Robot party trick
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.
The best doors
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.