Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I can’t say I blame the nurses. My carrying on was upsetting the other children, the ones who were subdued rather than frantic. It was worse than the time Mary had gone beneath the surface of the hydrotherapy pool. This time she never came back to the surface.

I knew the next morning I would be getting a rocket from Heel. Fearful scoldings they were too. Their blast could be heard all over the ward. I was quaking when I heard her come on duty. One of the cadet nurses, who may not have known what had happened to Mary, sniggered, ‘You’re really in for it now!’ Then Heel came in and just looked at me. She seemed to have run right out of scolding power. The batteries which supplied her with so much chastening energy had been drained of their charge. In a voice which cracked like her brown leathery face she asked if I had had a good night’s sleep. I suddenly realised that if strict sisters could cry, Heel would be crying now. I understood that she wasn’t allowed to cry, the same way Charlie, whom I missed like mad just now, wasn’t allowed to have nostrils. She just walked quietly off and I was returned to the ward without even a pretence of punishment.

The lessons of another life

Mary was a pure creature, who would no more have taken a cut while organising a raffle than she would have rubbed sweets against her bum or done murder. I heard one of the nurses say she was ‘too good for this world’, which almost captured my sense of the thing. It wasn’t quite right, though. The world was good enough to have Mary in it, but only just. Life had been lucky to have her. And, logically, perhaps she was better off out of it. I tried to understand that this was not a tragedy but a progress, which is what I believe to this day. Her soul needed only the lightest polishing, and I can’t imagine her being required to learn the lessons of another life.

For a long time after she died, though, I was terrified. I thought it would be me next. It seemed to me that if Mary died, when her walking was so much better than mine, then my life must be hanging by a thread. I’d got it into my head that the reason we were always being bullied into walking was for our own good, because if we didn’t walk we would die. As a theory it did at least fit the facts, and nobody had ever actually explained why walking was so over-ridingly important an activity for children who were so ill suited to it.

At this stage I was getting information and advice from two different quarters. Wendy and her gang were explaining that there’s a Death Bed. That’s why you die. Anyone who sleeps in the Death Bed will die. Mary slept in the Death Bed, and that’s why she’s dead. Nothing to do with any medicine. And now, according to them, I was sleeping in the Death Bed, the same bed in which Mary had died. The last time I had gone home for the weekend, the staff had switched the beds around. Hadn’t I noticed? And now I was in the Death Bed and it was my turn.

I didn’t believe Ivy and her gang the whole time, and Geraldine was saying something different, but it wasn’t much more consoling. Geraldine was saying they tell us dirty lies. They told us Wayne was going to a different hospital, but if they took him to another hospital it was a funny stretcher they took him away in. Because on a normal stretcher you can see the bump of the person on top, but when they took Wayne away the top of the stretcher was flat and there was a bag hanging underneath it, and that’s how we know he’s dead and the staff tell dirty lies, so don’t believe everything they tell you, not by a long chalk!

I got some comfort, during this period, from a hymn the monks sang in the chapel.

This joyful Eastertide

Away with sin and sorrow,

they sang. But I was deep in terror for a long while. I tried to be brave and fight my own battle, but it’s quite hard when you’ve not long been old enough to take your own money out of your Post Office Savings Account and girls are ganging up on you, telling you you’re in the Death Bed, you’re going to die next and it won’t be long.

I tried to put on a brave face when Mum visited, but she could see something was making me unhappy, and she asked ever so kindly. I crumpled and ended up telling her what the girls had been saying. That was all I told her, not about hearing little kids crying in the night, and then the next day they were gone, and what Geraldine said about the different stretchers and the lies.

After I’d opened my heart to her, or most of it at any rate, Mum went to see Sister Heel. She was in the office for a long time, talking. Eventually I was summoned to join them. My heart was pounding. I waited to hear what sentence would be passed on me.

Sister Heel had found again the scolding power she had temporarily lost. It filled her sails. She gave me an epic talking-to which included the words, many times repeated, ‘John, you are not going to die! Is that quite clear? You are not! NOT!! NOT!!’ It was the routine with the mugs all over again, except in reverse. She wasn’t saying I was going to be smashed, she was saying I wasn’t. I wasn’t cracked. I didn’t need smashing. I was safe.

Geraldine may have been right about the staff and doctors being a bunch of dirty liars, but Heel wasn’t one of them. She always spoke the truth and we knew that. Now she talked at length about how she knew about dying. She had been with many people when they died, and yes it is very upsetting, especially when it is children. Especially when it is children you care for.

It was true that Sister Heel’s face was brown and cracked, like the leather on Mum’s favourite shoes, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. Those shoes, after all, were past their best but Mum could never bring herself to throw them away. Heel talked in a funny way that was called an accent. She might even have come from the same part of the world as one of the cleaning ladies, Dora, who scowled and shook her mop when Wendy did a wee on the floor just to make work for her, but no one would ever play tricks on Sister Heel.

On the ward, dying was one of the most fascinating and most feared of all life’s events, and here was someone talking with authority about it. She said Mary’s case was quite different from mine. As for my idea that the less able you were to walk, the more likely you were to die — that was all my eye and Betty Martin. That was the purest codswallop from top to bottom. My cards weren’t nearly up. My cards had only just been dealt.

What it came down to was that I didn’t have Sister Heel’s permission to die. An absurd argument, but at the same time the evidence supported it. Heel WAS the Ward, and everything within those walls was subject to her say-so. I wouldn’t dare to die without her permission. This was a wonderful lesson, and a wonderful scolding to have from her. There was no trace of the oppressive Heel who had squashed me flat with the invention of Ninday. This was the fiercest scolding I had ever had, but I felt much better for it. I think the whole episode set me on the path of my life-long love affair with scolding. Scolding which is mostly awful but can be heavenly.

Calcutta superdragon

There have been a number of dragons in my life (Miss Collins, who was really a paper dragon, being I suppose the first), but Sister Heel showed herself to be only partly dragon. She was partly St George. If she didn’t slay the dragon of mortal fear in my boyhood self, then at least she boxed its ears and made it hang its head. Perhaps the social conditions for the creation of dragons don’t exist any more — the War that was then so recent, rationing more than a memory, strong public services. When a phenomenon like Mother Teresa comes along, we’re all baffled — but the Calcutta superdragon rang a bell with me.