Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

‘Wait a minute!’ I called after them. After so long without contemporaries, I wasn’t going to let them go without some attempt at communication. What they most looked like to me at that moment was an audience. I must entertain them. I decided that I would sing them a song, a special song.

This wasn’t entirely an exhibitionist impulse. The last time I had been in a room with this many children, it had been the carol singers that Christmas time. Then they had sung to me, now it was my turn to return the favour. My turn. Fair dos. I started to sing, croakily at first, and then with more confidence. I knew from listening to ‘Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better’ that you don’t have to have a sweet voice to make a song come alive. In fact I would have sung that song, itself, except that hearing one voice do both sides of the musical barney would have been too confusing.

The girls loomed back into my narrow field of vision. ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats,’ I began, and went on through the whole cryptic but satisfying animal-dietetic saga. There was no sign of appreciation when I finished, so I explained what the words really meant. I switched from a sort of Ethel Merman impersonation to a version of Professor Joad on the Brains Trust . ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats … Do you see?’ All silence was deadly to me just then, and I didn’t notice any peculiarly fatal quality to this one. When I got to ‘a kiddley divey too’ I not only glossed the line as ‘a kid will eat ivy too’, but explained that a kid was a young goat. I didn’t want to lose my hold on the audience by assuming too much knowledge.

I was just getting started on the natural history of ivy when the girl who had said I wasn’t pale interrupted. ‘We know the song, stupid. Uncle Mac plays it on the ruddy radio all the time. And this ’, she said, indicating the one on her right, ‘is Ivy. I’m Wendy and she’s Ivy. You’d better watch out for her. ’Cos you’ve got it the wrong way round. She eats kids .’ The girl called Ivy, who wore thick glasses, bared her teeth and snapped at me, and the three of them laughed. Then they receded from my view in a slow collective hobble. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I squeaked after them. My voice trailed away before I could finish with, ‘I’m sure we’re going to be great friends.’ Skilled as I was in looking on the bright side, I couldn’t persuade myself that we’d got off to much of a start.

After that first visitation I was left alone by the other patients. Every now and then nurses popped through the door to check on me, but otherwise I was left to my thoughts. I felt better if I thought about the earlier part of the day, before I actually arrived in the hospital, rather than my recent disappointments. From the years I had spent in the room with yellow roses on the wallpaper I had acquired some skill in controlling my mental activity. In replaying the day I concentrated on the train journey, my little adventure between confinements, and above all the ambulance ride that had started the journey in such style.

I felt there were important lessons for me to learn from what had gone on between the two men in the ambulance. I was determined to work it out. It was the word ‘mate’ that really struck me. ‘Mate’, as I’d learned from Mum, was what budgies did to make a chick and what a man did to a lady when he wanted to give her a baby, but this was clearly impossible here. Martin and Mikey were both men, and there was no taily-hole in either of them, so nowhere that a baby could be put in. But still, it seemed, they mated.

Suggestive shapes

The thoughts I was having about Martin and Mikey weren’t to do with touch and excitement, they were to do with understanding how the world worked. In a sense they were scientific, but they were also hardly thoughts at all. They were more like stray wisps of feathery cloud, feathers of the mind drifting idly by, but clouds that gradually grew into suggestive shapes. I still had the idea that ‘mating’ was something painful for the man. The message relayed through Mum that Dad thought it very nice, as nice as I found the scalp-tickling contact of my Mason Pearson brush, hadn’t really made an impression. That was just British stiff-upper-lip. Certainly Mum had never given any indication that there was anything enjoyable for the lady about this activity. I decided that ‘mating’ was just a job that needed doing and you were pleased when you had got it out of the way, like heavy digging in the garden or building an aviary.

Still, there must be something which Mikey and Martin could do together. Even without holes, they must be able to mate to be ‘mates’. Maybe the fact that they both wore uniform, like Dad, had something to do with it. Maybe it was only nice when you did it with another man in uniform. Maybe you had to tell little boys that it was nice to do with a lady, because if men only did nice things with men, people would stop having babies, which was ridiculous. Maybe little boys were tricked into believing it was nice, but they would grow up and become men and after having two or three children they would realise it wasn’t nice at all. If little girls weren’t nice, which was already beginning to seem a possibility, then how could grown-up ladies be nice? Even if they were nice I would never want to mate with them.

When I needed to do a tuppenny, a nurse brought a terrible thing, something which I thought had no place in my life. A bedpan. I tried to explain there was another way of doing a tuppenny which didn’t hurt me, but they didn’t want to know. There was to be no deviation from standard procedures, and there was no privacy, of course, for the agonies of excretion. The nurses could have learned better practice from Mum in a matter of minutes, until they were using a kidney dish as skilfully as she did, not only for my benefit but for everyone else on the ward, but they were doing everything by the book, which seemed to be their only ambition. Standard procedure was the gold standard as far as they were concerned. Never mind that it was a traumatic assault on the patient.

The bedpan was always cold, as if it had been kept in a ’fridge, but I could have put up with that. But my body had no flexibility. I couldn’t support myself over a bedpan in a lying position (or any other). No wonder I moaned and made little groans. I wasn’t making a fuss. It was hardly the Princess and the Pea — it was more like the Princess and the Mattress of Broken Glass.

From the nurses’ point of view, my inflexibility actually made things easier, in terms of the laws of levers. All they had to do was lift me up by the ankles and jam the bedpan underneath me, and move on to the next patient while I tried to relax my bowels, ignoring the rampages of the pain in my joints. Then I would have to wait for the nurse to return, in her own good time, for the second stage of the ordeal: the wiping of my bottom.

The nurses weren’t actively unkind. I thought of them as iron bedsteads in human form. There was no padding. There were no frills about their care. Some of them would wipe your bottom in a contemptuous way, others more or less tenderly. When they came on duty, they’d be assigned to particular patients, and I’d pray not to have an uncaring one, a bum-scraper who seemed disgusted by the whole business. It didn’t help that the lavatory paper was the cheapest and most abrasive grade. Every sheet was stamped with the words ‘Government Property’, though it was mystifying that the Government should boast of its ownership — unless the Government wanted it back.

The ward where I was going to live was at the bottom of the corridor but at the top of the numbering system. This testified to the importance of Still’s Disease in the establishment. Children with Still’s were put in Wards One and Two, but they weren’t segregated by sex. The numbers wouldn’t have worked that way, since for some reason (as I found out with dismay) there were so many more girls affected than boys. Still’s patients went on to Ward Three or Four after puberty, depending on gender. Ward Three for the boys becoming men, Four for girls becoming ladies. After that there was Men’s Surgical and Women’s Surgical. Further in the distance were some TB wards. For the time being, though, while they assessed my medical status, I lived in a little side ward off Ward One.