Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Hating the Hun

It was a relief to discover that we all hated and feared Miss Krüger. It wasn’t just me. I felt better knowing I wasn’t the only one who said hateful things under his breath, the only one who hated the Hun.

Although Clipworth had been annihilated, her arguments shredded and disposed of, somehow the lino didn’t ever get taken up. Officially I was praised for being ‘adventuresome’, but there was some brisk back-pedalling on the let-him-walk-and-fall-over-as-much-as-he-wants idea. Suddenly a proper wheelchair materialised, and the Tan-Sad was held in reserve for long outside walks on rough terrain. I was told to stay in the wheelchair and only walk if nurse or physio or doctor was on hand. ‘Besides,’ said Miss Reid, ‘we can’t have you neglecting your Education, can we? And the staff have better things to do than to spend their time running round looking for you, you know …’

That was CRX all over. If I had asked for extra lessons, nothing whatever would have happened, but by tottering around the place like a madman I was able to force that wonderful sentence, ‘We can’t have you neglecting your Education,’ into being. The best technique for getting something in the topsy-turvy world of CRX seemed to be to head firmly in the opposite direction. The most effective way of undermining the régime of the place was not to protest against its ordinances — like the walk-at-all-costs idea — but to carry them to extremes.

The feeling in those days seemed to be that rules were good things in themselves. For instance: hospital visiting hours amounted to eight hours a week, no more — seven to eight in the evening on weekdays, two to four in the afternoon on Saturdays, three to four on Sundays. These restrictions were strictly enforced unless you’d just had an operation or were actively and officially dying. Some of the kids asked rather tearfully about this. Mums and dads would have liked to visit more often, but many of them lived a long way away. Public transport wasn’t reliable and there was no provision for family members to stay in the hospital. In general the presence of parents was considered an obstruction to the smooth running of the ward.

No one was allowed to sit on the edge of the bed except doctors, and they never did. Occasionally Ansell would sit on the edge of your bed, if she was explaining something important. This gave the lecture a special meaning and you listened particularly well to what she had to say, but it was a rare event. Again, the rule was waived if you were very ill or dying, so I suppose it was really quite a good sign if visitors weren’t getting too familiar. The strictness of hospital policy meant that no one on Wards One and Two had visitors in the week except for Sarah Morrison, whose mum had moved to Cookham just to be near her.

Flowers were donated by posh ladies who felt sorry for us, making the ward a cheerier place. When it got dark Nurse came in and took them all off to another room and closed the door. Visiting hours were over for the day, even for flowers. When I asked the reason why, she said, ‘They’re dangerous at night. You’re not allowed to be near them.’ Mum got the science from Dad for me, explaining that plants absorbed carbon dioxide during the day and gave out oxygen, but at night they drank oxygen and emitted carbon dioxide. Normally this wasn’t a problem, but the plants might take a bit too much and cause breathing problems for sick children. After this I was reconciled to the nightly departure of the flowers, though mainly with their welfare in mind. Surely they would be relieved not to be competing for air with the massed lungs of the ward.

The hospital restricted the hours for visitors, their seating arrangements and even their numbers. No one was allowed more than two visitors at a time. So if a kid had an auntie and an uncle and a mum and a dad visiting, two of them would have to wait outside in the main hospital corridor, which was cold and draughty. Each bed had two chairs, one on each side. Visitors were allowed to stand by the bed, or sit on the chair. Sister and her staff would police the system. A certain amount of hand-holding was allowed. I suppose that was how visitors knew this was a hospital and not a prison.

The hardship experienced by all those uncles and aunties over the years, waiting outside in such a spooky and comfortless place, must have come to quite a tidy sum of misery. It didn’t compare with the sufferings of patients, but it was wholly unnecessary. Yet there was barely a murmur of grumbling. If families did speak up, they would be told firmly, ‘We don’t want to over-excite the patient, now, do we? Why not go to the WVS canteen and have a nice cup of tea? It’s at the end of the corridor on the right.’ Only a quarter of a mile away.

One day the visitors had exceeded their quota, and an officious nurse was doing her best to enforce the rules. There were also four kids who didn’t have visitors. One of the aunties had the nous to say, ‘Well, seeing as we are four relatives to one nephew, and the boy in the next bed has no visitors, why don’t two of us be visitors to this boy, and then we can swap round, and we can all chat with him and he won’t feel lonely? Besides,’ she added in a whisper, ‘even if Matron did swoop in, she would never know whose visitor was really whose, now would she?’

The ward held its breath while the nurse hesitated, and then she dissolved into a human being. Suddenly extra visitors were being hustled and bustled in. The ward rang with friendly chat and laughter, and boys with no visitor reaped the benefit. To crown it all, when the tea trolley came round, the rule of visitors being allowed tea but no cake went out of the window. It was madness, it was Liberty Hall. One boy ended up becoming very attached to his new uncle and auntie, and I think he went home with them for the odd weekend.

One day Mum told me that she and Dad were buying a house. At first I wondered what that had to do with me, and then I was suddenly terrified that they were moving far away on purpose so that they would never have to visit me again. It took me quite a while to realise that I’d got it exactly the wrong way round. They were moving to be near to me.

They must have done quite a lot of house-hunting on the sly, before I ever knew a move was on the cards. They didn’t have much money, unlike Jacquetta Morrison who could just swan into Cookham and buy a house whose address ended in Court. Dad’s pay at the time was barely a thousand pounds a year, so really it was a bit of a stretch. Mum and Dad had settled on Bourne End, which wasn’t quite Cookham but was certainly a desirable place to live. Properties could easily fetch £10,000, which was far beyond Dad’s reach. In fact riverside properties like the one they had found on the Abbotsbrook Estate could easily fetch higher prices than suburban Cookham — not that a village can have suburbs, but I’m sure that was how Mum would have viewed anything that wasn’t in the heart of Old Cookham.

Somehow they had happened on a house that was much cheaper. It was only £3,000, though there was a reason for that. It had no electricity. The garden was so over-grown you could hardly see the house itself (which made it sound to my ears like Sleeping Beauty’s castle). It had been occupied by two old dears who were nearly blind. Gardening was beyond them, but they made up for it in the kitchen. They spent all their time frying, or so it seemed. The kitchen was so encrusted with grease that it stank, and there would have to be many hours of scrubbing before the new occupiers could so much as make a cup of tea which didn’t taste rancid. Every other room was dusty and decaying in a different way.

It sounded perfect. It had been called St Dunstan’s, but Mum and Dad changed the name to Trees — which I thought was a bit of a cheat. If that was allowed, what was to stop common people decamping metaphysically from their numbered hovels by granting themselves decent addresses? Still, St Dunstan being the patron saint of the blind, he was no longer needed at that address. The trees, too, were worth celebrating. There were four or five poplars out at the front, as well as a cherry tree. I loved the poplars particularly, not just the way they looked but the sound they made. They sighed and swayed. There’s no tree more in touch with its past lives than your poplar.