Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Once upon a time, I was told, Ivy had been a cheerful little girl. Everyone would call out, ‘Oh cor blimey, ’ere comes Ivy!’ when they saw her. It was only after the second blindness that she became so nasty and enlisted as Wendy’s lieutenant. She took drastic measures to put herself beyond the reach of pity. She got her wheelchair in the end, but that wasn’t enough in itself to reverse the changes in her character.

Strider

On a good day I could get into the toilet. There was no soap in the basin, so I decided I would make some. I just wet my hands and rubbed. Bubbles came, masses of them, until the whole basin was full. I decided I could do magic, and showed off very successfully to various of the girls on the ward. Then one day the talent disappeared and never came back. I suppose the most likely explanation is that there were soap residues all round the basin, and that was what was generating the magic bubbles, until one day some bathroom zealot made a proper job of the cleaning, but I’m not quite convinced. In the back of my mind there’s always the possibility that the talent will come back.

A while after I had made my breakthrough by basing my movements on a toy robot rather than a fellow human being, I heard a couple of nurses talking about my being a ‘strider’. I was thrilled that they paid such close attention to my progress, and tottered up to them to bask in the glory of it all. They went quiet and actually seemed embarrassed. It took a lot of wheedling to get them to explain what they had been saying.

Apparently I was known at CRX for my night noises. If your movements are restricted by day, they’re not going to be any better at night. My sleeping posture was relatively inflexible — flat on my back. I hadn’t known that my snoring was conspicuous, since nurses had tactfully been using the technical term. Not ‘strider’, silly, stridor . Medical Latin. A whistling noise produced during respiration.

There was no treatment proposed for my snoring. No clips were attached to my sleeping nose, no operation was undertaken to widen the passages, and for that I was grateful.

After I had been walking for a while the physios tried to get in on the act. I didn’t take too kindly to that. I’d discovered my own technique for getting around, and now they wanted to horn in on all the glory, when they hadn’t really helped.

They didn’t even seem to understand the workings of my gait. If my stride was only a couple of inches, the actual height of each ‘step’ I took was minuscule. The physios measured it once and recorded it as a quarter of an inch. They told me that I must try harder, must increase the height of each step. They never explained exactly how increased height could be achieved with totally fused hips. I wasn’t raising my leg at all, I was only leaning away from it.

‘You do have a bit of movement in your spine, you know, John,’ said the physio supremo Miss Withers, which was true but didn’t make my hips work.

She was actually very nice, with a deepish voice and tufts of hair that sprouted from moles on her face. Never one to let a good style of nick-name go to waste, I dubbed her ‘Withie Boy’ and got everyone else to call her that behind her back. If she gave me pain she always said first, ‘If it hurts too much let me know. The pain should not be allowed to become too great. Your body is giving you a warning.’ This was an interesting interpretation of pain, though I couldn’t take it all that seriously. If pain was a warning, then my body had been on red alert for years.

In some parts of the ward the lino hadn’t been stuck down properly. It curled up half an inch or so, just enough to make it a perfect John-trap. When I was walking with the grain of the lino, by which I mean from the curl to the flat, the change of level added a little extra thrust to my totter. When I came from the other direction I would fall, often quite badly. I was always being told on those premises that pride came before a fall. It wasn’t just pride. Absolutely anything could come before a fall.

My falling at that spot was a common enough event to spark controversy among the staff of the ward. Should they replace the lino, or should they train me to adapt to the ward better? It would be most inconvenient and expensive to do anything about the lino, and where would they put the children while it was being done?

It was decided that the cost of replacing lino to save me from injury was too great. The physios would take me in hand and make me, again in the same unspecified way, able to raise my foot above all obstacles. I don’t think Withie Boy would ever have taken such a tough line, but she had ’flu at the time and her deputy, Miss Clipworth, was in charge. It happens very often that deputies are more authoritarian than their bosses. Flexibility seems a form of weakness unless endorsed at the highest level. So really it was the inflexible giving the inflexible a masterclass in being unbending.

Miss Clipworth watched me at my tottering and then asked me where I focused my eyes.

‘Well, on the next bed, of course!’ I said. ‘If I see where my next stop is I can walk that far. I make believe it’s a runway, and I’m a plane that can’t land until it gets there. My Dad’s in the RAF. It starts off hard, but it gets easier and easier as you go along because the distance gets shorter. That’s how I worked out how to walk.’ I felt rather proud of explaining my method.

‘Then no wonder you keep falling over!’ she said. ‘What an absurd idea! If you’d wanted to learn how to walk properly, you should have come to me.’

She told me not to concentrate on the next bed, but to keep my attention on the floor. I obeyed, and keeled over after three steps. I lost confidence without being able to concentrate on the next bed, the vista that kept me going. She caught me, then roughly lifted me back to the vertical and told me to try again. The same thing happened again, and although she didn’t let me fall I was very shaken. My heart was beating away like mad, and I started to cry. She said coldly, ‘You’re too old to cry — you don’t want people thinking you’re a sissy, do you?’ If I’d been less upset I might have answered that most of them already did, but I just wanted to apologise for all the trouble one little person was making for everyone who tried to help him. It was frightening to realise that Miss Clipworth was angry with me. She was being rough, but that wasn’t the worst of it, it was knowing that she despised me for the difficulties I was having.

I didn’t hear the approach of righteous footsteps. All I knew was that I was caught in a whirlwind of starched uniforms. Sister Heel had snatched me from Clipworth, but it took me a few moments to grasp what was happening. I was still being roughly treated, but oh what a difference! Heel was absolutely cross, but not at me, she was cross at the way I had been treated. Her strong arms held me to her. It was painful in its own right, and there were sharp edges to the hug, her belt buckle perhaps and the watch she wore pinned to her front. It was a hug against a barrier of starched hospital linen. It was very far from anything you could term a cuddle, but in its own way it was sheerly loving.

Heel gave Clipworth something as close to a scolding as the absence of direct authority allowed. ‘I don’t know what you hope to gain, Miss Clipworth, by torturing your patients.’ She was shaking with feeling as she said this. The tremors passed deliciously through me.

When Clipworth answered I could feel her emotion as a great wave of heat against my back, all that pride and shame and territorial resentment. ‘Physiotherapy is my area and my responsibility, Sister Heel. You must allow me to know best in these matters.’