Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Except that the move got mixed up with other things. Sarah told me that when the nurses were changing Ivy’s knickers, there was yellow sticky stuff in them, which meant her periods were starting. This held terror for me. I didn’t want my periods to come. My taily had been developing its own ideas about what to do, and I was frightened that sticky stuff would come out of it, maybe blood. Nearly everything else about me seemed to be abnormal, so I couldn’t take anything for granted. The most surprising thing, really, would be for me to follow the standard pattern.

I asked Sister Heel if I would be allowed to stay on Ward Two, or if this was all a trick to move me to a men’s ward. She could normally be relied on to tell the truth, but she hardly seemed to hear me. She told me she had been a nurse for a long time. She thought this would be a good time to retire. Her voice was unusually soft, as if she was already retiring in instalments. It felt as if she was washing her hands of me.

Then when we were safely established in Ward Two I learned something about the move that made it much more serious. Ward One was being turned into a maternity ward, yes, fine. People had babies, I knew that. People had babies all the time. Mum was going to have a baby too — that I knew. She’d told me about it, I had it in the back of my mind. She wanted to have a little girl. Perhaps it would happen this time. I didn’t see anything wrong in that. A baby girl might make her happy. I didn’t have strong objections.

It was putting all the information together that made things unbearable. All the little propositions combined into a terrible theorem. Mum was going to go into Ward One to have her new baby.

There was something primal about my revulsion, no question of that. It made my skin crawl, the idea that Mum would be full of baby and so near. Couldn’t she go and have her stupid baby somewhere else?

There was also an intense social discomfort. The different rules of home and hospital meant that there was a dividing line between them on my mental maps. What linguists call an isogloss, a contour representing changes in language. On one side of this line was ‘toilet’, ‘close’ and jeering at the posh. On the other was ‘lavatory’, ‘stuffy’ and sneering at everything common. It was awkward enough when the two worlds were a few miles apart, but in a little while there were going to be only yards between them. The isogloss would slice right through CRX, the isogloss would hang above me like a curtain of ice, quivering in every breeze, as if it was going to fall on me and slice me in two. The ice curtain was horribly permeable to sound. If the hospital was quiet Mum would be able to hear me saying ‘toilet’ to the little ruffians I shared the ward with, and Wendy would be able to hear me talking posh to her ladyship. I’d catch it coming and going. I’d be mocked and chastised by all parties. It made me feel sick just thinking about it.

The obvious thing to say would be that I was jealous of the baby that was coming. That wasn’t how it felt. I wished the baby well. I wished the baby well away. It certainly didn’t occur to me that tailies must have been busy in pockets, one taily in particular. If I was blotting out an intolerable truth for the sake of my sanity, I did a good job.

It felt as if there was almost nothing in my life I could control, and now everything was bearing down on me. I was counted precocious by the modest standards of CRX, but I hadn’t read Edgar Allan Poe at this stage. If I had, I might have found my nightmare well expressed in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The walls gliding towards me, ready to crush me in my bed or push me into an abyss. The isogloss playing the part of the pendulum with its wicked blade, swishing in wider and wider arcs as it approached my bound body. Swishing one way with a whisper of ‘Nugget’. Swishing back with a murmur of ‘Noo-gah’.

I tried to explain to Sarah but for once she didn’t get it. She couldn’t imagine not wanting Muzzie near her, and wasn’t a baby the best news in the world? It’s reading too much into the past to suggest that this was the first time I wondered if she was keeping up with me mentally the way she had always done before.

When Mum was actually in the hospital waiting for the baby to come I was almost hysterical. Liquorice Allsorts were my only comfort. A nurse came to say that Mum was coming to say hello. I couldn’t bear it. I tried to scramble off the bed to intercept her. Whatever my joints felt about it, I wanted to totter down the corridor to head her off before she got to Ward Two. The nurse told me to lie down and be patient. Everything was fine and my mum was on her way.

Then she came in, with the glow that pregnancy can give, eerily amplified in her case so that she seemed unnaturally calm and loving. Not herself at all. The nurse said, ‘Doesn’t your mum look well?’ Yes she did, but it didn’t suit her. It wasn’t her. The baby had put something strange inside her.

She asked me how I was and she called me ‘darling’ — Gran’s word, but with its briskness replaced by something tender. ‘How do you like your mum coming to stay in your hospital? Isn’t it great fun?’

I couldn’t speak. To speak in full hearing of both Mum and the cruel girls on the ward, to choose between pretending to be common and remembering to be posh, was not something I could do. All I could think of to do was to cough and mumble, ‘Sore throat,’ while Mum and the nurse looked at each other at a loss. No wonder they were baffled. I’m baffled myself when I look back. I was a boy whose body was distorted by an illness that would never go away, I was living in a hospital, and here I was transparently faking a trivial ailment. One thing I had no experience of was pretending to be ill. Funny that I made such a fuss.

Disastrous convergence

When the baby was born I did my best to prevent the disastrous convergence of the two worlds that I tried to belong to, by saying that Mum would be tired out and it would be better if I went to see her in my old ward rather than have her come to my new one. Luckily childbirth was still treated in those days as an illness in itself, and new mothers were discouraged from putting their feet to the floor for some time after the birth. Then they really did feel ill and weak when they finally got up. So bed rest came to my rescue for once. That was the only time it did me any good.

I brought with me the game of Flying Hats I’d won in a competition in the hospital. I don’t even remember what the competition was, and the game wasn’t really what I had my eye on in the matter of prizes. I wanted the loom that was also on offer. Looms were felt to be beneficial at CRX, in some way therapeutic, and I would have liked to have a go on one, but this particular model was unwieldy. It needed two hands to work it. It was described as ‘easy to operate’, but it was only easy to operate if you used both your hands. It required considerable motor skills to work it, which made it a completely perverse prize in this context. Presumably someone had one to spare and was getting rid of it, in a nice way.

It wasn’t nearly as good as the special loom Wendy Keach had, whose shuttle you could flip over one-handed, but she wasn’t about to let me have a go on that. In the end I settled for the Flying Hats. There’s a picture of Lord David Astor bending down to give me my prize. He owned the Observer newspaper. He didn’t like Cliveden very much, I don’t think. He certainly didn’t spend much time there.

Mum and I played Flying Hats as best we could, though I was still as much of a Dropper as I had been when Miss Reid gave me that name, after having to pick up so many pens and pencils. Mum wasn’t supposed to move more than the minimum, so if we dropped hats a nurse had to retrieve them. It’s not a very thrilling game at the best of times. At the end of it, though, Mum hugged me, in the barely-touching way she’d mastered by then, and said, ‘We do have fun, don’t we, John?’ It was so out of character it gave me the shivers. Everyone kept on and on about how she glowed, but what if I didn’t like the new light in her eyes?