And there were other misprints involved with this phase of my history. He had dated his gift — 14th May 1957 — and written simply ‘Psalm 37:5’. I looked up the passage referred to, rather dreading that it might be that old chestnut, ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’ which despite its rather withering Old Testament feel comes from the Sermon on the Mount. In my judgement it’s only later that the Sermon hits its stride, with the idea that we should take no thought for the morrow — one of those moments when Jesus was really on to something.
Dr Ducat’s passage was a little different. Psalm 37:5 reads: ¶ Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass. Inspirational too in its own way, I suppose, and certainly more tactful. Nice use of the semi-colon, too. I always loved the Gothic-looking backwards P which started the verse. I imagined it as a way of writing down the blast of a trumpet or ram’s horn, to announce Hear ye the Word of the Lord. Typographical shawms or sackbuts — instruments made even more potent by the fact of my not knowing what they sounded (or even looked) like.
I was surprised to see, on the flyleaf under Dr Ducat’s writing, two citations in my own sub-standard hand: ‘Mark XII: 7’ and ‘Luke VI: 20’. I looked them up, wondering what it was about those passages that had so struck me. I didn’t remember being particularly enraptured by the Bible at the time, even the pretty bits, and these seemed quite ordinary verses. Then I realised that it was misprints I was noting down: ‘our’s’ and ‘your’s’, both with apostrophes. Shame on Eyre and shame on Spottiswoode. Shame on Eyre & Spottiswoode both. Even at that age I was literal-minded, always on the lookout for typos. I couldn’t help myself. It was a strongly rooted instinct. Blessed are the proofreaders, for they shall seek sense. They will read everything twice.
¶In fact in those days what I most enjoyed about the Bible was the richly plain typography and the layout of the verses. ¶I never lost my love for the little sign that introduced a new section. It seemed holy in itself. I was quite shocked the first time I saw it in an ordinary secular book, as if I had bumped into a bishop in full fig at the supermarket.
On the cortisone question, as it happens, I think Duckett (I can’t get used to ‘Ducat’) was absolutely right. Cortisone betrayed my generation of Still’s Disease patients. It stole their minds while it was supposed to be helping their bodies. One of the girls on the ward had a lively intelligence, a mental age of ten before she reached that birthday. Cortisone wore her away inside and out. When she was thirty she still had a mental age of ten, and she died before she got to thirty-one.
I don’t regret my distinction, among Still’s patients of my age, in being free of steroids except for those two hallucinatory weeks. I had a lucky escape. On that basis I have to be grateful, too, for the misdiagnosis of rheumatic fever, without which I would have been put on cortisone as a matter of course, to keep my bones soft. Nowadays the wisdom is to administer steroids for short periods only. They relieve symptoms without getting involved with underlying causes.
If I’d been prescribed the stuff at three, I’d have been on it for the duration, and I think cortisone would have done to me what it was doing to so many of the children on Wards One and Two at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital. It was giving them moon faces and weakening their resistance to other infections. By affecting the pituitary gland, which regulates growth, it kept them small and I’m convinced it stunted their mental growth also.
The same thief
You’ll never read it stated in black and white that cortisone was the guilty party. I know because I’ve looked in all the right places. To me, though, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that John Cromer, the one who missed out on the wonder drug, was the one who did some definite growing, and didn’t have his mental age stolen by the same thief that took the pain away.
So I have every reason to thank Dr Duckett for his withdrawing of the wonder drug, whether his cavils were amplified by a mystical principle or not. Yes, I know, I hardly seem worth God’s trouble. There has always been a small voice, when I think along these lines, asking the question internally, where on earth do you get the nerve to assume you qualify for divine intervention? Luckily there’s also always been an internal voice, somewhat louder, asking me where on earth I would get the nerve to assume I don’t.
At Taplow Dr Ansell became part of my daily, or at least my weekly life. She was strict, but then no one in hospitals was anything else in those days. She didn’t tolerate nonsense, but there was no one there who did, and most of the things which excited my imagination received the label of nonsense. Still, Ansell was a definite force for good. She would say quite cheerfully, ‘I know they all say “Here comes Old Bossyboots” when I come onto the ward,’ which was perfectly true, though she wasn’t old, not much older than Mum. And she was loved as well as feared.
I’m sure that if Ansell had witnessed my bedpan torments she might have come up with a solution, but of course I wouldn’t be bed-panned while she was doing her rounds. I suppose I could even have told her about it, but I didn’t think of that.
The only thing I didn’t like about Ansell was the way she would talk nicely to me, asking how I felt and being completely friendly, and then she turned to the other members of the medical staff and started murmuring long words to them. I wanted to hear what the words were, and what they meant. If they were long and hard to pronounce, if they bristled with ‘æ’ and ‘œ’s, then all the better as far as I was concerned. Difficulty was an enticement not an obstacle. The easy things in life were hard for me, so why shouldn’t the hard ones be easy? I longed to be an initiate. An initiate of what? That was less important at the time. The need precedes the object it selects.
Nose-blood petition
It was my bad luck that it was a point of principle back then, in medical circles, not to listen to the patient. It was virtually a sub-clause of the Hippocratic Oath.
I had the most violent nosebleeds in those early days at Taplow, abrupt cataracts of the vital essence. I connected them in my mind with the pills I was given, and asked the doctors if they might be the cause. They just laughed and said, ‘Don’t be so silly, John, it’s only aspirin!’
This didn’t stop me feeling that my body was registering objections on the cellular level every time I had a dose of aspirin. When enough signatures had been gathered, those objections issued as a petition, in the form of blood from my nose. And still nobody paid the blindest bit of notice.
Nowadays the rare reaction to aspirin in childhood is an acknowledged fact. It’s called Reye’s Syndrome. Back then its only name was ‘John being silly’. Eventually they stopped giving me aspirin and the nosebleeds stopped also, but either nobody made the connection, or they didn’t want me to know I had been cheeky enough to be right all along about what was going on in my body.
The nurse in charge of Ward One, including the side ward where I was kept for the time being, was Sister Heel. She had introduced herself to me, and I had noticed that her skin was creased and cracked like worn leather, like the brown shoes that Mum didn’t wear for best. I hadn’t really met her, though, in the sense of becoming acquainted with her personality. I didn’t meet her in her essential form until she was out of the room, and I heard her giving a thorough scolding to one of her underlings.
In fact what I heard was a series of crashing noises, and Sister Heel’s voice baying over everything. At first I thought that some poor trainee nurse was so terrified of Sister that she had simply dropped a tray of tea things, but it wasn’t that at all. It was Sister Heel doing the smashing, with a fierce relish. The noise it all made would make a wedding party in a Greek restaurant seem quite muted in comparison. After a bit I could make out the words. What she was saying was, ‘I’ve told you TIME and TIME and TIME AGAIN!’ and each emphasised word coincided with a loud ceramic smash.