Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

‘Allow you to know best fiddlesticks!’ cried Heel. ‘This must be taken to arbitration.’

This was marvellous. I thought I knew CRX better than anyone by now, but I had no idea who or what Arbitration was. Sister went to her office, still holding me in her arms, and made a telephone call. Then she told me I should leave her. ‘You can manage, can’t you? I’m sorry Miss Clipworth is so disappointed in your walking. I think you’ve done rather well.’ And this time the wave of heat came from inside me.

In less than a minute the Tannoy lady was announcing, ‘ Dr Ansell to Sister Heel’s office, please … Dr Ansell .’ Soon Ansell was conferring with Heel in her office. At the time I was disappointed not to learn anything about Arbitration, but I knew Ansell would do the job just as well. I hung around the door and listened. This wasn’t strictly necessary — when Ansell was on the ward, everybody heard her anyway. Soon Clipworth was summoned to the office. She must have been taking a series of deep breaths as she approached the show-down — this was High Noon in Bucks (or Berks) — or she would have scolded me as she passed. I hadn’t been able to come up with an innocent reason for hanging around the office, and was picking off flakes of cream gloss paint from a crack in the wall.

What I heard from my listening post was a terrible piece of adult ganging-up — a coalition of Ansell and Heel against the physio. It was Heaven. Heel asked, ‘Do you have any idea what effect your actions are having on the emotional development of the child?’

Clipworth must have known from the start that she was outgunned but she shot back with, ‘I’m simply trying to do the job I was trained to do. I am also aware of what it would cost to pull up the lino and re-lay it.’

Apostle of walking though she was, she had just made a false step herself. Heel let her voice go almost sugary as she asked, ‘Since when have physios been so interested in the doings of the Costs & Maintenance Department?’

Taplow Tetragrammaton

I was reeling, outside the office, from all these new ideas. ‘The Emotional Development of the Child’ sounded wonderful, though I wasn’t sure what it might mean. Still, it was something to do with Me. ‘Costs & Maintenance’ was another stunner. On my journeys along the corridor I had memorised every notice board in the place, and I had never seen one labelled Costs & Maintenance. I had learned, though, that CRX was mystically organised. There wasn’t really any such thing as The School on those premises, either. It was an idea, a dream. It was conjured up when the stars were in the right alignment, and dematerialised when medical matters were in the ascendant. Costs & Maintenance, and also perhaps Arbitration, must have a similarly evanescent nature.

I was learning such a lot from the dramatic show-down in the office. I wish I had taken notes, except that my hand-writing was so poor I couldn’t usually read it myself. In any case, all these revelations were just the prelude to a statement of fantastic brevity and interest. It was in the class of Ansell’s ‘The illness has raged’, but you could argue that it was even more distinguished, since it contained a mere four syllables in four words, as against Ansell’s rather slapdash and prolix five.

With Ansell laying down covering fire behind her, Heel produced a fantastic ack-ack of invective, making it clear that Ward matters were her province, and ending with this astounding fusillade: ‘ I am the Ward …’

I am the Ward. I am the Ward . Something about the phrase resonated so deeply inside me I almost fainted. It was a connection more fundamental than memory

I am the Ward . This was the Taplow Tetragrammaton. It stopped the mind dead in its tracks, as a good mantra should. It sent a pulse of wonder through every brick in the place. This was an atom bomb of an argument against which nothing could prevail. I AM THE WARD. It had links with the Old Testament: I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14). It joined hands with the New — In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1). ¶I AM THE WARD.

When Heel detonated this exemplary mantra, Miss Clipworth for all practical purposes ceased to exist. She must have crawled off somewhere, blackened and smoking, perhaps through a door marked Arbitration or Costs & Maintenance, or maybe she just melted into nothingness, falling between the cracks in the rucked-up lino. I don’t think any of us ever saw or heard of her again.

It was only later that I worried about the hierarchies, about thrones, principalities and powers. If Sister Heel could atomise Miss Clipworth by saying ‘I am the Ward’, did that mean that if it came to a fight, Matron could flatten Heel by saying ‘I AM THE HOSPITAL’?

I hadn’t disliked Miss Clipworth, though it would be going too far to say I missed her when she was gone. There was only one physiotherapist I really disliked, in fact only one person on the whole staff, medical or scholastic: Miss Krüger, who worked on our walking and sometimes supervised solo sessions in the hydrotherapy pool. I hated and feared her because she was German. Dad always said that the Germans were an evil race. They were just naturally cruel and bad.

The rest of the staff pronounced her name as Krooger, but she herself used a different pronunciation, the vowel thin and gloating, the consonants as crisp as snapping bones.

In Miss Krüger’s sessions, we would be made to walk without shoes, and without help from walking aids, the various crutches and canes. Miss Krüger was dark and short. I’m not a good judge of height, but I don’t think she can have been much more than five feet — which could have worked in her favour. We liked to be looked after by people who didn’t tower over us too much, but her therapy was anything but fun. At the beginning of each session she would say brightly, ‘We have much work to do. We must make your ankles strong!’ She would go down on her haunches in front of us, and hold out her hands, palm upwards, to encourage us to take steps, but if we did manage to hobble towards her, she moved backwards so that there was more ground to cover. None of us could ever reach that receding target. She’d say firmly, ‘You must do it without help!’ When we overbalanced she would catch us, but then she just set us to walking again, on legs that had no aptitude for keeping us upright but whose inflamed joints were sensitised to every little disturbance.

I didn’t use walking aids like the others, so it wasn’t a deprivation for me to do without such things as crutches and canes, but I couldn’t keep myself vertical without the support of my shoes any better than anyone else. I’d topple again and again, until I thought I would prefer to fall over outright without being caught, as long as I was allowed to stay on the ground for the rest of the session. Miss Krüger would keep saying, ‘Ups-a-daisy!’ or ‘Boomps-a-daisy!’ as we lurched in our agony, breezy idioms which I came to hate since their actual meaning seemed to be ‘Show me more pain.’

It wasn’t that other physios (such as Miss Withers) made no pain, but Withie Boy stopped as soon as she could, and her own pain showed as a fact in the frown on her face. With Miss Krüger we went up on pointes like some tormented corps de ballet, and she made sure each of us had a solo. I had always had mixed feelings about the Little Mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, who chose human legs over a fishy tail even though each step would be like walking on knives. We had the sensation of walking on knives, all right, but our legs didn’t even work properly. We’d been swizzled, getting all the bad bits of the bargain. I for one would happily have traded my legs for a mermaid’s tail, which would have been hardly less useful and a lot more decorative. I’d like to see Miss Krüger try to get me walking on my tail! And at least I’d be able to do without a rubber ring in the hydrotherapy pool.