Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I said that my best friend was a budgie who knew all my secrets, and that he would soon be coming to live with me on the ward. I knew perfectly well that pets of any sort were forbidden at CRX, but it was worth fibbing for the short-term advantage. Until I was found out, I could make any number of promises about what Charlie would do when he came to live on the ward, the words we’d teach him, whose bed his cage could be stood by at night. If they were really nice to me, that is.

Mary was my closest friend on the ward, not only because of her sweet nature but because we shared a passion for books. We would read Famous Five adventures together. We were always coming up with some altruistic scheme or other. The altruism was stronger in Mary, but I wasn’t going to show myself up in front of her. Because I had a gramophone on top of my locker but no records, we decided to write a letter of appeal to Decca on behalf of the ward. It wasn’t quite true that I had no records — there were a number at home that Mum would happily have brought in, but I didn’t dare risk Wendy’s contempt about my posh tastes. It seemed to me that Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ was the quintessence of posh, and there was an aria from La Bohème that I also loved, but I wasn’t going to risk that either.

The letter Mary and I concocted to send to Decca hit the jackpot. They sent us a whole box of 78s. I suppose they were old stock, but I didn’t mind. They were all operatic highlights. So I was even able to hear that aria without having to own up to my love for it. Of course it wasn’t the repertoire the ward would have chosen for itself. Popular taste would have opted for Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele and Frankie Lymon. Frankie Lymon in particular hit the bullseye with a song about not being a juvenile delinquent. He preached a sermon that adults couldn’t object to, and still he filled your head with thoughts of being bad.

Just when I was beginning to give up on the educational component of the institution, the school began to keep more than Brigadoon hours. Lessons started at last. There was no school-room as such — lessons were held right there in the ward. The first subjects I remember being taught at CRX were music and scripture.

Miss Reid sang songs in her reedy voice. There was a piano at the end of the ward. ‘Please, Miss Reid,’ I would say, ‘will you pick up my pencil?’ She bent over to do it, saying, not unkindly, ‘I shall have to call you Dropper.’ She taught us, ‘Soldier, soldier, will you marry me?’ but she blushed scarlet, as we knew she would, when we asked if anyone had ever proposed to her. After a moment when it didn’t seem that she’d be able to speak, she said, ‘Yes. Someone did once, as a matter of fact.’ Of course we all cried out, ‘And what did you say?’ Though we knew the answer. If she had said ‘Yes’ she wouldn’t still be a Miss and she wouldn’t be teaching sick kids. It was still a surprise, somehow, when she said, ‘I said No.’

Playing thickly

Miss Reid’s lessons were fine, though she could only pick out a tune on the piano with one finger. What we really loved was when Mrs Pullen played thickly. Playing thickly meant using all her fingers, and all at once in great bunches. Playing chords. I looked longingly at the piano, which could make such a complex sound, but for some reason I was only ever assigned the triangle or tambourine.

In terms of equipment, the school at CRX was a step up from Miss Collins’s portable blackboard, wiped clean by the hanky she kept in her sleeve, but only a step. A school within a hospital was unlikely to attract inspirational staff. It was a legal requirement that we should be educated. It would have been unlawful to strand us without lessons, even those of us who were not going to see another birthday. Yet there wasn’t a strong sense of what we were being educated for. What, if anything, we were going to become.

The phantom school at CRX, so timid, so likely to vanish into the woodwork when a doctor appeared, didn’t concern itself with discipline. No matter — Sister Heel took care of that, and it was still her ward when lessons, by her gracious permission, were taking place there. If we children talked after lights out, the procedure was: first, dire warnings. After that the offender’s bed would be pulled into the middle of the ward. If we still hadn’t learned our lesson, the bed was trundled into a side ward where we had to stay until morning. In the morning there would be a full-dress dressing-down from Sister Heel, a proper scolding. As we waited for morning we learned how cracked hospital mugs feel in the seconds before their public smashing.

Early in my stay in the hospital, an astounding thing happened on Ward Two. A boy with Still’s Disease came down with measles, and when the measles cleared up so did the rheumatoid arthritis. The lesser illness carried off the greater on its back. Professor Bywaters was fascinated and did every test he could think of. He would have been happy for the boy to stay on the ward until the mechanism of this absurd cure was understood, but the boy no longer needed to be looked after. He wasn’t a patient any more, and he wasn’t going to loiter around. Gregory went home.

The mystical action of the measles cure was as mysterious as the way white wine lifts a stain of red, leaving the tablecloth none the worse for wear. And after all, the person who first tried that desperate bit of dinner-party alchemy must have been something of a mystic, or else only threw the second glassful in a fit of temper.

I spent a lot of time arguing with God about the measles cure. It seemed so unfair that Gregory was the one to get the luck. I tried not to bear a grudge, to resent him for his good fortune (not that I even knew him, since he was on Ward Two), but it was hard to accept things as they were. Why did it have to be Gregory who got to go home? Why couldn’t it have been Wendy?

The professor tried to be methodical about this freak thunderbolt of healing energy. He wanted us all to get the measles, hoping that some or all of us would stumble on the same happy cancellation of one disease by another. I remember being indefatigably coughed on by feverish children. I didn’t succumb, but quite a few did, including some of the leukæmics, who could hardly hope to benefit. There were no repetitions of the miracle cure, even among the Still’s children. Freak lightning only struck the once. When the measles cleared up, they took nothing away with them except a little hope.

It doesn’t seem exactly scientific, to expose sick children to measles on the off-chance that it will do them good. But ever since Fleming had waited for penicillin to re-occur naturally, after a promising mould was washed up by an over-zealous technician, the picture of scientific discovery had been changing. Now discoveries could be made by knowing what you were looking for and waiting for it to actually happen. It was less about genius taking a chisel to the materials of the universe, and more about a dance and marriage between a drifting spore and an opened mind.

I don’t know if the term ‘immune system’ even existed in the 1950s. Certainly it wasn’t in general currency. The mechanism of that freakish cure is easier to understand with its help. By analogy: a householder is fast asleep while thieves are stripping the house, packing his treasures into bags marked SWAG and throwing them out of a window to accomplices in the street outside, when he is woken by a bird flying down the chimney. Measles being the bird.

The analogy can just about be stretched to allow for the possibility that Still’s proves to be an auto-immune condition. A sleep-walking householder is putting his own treasures into bags marked SWAG, throwing them out of the window into the empty street, when he’s woken by a bird flying down the chimney. Measles still being the bird.