Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I got a nurse to stand me up by my bed and be ready to catch me if I fell. Then I set about creating my own slope. It was largely a mental exercise. It was a variation of the way I had learned to ‘lie down’ or ‘sit up’ at will while reclining in the Tan-Sad, fiddling with the coördinates of reality since I had so little control over my own.

I charged up my body with a small pulse of energy, as if I was winding up an elastic band. I tugged my shoulder up a little. Then I leaned forward and to the side, getting the rocking motion going, and let the leg on the other side inch forward. That first stride was hardly detectable. It was only a stride at all on a technicality, but I was starting to believe that I could move by myself, on my own two legs. Without walking aids of any sort, neither the noisy ones nor the ones I couldn’t lift.

My first expedition amounted to no more than six laborious inches. Then I learned to totter from bed to bed, and soon I was tottering around the ward. In my mind I used to stretch the distance ahead of me, and turn the next stopping point into a miniature runway, a landing strip that was waiting for me to touch down, so as to please the Dad in my head, the aviation wizard. The other kids’ walks were fast compared to mine, their strides long. My stride could reach an inch and a half on a good day, but I learned to totter fairly fast. Soon I was everywhere, poking my nose into all sorts of things, peeping round corners. My walking was a sort of fiction, but it had me fooled.

One day I got as far as the swing doors, and a nurse coming the other way sent me flying. She knocked me over and she knocked me out. There were portholes in the swing doors, and she had looked through but not down. She would have had to stop dead, go on tiptoe and peer down to make sure that I wasn’t there. My head was below her angle of vision, and so I went flying.

Even in an institution full of the disabled, and at a time when the received wisdom was that such people must be lured away from the seductive ease of their trolleys and wheelchairs, it was easy to be overlooked and bowled over. That might have been an advantage of the aluminium-clad tripods — they would have made my progress so noisy that no one could fail to hear me coming, and there would have been no collisions. It would still have been too high a price to pay.

Ansell sent me to Hammersmith Hospital for tests. She was worried about epilepsy. I remember having an EEG, with wires attached to my scalp and lots of flashing lights. It was wonderful. I convinced myself that they were hypnotising me, which was something I’d always wanted to happen. The Home Hypnosis Kit was pretty much my favourite item in the Ellisdons catalogue, but Mum would never let me send off for it. And now I was being hypnotised for free, on the National Health. Once Ansell was satisfied that I was free of epileptic tendencies, she relaxed her protectiveness. I was allowed to fall over as often as I liked.

I don’t know what would have happened to me, as a non-walker in an institution that was fanatical about walking, if I hadn’t come up with my own method, thanks to Muzzie’s gift. That robot opened many doors for me. Even so, my progress was very slow. It didn’t even look as if I was getting anywhere at all. Nobody paid me any attention. I seemed to be trapped for ever in the middle distance. And then — as I imagined it, anyway — the nurses would look up and ‘suddenly’ I wasn’t there any more. Gone. Gone walkabout.

The best doors

It was high time I took a good look round the hospital. A robot my size would have made no end of clanking, but I could be pretty quiet. I was particularly attracted to doors with machinery behind them. The best doors had signs on them, saying things like PRIVATE, NO ENTRY or DANGER — ideally all three.

Doors could be a headache. All the same, I reasoned that any telling-off I got for straying into a restricted area would have to be diluted with praise for having covered such a distance. Deep down, wasn’t I doing what I was always being told to do, walking at any price?

I was particularly attracted when a room was being fumigated, as sometimes happened, for instance if there had been a case of dysentery. The procedure involved sealing up the room with brown paper, and then releasing fumes from some sort of hygienic bomb. This was all very exciting, the combination of a bomb and a forbidden area, and I hung around as much as I could. I could never quite work out how the bomb was detonated inside the sealed room. Perhaps it was a time bomb. I just knew it would release something even more wonderful than a smell you could almost see.

Once I found my way into a broom cupboard full of mops and buckets and couldn’t get out again. It was a surprisingly long time before anyone came looking for me. I was bit cheesed off about that. Weren’t they supposed to be keeping an eye on me? I mean, anything could have happened, for all they knew. So by the time I started hearing voices calling my name I decided I wouldn’t make it too easy for them — I wouldn’t answer. The searching noises and calls became a bit desperate, and finally the cupboard door was flung open. If I’d been able to jump out like a jack-in-the-box I would have done it, but there was nothing to stop me shouting ‘Boo!’

I was taken to Ansell, perhaps to get an earful, but Ansell couldn’t stop smiling and said, ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with his spirit, I’ll say that for him.’ I didn’t even have to play my trump card, saying plaintively, ‘But Doctor, I thought you said you wanted to get me walking …’

My marginal new mobility enabled me to give the nurses the slip, but it didn’t have the same effect on Wendy and her charming gang. In fact they were able to escalate their campaign of terrors free from the inhibiting presence of staff. They would ambush me, or simply out-totter me. Their walking wasn’t good, but mine was much worse. In these special Olympics I was never going to be a medallist.

Wendy Keach had a knife which she kept hidden under her dress while she was in view of any nurses but would point menacingly at me. I don’t know if she wanted to do actual violence or simply to get me into a state. She may even have timed these little episodes so that the arrival of a nurse would ‘thwart’ her, but I had no reason to suppose she wasn’t being serious when she hissed, ‘Next time I will not miss.’

Ivy Horrocks’s blindness dictated a division of labour, whereby Wendy looked after the physical side of things and Ivy was in charge of the psychology department. Ivy had a very effective trick of staring straight ahead of her while I toiled past her bed, and then suddenly focusing on me and hissing, ‘Don’t think I can’t see you!’ Even now I’m not sure how much she could actually see, but she certainly managed to get mileage out of her condition. Up close she smelled of wee, not because she was incontinent but for more complicated reasons. An earlier operation had restored her sight, but Mr Smiley the surgeon told her it was only for a few months at best. Then she would be blind again. The doctors advised her to walk around the ward as much as possible while her sight lasted, memorising the geography of the place. Then she would be able to get around later on.

It was a lot to ask of a child — to spend her eyesight, while she had it, preparing for a future in the dark. Ivy became despondent and withdrawn. When her eyesight failed she wanted a wheelchair, but was told off for that. Just because her eyes were worse, it didn’t mean she was allowed to abandon the great project of walking. So she sat on an ordinary chair, and when she wanted a wee she would call for help from a nurse. Nobody ever said it was wrong to call, but it was certainly disapproved of. There was always a long wait involved, to rid you of any idea that the nurses were your personal servants. And by the time anyone came to help Ivy to the toilet, it was too late.