Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Mum wanted to wipe the lavatory seat clean before she helped me sit down on it, but I over-ruled her. Scientists must accept the world as it is. I also reminded her that I needed to see the inside of the lavatory before I made my contribution to science. She propped me up so that I could see down the broad pipe to where a stained metal plate, held by a feeble spring, clanked and wobbled over the speeding rails. Then I gave the signal that she could sit me down now, to do my tuppenny.

I wanted to see what I had done even before I let her wipe me clean. I dare say we passed through some pretty countryside that day, and countryside was something I had hardly ever seen. But my enthusiasm was all for looking down the foetid funnel of the lavatory, as my tuppenny, escorted by a feeble shower of water that could hardly qualify as a flush, went to join the crusts of its fellows on the trackbed of the Great Western Railway.

The Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital, Taplow, wasn’t built as a hospital, any more than it was built as a school. It was built as a grand country house — or rather it occupied converted buildings in the grounds of what was a country house. On the first day of the Great War, its owners had offered it to the army for use as a military hospital. The authorities had taken a quick look round and decided it wouldn’t do. The house would require too much conversion to be immediately useful. They don’t seem to have considered the offer very imaginatively. They looked at it, saw it wasn’t actually a hospital as yet — no beds installed, no operating theatre — and more or less washed their hands of it.

Then the Canadian armed forces were made the same offer, and they saw the potential that had been missed by their British counterparts. The great house wasn’t flexible, no, but it would serve perfectly well as a convalescent home. The surrounding buildings were much more promising. There were covered tennis courts, there was a bowling alley. These were large internal spaces that could accommodate hundreds of the wounded of the War.

At the end of the War, the family took possession again and the hospital melted back into outbuildings. When another war broke out, the hospital rematerialised, and this time it survived the end of hostilities. It was made over permanently as a hospital, as part of an ambitious restructuring of the estate, not entirely philanthropic since the post-war government was bearing down hard on the landed gentry. The house itself was gifted to the National Trust, though the family remained in residence. An early example of an arrangement that became commonplace, the rich divesting themselves of their assets but managing to stay in the saddle somehow.

That was the history of the place. As for the geography: it was essentially one enormous corridor. The house may have been a grand one, but our part of the estate wasn’t exactly plush. All the wards were Nissen huts. Even the chapel was a Nissen hut, a half-sized one.

The quarter-mile corridor started with Ward One, which was at the farthest and lowest end, and finished after Ward Twenty-Two. The main entrance was somewhere between Ward Fifteen and Ward Eighteen. The entire corridor sloped gently upwards in the direction of the main entrance. I think it was supposed to be evenly sloped, but there were little level bits outside each ward. The builders or designers made mistakes in the calculations somehow, because near the main entrance they must have realised they had to take the thing up quite a lot, but had almost run out of space to do it in. So there was a sudden, violent upheave as you came from the Ward One end. That part of the corridor was more like a ramp. Porters would have to put on a burst of speed to get a trolley up it. It made me feel a bit sick the first time I was jounced up the ramp, but then I learned to find it fun. Coming the other way, of course, the porters would have to dig their heels in to keep control of what they were pushing. Left to themselves, wheelchairs would tend to roll downhill to the end of the corridor, as if they were curious to find the exit there and to explore the grounds in their own right.

Immobility had been the mystical goal of my bed-rest years. As long as I stayed perfectly still in my garden of yellow roses, sooner or later the unicorn of perfect health would find me and lay its trusting muzzle in my lap. Of course immobility wasn’t the Holy Grail but a poisoned chalice, or simply a cracked cup through which the last of my health drained away.

Staying perfectly still was no longer an obligation. So there was no obvious reason for me being put to bed in a side ward the moment I arrived at the hospital, in a sort of visual quarantine. Perhaps after years of seeing so little happen I fell into the category of a starving person, who must be prevented from stuffing himself with bread to protect a digestive system that might simply explode from the shock of nourishment. The digestive system in this case being my mind.

Mum and I had an early encounter with the nursing staff which gave notice of things to come. Along with my modest luggage she had brought along the fire-guard which had kept the bedclothes off my legs for so long. She was relying on maternal eloquence and her nursing background to make this improvised item acceptable to the hospital. It wasn’t enough. She was listened to in stony silence, then told it was out of the question.

Mum’s briskness always had a tremor in it, but even Granny might have struggled to impose herself on the nursing staff of my new home. I learned soon enough that Mum was right about the superiority of the fire-guard to the adult-sized cradles issued there. They were hopeless. The volume of air they enclosed was so large that in any weather conditions short of the tropical my legs took ages to get warm. No reason was given for the unacceptability of the fire-guard, but I expect it was Manor Hospital all over again, a silent re-statement of the Weetabix Protocol. They’ll all want one . We can’t have that. As if it would be a bad thing for sick children to discover, that between warm ankylosed legs and cold ankylosed legs they had a preference.

When she went home, Mum left the fire-guard behind in case some independent-minded member of the nursing staff saw its clear superiority for the intended purpose, and brought it back into service. None did. Perhaps none existed. The establishment regarded initiative as a symptom of organisational disease.

Junior Norns

After Mum left, I must have had a short sleep in my side ward. When I opened my eyes again, I was looking up at a little deputation of children. There were three of them. My new friends. They must have sneaked between the screens. ‘Hello!’ I said cheerfully, though I was already disappointed by what I saw. They were all girls, when I was counting on having some male company. I told myself that perhaps the boys here were shyer than the girls, though it didn’t seem likely, or promising if true.

None of the girls returned my greeting or spoke to me in any way. They looked at me entirely expressionlessly. My stock of culture was not large. I had few tools for interpreting the world beyond the beloved Snowflake , some Beatrix Potter, a little Andersen and Grimm. My little supply of templates would not fit. I would need a broader swathe of knowledge to find a parallel for these girls — Scandinavian mythology, or Greek. I was facing a tribunal of junior Norns. These were the precocious Fates of the institution, who would spin me out, weave me and cut me off.

The girl in the middle spoke at last. She announced, ‘He’s not pale and floppy — he’s very stiff and twisty,’ and as if this bulletin gave them all they needed to know, they turned and began to move off. Their movement was ragged, I was pleased to notice, and I thought I could see the welcome gleam of a crutch.