‘But I’m not afraid!’ The words were out of my mouth before I could do anything about it. I had painted myself into a corner. I was caught good and proper. But that hardly mattered. The idea of a lavatory on a speeding train dropping a tuppenny onto the rails was a boy’s dream come true. It was fascinating and disgusting and funny. I’ve been stool-minded all my life, and Mum got me off to a good start when she talked about barium meals and scrambled eggs. How to improve the working of toilets on trains, so that the tracks don’t get covered with tuppenny? As Mum had so wisely said, you can only solve a problem if you can observe it with your own eyes.
The crusts of its fellows
I began to think I would have a good chance of solving the problem. At that moment I could think of little else. My mind didn’t go in for modulation much. One obsession simply displaced another, even one with the opposite polarity.
Mum’s problems went rapidly into reverse. Instead of being faced with a furious child refusing to go to the toilet on the train, now she had one who was mad with impatience to go. A whole trainful of kidney dishes offered to my throbbing botty wouldn’t have persuaded me to stay in the compartment to which I had clung so desperately a few moments before. I still hadn’t altogether regained my faith in Mum. To insure myself against further treachery I made her promise me something. She must solemnly swear. If I went to the loo on the train, she must promise to let me see the tuppenny dropping onto the tracks. When she swore her oath, I was ready to set off. I simply gritted my teeth against any discomfort which might follow. It was in the interests of science, after all. I could endure it. And I did just happen to have a mum who knew exactly how to carry me. Deftly she picked me up. She hung back for a moment at the edge of the concertina and then committed us to our passage across the metal waves. We picked our way safely through the groaning tunnel and from there to the lavatory.
Mum wanted to wipe the lavatory seat clean before she helped me sit down on it, but I over-ruled her. Scientists must accept the world as it is. I also reminded her that I needed to see the inside of the lavatory before I made my contribution to science. She propped me up so that I could see down the broad pipe to where a stained metal plate, held by a feeble spring, clanked and wobbled over the speeding rails. Then I gave the signal that she could sit me down now, to do my tuppenny.
I wanted to see what I had done even before I let her wipe me clean. I dare say we passed through some pretty countryside that day, and countryside was something I had hardly ever seen. But my enthusiasm was all for looking down the foetid funnel of the lavatory, as my tuppenny, escorted by a feeble shower of water that could hardly qualify as a flush, went to join the crusts of its fellows on the trackbed of the Great Western Railway.
3 Permission to Die
The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow, wasn’t built as a hospital, any more than it was built as a school. It was built as a grand country house — or rather it occupied converted buildings in the grounds of what was a country house. On the first day of the Great War, its owners had offered it to the army for use as a military hospital. The authorities had taken a quick look round and decided it wouldn’t do. The house would require too much conversion to be immediately useful. They don’t seem to have considered the offer very imaginatively. They looked at it, saw it wasn’t actually a hospital as yet — no beds installed, no operating theatre — and more or less washed their hands of it.
Then the Canadian armed forces were made the same offer, and they saw the potential that had been missed by their British counterparts. The great house wasn’t flexible, no, but it would serve perfectly well as a convalescent home. The surrounding buildings were much more promising. There were covered tennis courts, there was a bowling alley. These were large internal spaces that could accommodate hundreds of the wounded of the War.
At the end of the War, the family took possession again and the hospital melted back into outbuildings. When another war broke out, the hospital rematerialised, and this time it survived the end of hostilities. It was made over permanently as a hospital, as part of an ambitious restructuring of the estate, not entirely philanthropic since the post-war government was bearing down hard on the landed gentry. The house itself was gifted to the National Trust, though the family remained in residence. An early example of an arrangement that became commonplace, the rich divesting themselves of their assets but managing to stay in the saddle somehow.
That was the history of the place. As for the geography: it was essentially one enormous corridor. The house may have been a grand one, but our part of the estate wasn’t exactly plush. All the wards were Nissen huts. Even the chapel was a Nissen hut, a half-sized one.
The quarter-mile corridor started with Ward One, which was at the farthest and lowest end, and finished after Ward Twenty-Two. The main entrance was somewhere between Ward Fifteen and Ward Eighteen. The entire corridor sloped gently upwards in the direction of the main entrance. I think it was supposed to be evenly sloped, but there were little level bits outside each ward. The builders or designers made mistakes in the calculations somehow, because near the main entrance they must have realised they had to take the thing up quite a lot, but had almost run out of space to do it in. So there was a sudden, violent upheave as you came from the Ward One end. That part of the corridor was more like a ramp. Porters would have to put on a burst of speed to get a trolley up it. It made me feel a bit sick the first time I was jounced up the ramp, but then I learned to find it fun. Coming the other way, of course, the porters would have to dig their heels in to keep control of what they were pushing. Left to themselves, wheelchairs would tend to roll downhill to the end of the corridor, as if they were curious to find the exit there and to explore the grounds in their own right.
Immobility had been the mystical goal of my bed-rest years. As long as I stayed perfectly still in my garden of yellow roses, sooner or later the unicorn of perfect health would find me and lay its trusting muzzle in my lap. Of course immobility wasn’t the Holy Grail but a poisoned chalice, or simply a cracked cup through which the last of my health drained away.
Staying perfectly still was no longer an obligation. So there was no obvious reason for me being put to bed in a side ward the moment I arrived at the hospital, in a sort of visual quarantine. Perhaps after years of seeing so little happen I fell into the category of a starving person, who must be prevented from stuffing himself with bread to protect a digestive system that might simply explode from the shock of nourishment. The digestive system in this case being my mind.
Mum and I had an early encounter with the nursing staff which gave notice of things to come. Along with my modest luggage she had brought along the fire-guard which had kept the bedclothes off my legs for so long. She was relying on maternal eloquence and her nursing background to make this improvised item acceptable to the hospital. It wasn’t enough. She was listened to in stony silence, then told it was out of the question.
Mum’s briskness always had a tremor in it, but even Granny might have struggled to impose herself on the nursing staff of my new home. I learned soon enough that Mum was right about the superiority of the fire-guard to the adult-sized cradles issued there. They were hopeless. The volume of air they enclosed was so large that in any weather conditions short of the tropical my legs took ages to get warm. No reason was given for the unacceptability of the fire-guard, but I expect it was Manor Hospital all over again, a silent re-statement of the Weetabix Protocol. They’ll all want one. We can’t have that. As if it would be a bad thing for sick children to discover, that between warm ankylosed legs and cold ankylosed legs they had a preference.