On our second or third session, Gisela starting reciting something with a soothing, tantalising sound and rhythm. I asked her what it was. It is a poem. A nursery rhyme. And I said: ‘Teach me please!’ What I meant was for her to tell me what the poem meant, but again she did something much better. First she taught me the poem as pure sound. My favourite part sounded like ‘Gink a line’. Only later did she supply the meaning, and by then the German words had put down little radicles of their own. They had begun to be rooted. Once again it turned out that medical staff had lessons of their own to teach.
The poem went:
Hänschen klein
Ging allein
In die weite Welt hinein:
Stock und Hut
Steht ihm gut,
Ist ja wohlgemut.
Aber Mutter weinet sehr,
Hat ja nun kein Hänschen mehr,
Da besinnt Sich das Kind
Läuft nach Haus geschwind.
The meaning, when she told me, was something like:
Little Hans
Went alone
Into the wide world beyond:
Stick and hat,
He’s very pleased with himself.
But Mother is crying bitterly,
She hasn’t got little Hans any more.
The little boy thinks again
And runs very quickly back home.
She couldn’t have chosen a more illuminating text. I liked the image of Little Hans with his stick. I had a stick of my own, not to walk with but to point to things or nudge them towards me. Also to scratch my head where I couldn’t reach.
It became even more marvellous when Gisela explained that Hänschen was a double diminutive of John. She explained this to me with hand gestures rather than words. First she pointed at me, and said ‘Johann’. Then she put her thumb and index finger an inch apart, and said, ‘Hans’. Then she brought them so close together they were almost touching, and said, ‘Hänschen’. Hänschen was Little Johnnie. Hänschen was a Johnlet, a mini-John.
Horizontal vertigo
My hatred of everything German began to turn into its opposite. The language made such satisfying demands on the tongue and the lips and the palate, while German fingers brought deep relief and warmth. Soon I was listening out for her footsteps in the corridor. The clop of her clogs made my heart lift even before I could see her. It was wonderful for me to lie down and have Gisela conjure delicious pangs from my flesh.
She in her turn was impressed by the National Health Service of which she was now a part, saying simply, ‘In Charmany your parents would have to pay.’
The standing-up parts of our sessions weren’t quite so much fun. I had a sort of horizontal vertigo after Miss Krüger’s lessons. That time left scars. I clung to the wall and resisted any attempt to coax me into walking. Small distances seemed absolutely terrifying. Gisela would crouch a little in front of me and sing out, ‘Come just so far, Hänschen,’ and I would make myself trust her. As I tried to do as I was asked, I experienced something that was either a hallucination or a revelation of the true nature of matter. It seemed to me that as I inched my foot forward, the ground came into existence to meet it, and dematerialised again the moment I took another pace and moved on. This was either an intuition of quantum physics or a side-effect of eating Liquorice Allsorts.
I would manage the daunting distance to Gisela. But then she would move away the same distance and tell me again that I needed to come just so far. So I would say, ‘I think you lied to me, Gisela,’ and she would say, ‘I lied from love.’ Sensibly she broke the daunting task down into manageable slices of effort. Then finally she would turn me round and say, ‘Look! See how far you have been!’ And the distance would be impressive enough for her loving lie to disappear from my mind.
I became ambitious under her influence. A tricycle was the next adventure. I learned to move the pedals through part of their arc, and then to back-pedal so as to do the same thing again. I really wanted to ride a bike, but was told it was impossible. I didn’t see why. My determination won approval from the faction that regarded refusal of a wheelchair as the greatest virtue in someone like me.
It seemed to me that riding a bike would be relatively easy. Riding it, as opposed to starting or stopping. When the pedals were horizontal I would jiggle down against the ratchet for an inch and a half, then back-pedal slightly and repeat the process. Setting a rhythm was crucial. I managed to get another inch or two of drive down onto the pedals by lifting my bottom up.
So Shmitty would always walk beside me. Walk and then run. One of the joys of riding a bike in CRX was that so much of it was on a slope. I could get up a fantastic speed in some corridors. Shmitty would be panting, saying that she had never had a patient who made her work so hard.
Of course riding the bike was insanely painful, but there came a time when the joy and sensation of freedom it brought reached a certain level, and drowned the pain. Or rather, it was still pain but it changed key, and when I had got the bike moving properly the pain was in the key of triumph. It was well worth it, even though my legs felt very locked and deadened after Gisela lifted me off at last.
I had a cactus on the ward. It did nothing. It did nothing in a really big way. It was inert even for a cactus, and cacti aren’t the most entertaining of plants. It didn’t help that I was watering it. Watering it and then, when that didn’t seem to do any good, watering it some more. I dare say I’d only been given the cactus in the first place because of its ease of maintenance. If so, my needs were misunderstood. I didn’t want something that survived despite my neglect. I wanted something that thrived entirely because of love and care. Somehow my rage to make things grow escaped people’s notice. I wanted active responsibility for life, not mere curatorship. In those terms, having intervened and failed (by watering a desert plant, thereby killing it) was a better outcome than learning the bad lesson of laissez-faire.
I was serving notice of an important character trait, the need to keep something alive beside myself. Into that disobliging cactus I poured energy that would have sustained a whole extended family, a menagerie, a harem. It was Gisela who broke the news to me, saying, ‘Your cactus I think is dead.’ We lifted it from the pot and the stench of rotten vegetation was overwhelming. But the cactus didn’t die in vain. I asked Gisela to translate a special sentence for me into German. I wanted to know how to say, ‘You smell like my old cactus.’ Gisela laughed, but it wasn’t the sort of laugh that means no. She told me I should say, ‘Du stinkst wie mein alter Kaktus.’ She coached me until my pronunciation was perfect. Then I’d say it to doctors I didn’t like, under my breath at first and then with more confidence, out loud. It was my revenge for the way they were always producing incomprehensible sentences of their own.
I didn’t know it, but some of the doctors were trying alternatives to cortisone. In 1958 we had all been prescribed phenylbutazone, under the trade name of Butazolidin. I memorised every medical word I came across, and I’d taught myself to read upside down, so I could decipher what the doctors were writing down. It was no good asking them — they wouldn’t tell you. Poor Geraldine went all red and itchy, so the drug was stopped for everyone. It’s true that it can kill white blood cells, it can hurt bone marrow in some people, it can lead to aplastic anæmia. Certainly its side-effects were more obvious than those of steroids, and they could be severe in ten per cent of people. It’s just that I can’t help feeling it was a better drug for the ninety per cent who could tolerate it than what they were on. It certainly wouldn’t have stunted them.