I didn’t hear the approach of righteous footsteps. All I knew was that I was caught in a whirlwind of starched uniforms. Sister Heel had snatched me from Clipworth, but it took me a few moments to grasp what was happening. I was still being roughly treated, but oh what a difference! Heel was absolutely cross, but not at me, she was cross at the way I had been treated. Her strong arms held me to her. It was painful in its own right, and there were sharp edges to the hug, her belt buckle perhaps and the watch she wore pinned to her front. It was a hug against a barrier of starched hospital linen. It was very far from anything you could term a cuddle, but in its own way it was sheerly loving.
Heel gave Clipworth something as close to a scolding as the absence of direct authority allowed. ‘I don’t know what you hope to gain, Miss Clipworth, by torturing your patients.’ She was shaking with feeling as she said this. The tremors passed deliciously through me.
When Clipworth answered I could feel her emotion as a great wave of heat against my back, all that pride and shame and territorial resentment. ‘Physiotherapy is my area and my responsibility, Sister Heel. You must allow me to know best in these matters.’
‘Allow you to know best fiddlesticks!’ cried Heel. ‘This must be taken to arbitration.’
This was marvellous. I thought I knew CRX better than anyone by now, but I had no idea who or what Arbitration was. Sister went to her office, still holding me in her arms, and made a telephone call. Then she told me I should leave her. ‘You can manage, can’t you? I’m sorry Miss Clipworth is so disappointed in your walking. I think you’ve done rather well.’ And this time the wave of heat came from inside me.
In less than a minute the Tannoy lady was announcing, ‘Dr Ansell to Sister Heel’s office, please … Dr Ansell.’ Soon Ansell was conferring with Heel in her office. At the time I was disappointed not to learn anything about Arbitration, but I knew Ansell would do the job just as well. I hung around the door and listened. This wasn’t strictly necessary — when Ansell was on the ward, everybody heard her anyway. Soon Clipworth was summoned to the office. She must have been taking a series of deep breaths as she approached the show-down — this was High Noon in Bucks (or Berks) — or she would have scolded me as she passed. I hadn’t been able to come up with an innocent reason for hanging around the office, and was picking off flakes of cream gloss paint from a crack in the wall.
What I heard from my listening post was a terrible piece of adult ganging-up — a coalition of Ansell and Heel against the physio. It was Heaven. Heel asked, ‘Do you have any idea what effect your actions are having on the emotional development of the child?’
Clipworth must have known from the start that she was outgunned but she shot back with, ‘I’m simply trying to do the job I was trained to do. I am also aware of what it would cost to pull up the lino and re-lay it.’
Apostle of walking though she was, she had just made a false step herself. Heel let her voice go almost sugary as she asked, ‘Since when have physios been so interested in the doings of the Costs & Maintenance Department?’
Taplow Tetragrammaton
I was reeling, outside the office, from all these new ideas. ‘The Emotional Development of the Child’ sounded wonderful, though I wasn’t sure what it might mean. Still, it was something to do with Me. ‘Costs & Maintenance’ was another stunner. On my journeys along the corridor I had memorised every notice board in the place, and I had never seen one labelled Costs & Maintenance. I had learned, though, that CRX was mystically organised. There wasn’t really any such thing as The School on those premises, either. It was an idea, a dream. It was conjured up when the stars were in the right alignment, and dematerialised when medical matters were in the ascendant. Costs & Maintenance, and also perhaps Arbitration, must have a similarly evanescent nature.
I was learning such a lot from the dramatic show-down in the office. I wish I had taken notes, except that my hand-writing was so poor I couldn’t usually read it myself. In any case, all these revelations were just the prelude to a statement of fantastic brevity and interest. It was in the class of Ansell’s ‘The illness has raged’, but you could argue that it was even more distinguished, since it contained a mere four syllables in four words, as against Ansell’s rather slapdash and prolix five.
With Ansell laying down covering fire behind her, Heel produced a fantastic ack-ack of invective, making it clear that Ward matters were her province, and ending with this astounding fusillade: ‘I am the Ward …’
I am the Ward. I am the Ward. Something about the phrase resonated so deeply inside me I almost fainted. It was a connection more fundamental than memory
I am the Ward. This was the Taplow Tetragrammaton. It stopped the mind dead in its tracks, as a good mantra should. It sent a pulse of wonder through every brick in the place. This was an atom bomb of an argument against which nothing could prevail. I AM THE WARD. It had links with the Old Testament: I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14). It joined hands with the New — In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). ¶I AM THE WARD.
When Heel detonated this exemplary mantra, Miss Clipworth for all practical purposes ceased to exist. She must have crawled off somewhere, blackened and smoking, perhaps through a door marked Arbitration or Costs & Maintenance, or maybe she just melted into nothingness, falling between the cracks in the rucked-up lino. I don’t think any of us ever saw or heard of her again.
It was only later that I worried about the hierarchies, about thrones, principalities and powers. If Sister Heel could atomise Miss Clipworth by saying ‘I am the Ward’, did that mean that if it came to a fight, Matron could flatten Heel by saying ‘I AM THE HOSPITAL’?
I hadn’t disliked Miss Clipworth, though it would be going too far to say I missed her when she was gone. There was only one physiotherapist I really disliked, in fact only one person on the whole staff, medical or scholastic: Miss Krüger, who worked on our walking and sometimes supervised solo sessions in the hydrotherapy pool. I hated and feared her because she was German. Dad always said that the Germans were an evil race. They were just naturally cruel and bad.
The rest of the staff pronounced her name as Krooger, but she herself used a different pronunciation, the vowel thin and gloating, the consonants as crisp as snapping bones.
In Miss Krüger’s sessions, we would be made to walk without shoes, and without help from walking aids, the various crutches and canes. Miss Krüger was dark and short. I’m not a good judge of height, but I don’t think she can have been much more than five feet — which could have worked in her favour. We liked to be looked after by people who didn’t tower over us too much, but her therapy was anything but fun. At the beginning of each session she would say brightly, ‘We have much work to do. We must make your ankles strong!’ She would go down on her haunches in front of us, and hold out her hands, palm upwards, to encourage us to take steps, but if we did manage to hobble towards her, she moved backwards so that there was more ground to cover. None of us could ever reach that receding target. She’d say firmly, ‘You must do it without help!’ When we overbalanced she would catch us, but then she just set us to walking again, on legs that had no aptitude for keeping us upright but whose inflamed joints were sensitised to every little disturbance.