Wendy Keach had a knife which she kept hidden under her dress while she was in view of any nurses but would point menacingly at me. I don’t know if she wanted to do actual violence or simply to get me into a state. She may even have timed these little episodes so that the arrival of a nurse would ‘thwart’ her, but I had no reason to suppose she wasn’t being serious when she hissed, ‘Next time I will not miss.’
Ivy Horrocks’s blindness dictated a division of labour, whereby Wendy looked after the physical side of things and Ivy was in charge of the psychology department. Ivy had a very effective trick of staring straight ahead of her while I toiled past her bed, and then suddenly focusing on me and hissing, ‘Don’t think I can’t see you!’ Even now I’m not sure how much she could actually see, but she certainly managed to get mileage out of her condition. Up close she smelled of wee, not because she was incontinent but for more complicated reasons. An earlier operation had restored her sight, but Mr Smiley the surgeon told her it was only for a few months at best. Then she would be blind again. The doctors advised her to walk around the ward as much as possible while her sight lasted, memorising the geography of the place. Then she would be able to get around later on.
It was a lot to ask of a child — to spend her eyesight, while she had it, preparing for a future in the dark. Ivy became despondent and withdrawn. When her eyesight failed she wanted a wheelchair, but was told off for that. Just because her eyes were worse, it didn’t mean she was allowed to abandon the great project of walking. So she sat on an ordinary chair, and when she wanted a wee she would call for help from a nurse. Nobody ever said it was wrong to call, but it was certainly disapproved of. There was always a long wait involved, to rid you of any idea that the nurses were your personal servants. And by the time anyone came to help Ivy to the toilet, it was too late.
Once upon a time, I was told, Ivy had been a cheerful little girl. Everyone would call out, ‘Oh cor blimey, ’ere comes Ivy!’ when they saw her. It was only after the second blindness that she became so nasty and enlisted as Wendy’s lieutenant. She took drastic measures to put herself beyond the reach of pity. She got her wheelchair in the end, but that wasn’t enough in itself to reverse the changes in her character.
Strider
On a good day I could get into the toilet. There was no soap in the basin, so I decided I would make some. I just wet my hands and rubbed. Bubbles came, masses of them, until the whole basin was full. I decided I could do magic, and showed off very successfully to various of the girls on the ward. Then one day the talent disappeared and never came back. I suppose the most likely explanation is that there were soap residues all round the basin, and that was what was generating the magic bubbles, until one day some bathroom zealot made a proper job of the cleaning, but I’m not quite convinced. In the back of my mind there’s always the possibility that the talent will come back.
A while after I had made my breakthrough by basing my movements on a toy robot rather than a fellow human being, I heard a couple of nurses talking about my being a ‘strider’. I was thrilled that they paid such close attention to my progress, and tottered up to them to bask in the glory of it all. They went quiet and actually seemed embarrassed. It took a lot of wheedling to get them to explain what they had been saying.
Apparently I was known at CRX for my night noises. If your movements are restricted by day, they’re not going to be any better at night. My sleeping posture was relatively inflexible — flat on my back. I hadn’t known that my snoring was conspicuous, since nurses had tactfully been using the technical term. Not ‘strider’, silly, stridor. Medical Latin. A whistling noise produced during respiration.
There was no treatment proposed for my snoring. No clips were attached to my sleeping nose, no operation was undertaken to widen the passages, and for that I was grateful.
After I had been walking for a while the physios tried to get in on the act. I didn’t take too kindly to that. I’d discovered my own technique for getting around, and now they wanted to horn in on all the glory, when they hadn’t really helped.
They didn’t even seem to understand the workings of my gait. If my stride was only a couple of inches, the actual height of each ‘step’ I took was minuscule. The physios measured it once and recorded it as a quarter of an inch. They told me that I must try harder, must increase the height of each step. They never explained exactly how increased height could be achieved with totally fused hips. I wasn’t raising my leg at all, I was only leaning away from it.
‘You do have a bit of movement in your spine, you know, John,’ said the physio supremo Miss Withers, which was true but didn’t make my hips work.
She was actually very nice, with a deepish voice and tufts of hair that sprouted from moles on her face. Never one to let a good style of nick-name go to waste, I dubbed her ‘Withie Boy’ and got everyone else to call her that behind her back. If she gave me pain she always said first, ‘If it hurts too much let me know. The pain should not be allowed to become too great. Your body is giving you a warning.’ This was an interesting interpretation of pain, though I couldn’t take it all that seriously. If pain was a warning, then my body had been on red alert for years.
In some parts of the ward the lino hadn’t been stuck down properly. It curled up half an inch or so, just enough to make it a perfect John-trap. When I was walking with the grain of the lino, by which I mean from the curl to the flat, the change of level added a little extra thrust to my totter. When I came from the other direction I would fall, often quite badly. I was always being told on those premises that pride came before a fall. It wasn’t just pride. Absolutely anything could come before a fall.
My falling at that spot was a common enough event to spark controversy among the staff of the ward. Should they replace the lino, or should they train me to adapt to the ward better? It would be most inconvenient and expensive to do anything about the lino, and where would they put the children while it was being done?
It was decided that the cost of replacing lino to save me from injury was too great. The physios would take me in hand and make me, again in the same unspecified way, able to raise my foot above all obstacles. I don’t think Withie Boy would ever have taken such a tough line, but she had ’flu at the time and her deputy, Miss Clipworth, was in charge. It happens very often that deputies are more authoritarian than their bosses. Flexibility seems a form of weakness unless endorsed at the highest level. So really it was the inflexible giving the inflexible a masterclass in being unbending.
Miss Clipworth watched me at my tottering and then asked me where I focused my eyes.
‘Well, on the next bed, of course!’ I said. ‘If I see where my next stop is I can walk that far. I make believe it’s a runway, and I’m a plane that can’t land until it gets there. My Dad’s in the RAF. It starts off hard, but it gets easier and easier as you go along because the distance gets shorter. That’s how I worked out how to walk.’ I felt rather proud of explaining my method.
‘Then no wonder you keep falling over!’ she said. ‘What an absurd idea! If you’d wanted to learn how to walk properly, you should have come to me.’
She told me not to concentrate on the next bed, but to keep my attention on the floor. I obeyed, and keeled over after three steps. I lost confidence without being able to concentrate on the next bed, the vista that kept me going. She caught me, then roughly lifted me back to the vertical and told me to try again. The same thing happened again, and although she didn’t let me fall I was very shaken. My heart was beating away like mad, and I started to cry. She said coldly, ‘You’re too old to cry — you don’t want people thinking you’re a sissy, do you?’ If I’d been less upset I might have answered that most of them already did, but I just wanted to apologise for all the trouble one little person was making for everyone who tried to help him. It was frightening to realise that Miss Clipworth was angry with me. She was being rough, but that wasn’t the worst of it, it was knowing that she despised me for the difficulties I was having.