Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

So many aspects of our lives at CRX were painful or humiliating that it was hard to be sure when something had no other purpose. Being photographed naked by Mr Fisk four times a year, for instance, was something I dreaded, since no one had taken the time to explain what it had to do with being ill, or how those photographs ended up being pored over by the medical staff. My sense of dread wasn’t nuanced enough to make a real distinction between Mr Fisk and Miss Krüger. It’s just that Miss Krüger’s visitations happened more often.

The whole doctrine of walking at any cost had the effect of making us feel our pain was beneath notice, so it was hard to be aware of the difference when it was being actively cultivated, when we were being mined for the pain we could be made to yield. One of the defects of the prevailing wisdom that you had to be cruel to be kind was that it masked so well those who were being cruel to be cruel. It’s hard even now to draw a meaningful line between a régime of obtuse doctrinaire rehabilitation and straightforward abuse. This was a characteristic of the system which Miss Krüger shrewdly exploited. Even the authorised therapies prided themselves on ignoring the desires of the patient.

I can’t answer for anyone else, but it never occurred to me to grass Miss Krüger up to Heel. That wasn’t a thinkable option, it was strictly taboo in the culture of the hospital. Even if I had been tempted, the timing wasn’t right. Sister Heel was full of budgie love and budgie thoughts. Charlie’s loving beak was pouring endearments in her ear which would drown out any complaints.

I did worry, though, about Mary, and whether her short life had included episodes of torture in the pool. She had gone up on pointes with the rest of us in group sessions, but I didn’t know about the pool. I tried to remember if she had talked about Miss Krüger, but if she had I had already forgotten. I told myself that she couldn’t have sat there so happily, elaborating schemes for raffles, on the last day we spent together, if the pool had meant pain and horror to her, as it already did, partly, for me. She had a very forgiving nature, but forgiving Miss Krüger without making a protest would have been a crime against herself.

Couldn’t bear to see children suffer

With a bona fide sadist on the premises, it seems odd that we had any fear left over for anyone else. It was Ivy who had first told me stories about Vera Cole. I’m certain that she believed what she was telling me. She was passing on fears that she shared, not infecting me with something to which she was immune.

Vera was a lady who killed children. The story always went that she’d been seen just lately in the hospital, looking through a list of names she held in her hands. She was very smartly dressed in a fur coat and wore gloves. She wasn’t heartless, it was just the opposite. She couldn’t bear to see children suffer. She wanted them to be out of their pain, and so she slit their throats and drank their blood. We all believed absolutely in Vera Cole. There were even a couple of cadet nurses who talked about her. Of course they seemed old to us, but cadet nurses were hardly older than children themselves.

I wonder if there was some tiny basis in truth behind the story. Perhaps there really was a Vera Cole in the newspapers at that time, or someone with a similar name, who’d been involved in a child’s death with a hint of mercy killing. I can imagine someone like Wendy embroidering a few nasty extra touches — she maintained, for instance, that it was boys that made Vera Cole so sad, and that she got into bed with them for a special kiss before she ended their pain. Still, I don’t think any of us had the imagination to make the whole thing up from scratch. The details about the clothes make me wonder if there isn’t an echo of Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians . The book, of course. The film hadn’t happened yet.

So we could talk for hours amongst ourselves about the danger we were in from Vera Cole, who had been seen in the WVS canteen only the other day, but we said nothing about the sadist into whose hands we were passed on a regular basis. It complicated things that Miss Krüger was German. I had been brought up with a strong anti-Teutonic reflex, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Dad was always saying that the only good German was a dead German, and hadn’t he done his bit in the War to produce exactly that improvement of character? But if Germans were inherently cruel and evil, then we couldn’t be surprised by Miss Krüger’s actions. In fact it seemed obvious that if a German physio had been hired, then it was to do precisely what Miss Krüger was doing.

We didn’t have the independence of mind to notice that certain things only happened when Miss Krüger was in sole charge of us, when no one else was in the physiotherapy room or the hydrotherapy pool. An outsider might have thought it significant that although we were competitive about our autograph books, as about everything else in our rather restricted world, none of us asked Miss Krüger to sign them, but that was the only ripple which showed even faintly on the surface.

You say nugget here

Sarah had been very kind to me after Mary died. She told me once about guardian angels, and how we all had one. She was sure that Mary had been made a guardian angel, but it would be selfish to want to know whose.

In fact if I had a guardian angel on those premises it was Sarah herself. She watched over me and helped me protect myself when my home-conditioned reflexes let me down. At home Mum sometimes let me have one of her favourite chocolates as a special treat. At CRX similar sweets turned up in the communal confectionery hoard. When I was asked which ones I wanted, I said, ‘I’d like some nougat, please,’ pronouncing it ‘noo-gah’. Almost before I had said it Sarah made a warning hiss and muttered urgently from the side of her mouth, ‘You say nugget here,’ before Wendy could get wind of my latest poshie blunder.

As we all grew up, Wendy’s weak points became easier to notice. She was invincibly ignorant — not stupid by any means, but very badly informed. She thought, for instance, that the sun was only as big as it looked. Which meant it was as big as a farthing. I knew from Arthur Mee’s book that the sun was 93 million miles away, and I made my case in the strongest terms. I also moved a coin away from her and asked how big it looked now.

Wendy didn’t exactly cave in, but she changed her story. She maintained that you couldn’t possibly see something that was so far off, but she did allow the sun a little discreet expansion. The sun was now as big as Ward Two — not Ward One, but as big as Ward Two. Which was, admittedly, the larger of the two wards. But not of cosmic dimensions. I wished that I could bring The World We Live In into the ward, to have Arthur Mee back me up, but I didn’t trust anyone, patients or nurses, with anything precious.

Sex was another area of intellectual vulnerability for Wendy. Wendy was adamant that when a lady had a baby it came out of her belly button. There was consistency to her theory, since she thought a man made a baby by putting his willy ‘in a lady’s belly button’ in the first place, but I had an eloquent supporter on my side. I didn’t even need to go into detail, because Sarah Morrison had a book. Muzzie must have been very advanced to supply such a thing. Sarah didn’t contradict Wendy directly, she was too politic for that. Instead she just read aloud from her book: ‘When humans mate, they lie on their sides facing each other …’ Funny that there was no leeway in her book for missionaries and their positions.

It was sweet enough that Wendy was too dim to know about tailies and pockets. Even better that the street arab of the ward, our resident guttersnipe, had fallen back on the word ‘lady’. She went all posh herself, when she was threatened and flustered.