thing is. They call it “chi,” but they don’t even pretend it isn’t magic. The man who does it is English, which surprised me after all the fear of wily orientals the aunts tried to put into the procedure. He was trained in Bury St. Edmunds, which is in the Fens, near Cambridge, by people who had been trained in Hong Kong. He had framed certificates, like a doctor. On the ceiling was a map of the acupuncture points of the human body. I got to look at it a lot, because most of the time I was lying on the table with huge enormous needles stuck in me, not moving.
It doesn’t hurt at all. You can’t feel them, even though they’re really long and they’re really stuck in you. What did happen was that when the last one went in, the pain stopped, like turning off a switch. If I could learn to do that! One of them, in my ankle, he put in slightly the wrong place first, and I did feel it, not real pain, but like a pinprick. I didn’t say anything, but he immediately moved it to a spot a fraction of a centimeter to the side and I couldn’t feel it. It’s body-magic plain enough.
Even if it just turned the pain off for the hour I was there, it would have been worth the thirty pounds, to me anyway. But it wasn’t. I’m not miraculously cured or anything, but I hobbled up the stairs to his room and I walked down them, no worse than before they put me on the rack. He wants me to go every week for six weeks. He said that today he was just doing what he could for the pain, but if he saw me regularly he might be able to see what was wrong and do something about it. He admired my stick—I’ve been using the fairy one, as it seems to give me more strength than the metal one, as well as being less ugly.