Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I had to get used to my built-up shoes. I had to learn how to use a wheelchair, and then in the distant future I was supposed to learn not to use it, to devise some approximation to walking.

It doesn’t sound as if sitting in a wheelchair is something you need to learn. It’s a chair, isn’t it? You sit in it. It’s not as simple as that if your hips are stuck in one position. My posture wasn’t fixed so that my lower half continued the line of the upper — there was a bend of a sort, so that my legs were at an angle of perhaps 160 degrees to my torso. I couldn’t sit, exactly, but I could perch on the edge of the seat. Because there was a little flexibility in the lower spine, I could make the limited bend appear greater than it was. I could even seem to be ‘sitting comfortably’, in true Listen with Mother style, but this was an optical illusion. All of it took effort. To start with, until my muscles became strong enough to hold me up, I could only sit in the wheelchair for short periods. Later when I went back home on weekend visits and even went socialising with Mum, I could manage reasonably well perched on an ordinary chair, as long as some kindly soul didn’t come bustling along with a footstool, in which case my body went hurtling backwards and all impression of ease went out of the window.

If I had Jim Shaeffer to thank for giving me a watch that kept my right elbow marginally active, then certainly Dr Duckett deserves some credit for helping me resist atrophy in one crucial area at least. In the history of my health, though, he is a complex figure.

It was only much later that I understood that cortisone had actually been tried on me, and then abandoned, during the years of misdiagnosis and bed rest. Dr Duckett had tried prescribing cortisone at one point, and watched in amazement while I ran around as if there was nothing whatever the matter with me. Yet somehow he misliked the drug, despite the apparent miracle of its working. He didn’t trust it. He told Mum that he wanted to discontinue the treatment — the results were just too dramatic. He was too experienced a physician to believe that any drug could just abolish an illness, when there was no question of curing it. It went against everything he knew about the relationship of the sick body with medicine.

The amazing thing was that Mum went along with him. Of course this was before she understood that a doctor might know less about what was wrong with her son than a magazine that someone had left in a dentist’s waiting room (rare condition or no, he should have done a bit of homework). But Mum had been a nurse, however unsatisfactorily and for however short a period, and nurses normally have a healthy disrespect for the doctors after whose decisions humbler professionals have to clean up.

Even about the big issue of misdiagnosis she was remarkably forbearing. By rights Duckett should have been disgraced in her eyes. Of course it’s always comforting to have someone to blame, but there was still an awful lot of taking-it-on-the-chin in the national culture.

Authority had prestige, right down to the level of village policeman and general practitioner. Even the postman had an aura vulnerable only to dogs. Mum accepted the mistakes of authority as having the force of fate, rather than anything as trivial as human error, and she never said a word against him.

In the earlier, lesser case of the steroids, she had taken his professional advice even when it was a substantial violation of common sense. Take the boy off these new-fangled drugs — they’re doing him far too much good.

A dispersed function

Perhaps there was an extra factor at work. Sometimes it happens that a mundane communication taps into a deeper source of meaning. A buried spiritual charge turns ordinary lower-case sentences into commands blazing with capitals and italics, all the curlicues of presence, so that a debatable proposition is instantly proven. Not that Dr Duckett was necessarily a spiritually commanding figure. The guru is a dispersed function as well as a real presence. The guru can requisition any tongue, speak out of any mouth at any time. And so Mum had followed Dr Duckett’s directions, even though my immediate and seeming health relapsed dramatically as a result of her obedience.

My dreams of pushing Peter over, of being punished, of not wanting to go to bed in case I never got out again, all these were memories of a real period of two weeks when I was five. It’s just that it was so unlike the experience of what came before and after that I meekly relegated it to the category of the nightly unreal.

Guru or no guru, Dr Duckett was a religious man, which in a strange way may explain his resistance to the wonder drug of the era, even when he saw its effects at first hand. Rather than actually restoring people to health perhaps he saw himself as ministering to the sick. He had the pessimism I have often noticed in practitioners of conventional medicine.

While I was in the hospital at Taplow he gave me a Bible. I had a Bible-cull a few years ago, when I was feeling particularly got at by the local Christians, and it’s the only Christian book to have escaped. A whole box of holy tomes was lugged down to the charity shop, but this one survived the purge.

Only when I looked again at the book, at the time of that cull, did I see that my doctor’s name was actually Ducat. Ducat like the money in Shakespeare. Ducat like the middle part of educate . His name was imprinted on my mind for all those years, yes, but misprinted.

And there were other misprints involved with this phase of my history. He had dated his gift — 14th May 1957 — and written simply ‘Psalm 37:5’. I looked up the passage referred to, rather dreading that it might be that old chestnut, ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’ which despite its rather withering Old Testament feel comes from the Sermon on the Mount. In my judgement it’s only later that the Sermon hits its stride, with the idea that we should take no thought for the morrow — one of those moments when Jesus was really on to something.

Dr Ducat’s passage was a little different. Psalm 37:5 reads: ¶ Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass . Inspirational too in its own way, I suppose, and certainly more tactful. Nice use of the semi-colon, too. I always loved the Gothic-looking backwards P which started the verse. I imagined it as a way of writing down the blast of a trumpet or ram’s horn, to announce Hear ye the Word of the Lord . Typographical shawms or sackbuts — instruments made even more potent by the fact of my not knowing what they sounded (or even looked) like.

I was surprised to see, on the flyleaf under Dr Ducat’s writing, two citations in my own sub-standard hand: ‘Mark XII: 7’ and ‘Luke VI: 20’. I looked them up, wondering what it was about those passages that had so struck me. I didn’t remember being particularly enraptured by the Bible at the time, even the pretty bits, and these seemed quite ordinary verses. Then I realised that it was misprints I was noting down: ‘our’s’ and ‘your’s’, both with apostrophes. Shame on Eyre and shame on Spottiswoode. Shame on Eyre & Spottiswoode both. Even at that age I was literal-minded, always on the lookout for typos. I couldn’t help myself. It was a strongly rooted instinct. Blessed are the proofreaders, for they shall seek sense. They will read everything twice.

¶In fact in those days what I most enjoyed about the Bible was the richly plain typography and the layout of the verses. ¶I never lost my love for the little sign that introduced a new section. It seemed holy in itself. I was quite shocked the first time I saw it in an ordinary secular book, as if I had bumped into a bishop in full fig at the supermarket.