Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Physical punishment wasn’t part of the régime at CRX, but it wasn’t easy to tell. This was because the régime itself subscribed so fervently to an agenda which forced children to fit in with an able-bodied world at whatever cost. Pain wasn’t administered with specific intention, but it was certainly part of daily life. There was a certain amount of incompetence too, perhaps. The lady who fitted us with built-up shoes, grudgingly stuffing them with cotton wool if we went on complaining, might not have dared to say in Dr Ansell’s hearing that they were meant to hurt, but we weren’t sensitive to these crosscurrents of hospital culture. We didn’t know that there were two schools of thought at the time, one of them less severe.

Tough love, love so toughened as hardly to be recognisable as such, was part of the mission of the hospital from its foundation. Those converted Nissen huts were impregnated with a tradition of untender tending. Nancy Astor herself, mistress of Cliveden, was very much present in the early days of the hospital, in that first War. Her speciality was the unsympathetic handling of those, desperately scarred or damaged, who couldn’t be rallied by the conventional means. They were at death’s door. She merely held the door open and bowed ironically, hoping to shame them. After you . She thought of it as ‘gingering them up’.

It may be that the nursing staff had reservations about this approach, which strayed rather far from Nightingale principles. If so, they were hardly likely to say anything. Not only was Nancy Astor their landlady, she was their employer. Nancy and her husband Waldorf paid the wages of the Medical Officers, nurses and orderlies. They were stuck with her, this lay matron who came alive around the dying.

Her bedside routine regularly included unstrapping her watch and placing it on a patient’s bedside table. ‘I bet you this watch’, she’d say, ‘that you’ll be dead this time tomorrow. You’ve pretty much thrown in the towel. I’ll leave it with you for now — it’s a nice little watch. I don’t know if you’re hungry. Probably not. Still, they say a condemned man is allowed a last meal, so order anything you like from the kitchens. I’ll make sure you get it. And I’ll be back for my watch this time tomorrow.’

Her style was harder than Heel’s, her method more paradoxical. Instead of withholding permission to die, she gave it freely, so as to goad the moribund into defying her.

She lost that bet and that particular watch, but I wonder if there were some bets she won that we don’t hear so much about, disfigured amputees who couldn’t quite be gingered up the Nancy Astor way. Sometimes she went in for a refinement of the same approach, a sort of jingoistic shock therapy. Hearing from the nurses that a couple of young airmen with burns all over their faces and bodies had lost any will to live, she approached their bedsides and bent down so they could hear her, through the grease that kept the bandages from touching their war-cooked flesh. ‘You’re going to die,’ she said, ‘and so would I if it meant I didn’t have to go back to Canada.’ Sprinkling salt on their wounds, for their own ultimate good. ‘If you were a Yank or a Cockney or a Scot you’d live, because — unlike you — they’ve got guts.’

The mutilated boys tried to defend their country against these insults, as best they could through charred lips. In this way they were tricked into regaining the will to live, gingered up in spite of themselves. Brusqueness and an almost contemptuous mobilisation of the life force were part of the fabric of the place.

I was a veteran of pain by that time, as we all were, and had had various types of relationship with it. The best sort of relationship to have with pain is a contemplative one, when the pain itself is constant, and distance from it can be maintained by homespun meditation and yoga breathing. Then it’s easy to remember that pain is unreal, and the ‘I’ which burns underneath everything is made of a substance impervious to it.

At other times the pain pounced without warning, when for instance Mum was doing her Noh-drama rough-housing and my back clicked. Then the relationship was necessarily confrontational, until I could bring my thoughts under control. But this was the first time that a person had intruded on my relationship with pain. This was my first experience of pain with an agency. Pain with an agent: cruelty. Miss Krüger claimed an obscene intimacy, by watching us in our pain, and making us watch her watching. It hadn’t been cruel when Dad had gone on reading his paper when I fell over practising my walking — all he wanted was for me not to be in difficulties, and the closest he could get to that goal was refusing to acknowledge them, absenting himself from the scene. That wasn’t cruel, but this was. This was cruelty itself.

Miss Krüger’s solo pool sessions were mainly about power, and her group lessons were about pain, pain that was distilled and extracted from us for another person to consume. Ankylosed joints were being asked to take our weight without other means of support. It was no different from getting people with freshly broken ankles to walk on them. One day Geraldine bit quite deeply into her tongue, trying not to scream. The sight of blood seemed to sober Miss Krüger up. It may even have frightened her. It’s possible that she was squeamish — an odd characteristic in a sadist, but not unheard-of. Some of the blood got onto her smock, and she was very distressed by that, less by where it had come from, I suppose, than where it had got to. The violation of the proper order wasn’t blood dripping from a child’s chin but the same substance compromising a uniform, contaminating the wearer.

It may be, though, that there was a part of Miss Krüger which didn’t consent to her actions, and which was suddenly made aware that things had got out of hand. The dream of cruelty can become too real even for the person who is making it happen. For a while Krüger certainly watched herself. She eased up on us for a bit — she was almost like a real physio. And then she started all over again. It was stronger than her. It was the deepest part of her, and the part of her that did not consent to it was effectively smothered, or held under the surface of some interior pool until it stopped struggling.

Deep down she wanted to save me

In the pool Miss Krüger could almost have been modelling herself on the bogus priest in that rather scary film Night of the Hunter , who has love tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, HATE on the other. In Miss Krüger’s case the words appearing in phantom form on the knuckles of her clean, well-cared-for hands would have been DROWN and SAVE, perhaps with a question mark — SAVE? — to make the symmetry perfect. Even when she was pressing down on my chest with one hand, after all, she was continuing to support me with the other. Otherwise I would have sunk like a gasping stone. Perhaps the whole ritual was about her and not us at all. Perhaps it was more to do with frustration than cruelty. It may be that deep down she wanted to save me, and how could she do that without drowning me a bit first?

The other part of her programme, though, the agony ballet in group physiotherapy sessions — I can’t devise any nuanced reading of that. That was just a routine of atrocity.

And still we failed to realise we were being tortured. I’m not sure we ever really got the message, as a group. We never talked about it. We weren’t attuned to our own violation. In the culture of the time, the real danger to children wasn’t abuse but spoiling. The fear wasn’t that children might be cruelly treated but that they might not learn manners. They might cry themselves to sleep after torture by physio, but at least they would write proper thank-you letters, a minimum of three paragraphs long, to relatives they rarely saw, for presents they hadn’t liked.