Graham Swift - Shuttlecock

Of course, there is something terribly perfunctory, terribly pointless and mechanical about these twice-weekly visits. Sometimes I think it is not a man who walks or sits beside me, but some effigy I push and trundle about on a wheeled trolley, and it is I who am the deranged one for imagining this dummy is really alive, is my own father. When we sit on our bench (we have our favourite one, beneath a cedar tree) there is this feeling of hopeless pantomime. But then, on the other hand, there is so much to be said , so much to be explained, understood and resolved between us. It is odd, but until Dad ceased to speak I never had this need to talk to him. And because Dad does not answer back, because he neither hinders nor encourages whatever I say, I use him as a sort of confessional. I go to Father to say things I would never say anywhere else. (Perhaps I am the deranged one, after all.)

Tonight, for example, I said: ‘The boys have been bad again this week. Trouble-making, insolent. What’s wrong with them, Dad? I’ve been down on them again, and I’ve been bullying Marian and I’ve threatened to take back our television. And I don’t mean any of it, not really, though I’m going to go through with it.…’ Dad looks in front of him, as if he is looking at some phenomenon in the middle distance which only he has noticed. His eyebrows are thick; pale brown hairs mixed with grey. The little furrows above his straight nose, the firm set of his lips suggest some inscrutable resolution. His hands rest on his knees, and now and then they move automatically, rubbing the cloth of his trousers. Between the knuckles on the first finger of his right hand is the little bluish scar where I bit him when I was a boy. ‘What do you say?’ I ask. ‘Nothing, eh?’ For, even after two years, I still treat Dad’s silence as if it is some quirky thing of the moment and not a permanent fact. And even after two years, because I can’t help feeling that Dad’s silence is some punishment, some judgement against me, I sometimes say to him, in all ingenuousness: ‘Please Dad, please. Speak to me. Explain.’

It’s peaceful in the hospital grounds these spring evenings, as the light fades and the more disturbed patients are ushered inside and put to bed. In some ways I would rather be there, sitting with Dad under the cedar tree, than in my own back garden at home, or even with Marian feeding the ducks on the common. The hospital is like an old red-brick country house of another age, set amidst trees. Except for the blue and white notices, the modern extensions and the iron bars across the lower windows, you wouldn’t know. There are rose beds, yew walks, ornamental ponds and the sort of sculptural trees (cedars, maples, copper beeches) that you associate with private estates. All this is surrounded by a high brick wall; and the hospital grounds themselves are set within fields and woodland, though the suburbs of South London are less than a mile away. It’s a strange thing that we put mad people in these walled-in parks, as if we recognize that though they have to be confined they need to rub against nature. But then, as I’ve said, the people in mental hospitals aren’t mad, no — or if they behave like mad people, this is only what you’d expect in such a place — so there seems nothing abnormal about it.

Since I’ve been visiting Dad I’ve been making my own private study of the inmates. I cannot decide, still, whether they are prisoners or whether in some way, unlike you or me, they have broken free. Don’t we all, secretly, want to have their privileges? The hospital staff cheerfully condone behaviour that elsewhere would, to say the least, be frowned upon; and the same indulgence is somehow expected from visitors. It’s like entering a foreign country where you must bide by the native customs. So when you see a man walking down a corridor with what looks like — and, indeed, it is — a turd in his hand — you say nothing. Or when a figure, in an apparently drugged lethargy, at one end of the ward, suddenly starts to beat his head, in archetypal fashion, against the metal bars of a bed-frame, you do not stop and stare.

Only once have I seen the hospital staff perturbed on behalf of their visitors’ sensibilities. This was almost a year ago, a Sunday afternoon, when the weather was especially hot. The inmates were scattered over the lawns, some lying in little groups, some sitting with visiting relatives, some sprawled alone, in shady places, fast asleep. Some of them wore handkerchiefs with the corners tied in knots over their heads as sun-hats, and this fashion seemed to have caught on, like the crazes which sometimes sweep through children’s playgrounds, so that the only activity seemed to be the appropriating of handkerchiefs, the making and trying-on of the finished caps. The nursing staff, with their white jackets, were also lounging drowsily on the grass, and nobody seemed to mind their apparent non-vigilance. I was sitting with Dad, not on our usual bench under the cedar — somebody had got there first — but on one of the five or six benches ranged in front of the rose beds. This is a popular place for visitors, and on fine Sunday afternoons each rose-bowered bench is occupied by a patient and usually a middle-aged or elderly couple. Some of these visitors are often quite smartly dressed — like the sedate old couples I see sometimes watching the bowls matches on Clapham Common — the women in pastel suits, hats and white gloves, the men in linen jackets. And I swear they come on these visits because they actually enjoy it — a day out to some exclusive private garden.

In the midst of this general relaxation I suddenly noticed — several other eyes must have noticed it too, but the odd thing was that this event went, at first, quite unregistered — that one of the patients on the edge of a group away to our right was removing his clothes. He was a tall, gaunt man — over seventy, I would have said — with white hair, in a grey hospital suit. Before anyone made a move to stop him he had taken off not only his suit but his underwear as well. An attendant stood up, shouted at him, and immediately the patient broke into a loping run, not, it seemed, to escape pursuit, for his run had nothing urgent about it, but for some peculiar, cryptic purpose of his own. He ran, at about fifteen yards’ distance from us, right in front of our line of benches, with the aim, perhaps, of reaching the ornamental pond to our left; but before he could do so two chasing attendants closed on him.

Now all this could have been, in one sense, highly comical. But the man’s bony, yellowish body, his wide-open mouth as he ran, his shrivelled genitalia bobbing up and down, made you think — I don’t know how to put it — of something really terrible, not amusing at all. And this fact seemed to be endorsed by the reactions of the nursing-attendants. As they walked the patient back to his clothes they did not attempt to laugh the matter off. The mood of the sunny afternoon had changed. A third attendant ran up with a blanket to cover the man. They all looked apologetic, ashamed — here where there was so much mental nakedness — as if they had allowed us visitors to witness something unthinkable. And the odd thing was that when I turned back again to Dad, whom I’d almost forgotten in the commotion, he was twisted round on the bench, his arms propped on the back-rest, his head turned away towards the roses so he could not see what was happening.

When Dad and I have sat for some minutes we get up and take a second stroll. This is part of the pantomime too. We walk round the pond and down the yew walk and back over the lawns to the ward. All this time, of course, Dad is utterly silent. As we walk across the trim grass in the hospital grounds I am reminded of how I used to trail behind Dad, lugging his bag of clubs, as a boy, on the golf course at Wimbledon. Every Sunday morning, after an early breakfast; the pigeons clattering out of the hawthorn bushes, the dew still glistening on the fairways. It was one of those gestures of kindness and good will I made only in the period when I had my hamster. I volunteered to be Dad’s caddy — no mean feat, when you consider the weight of a loaded golf bag, for a boy of ten. But I used to follow doggedly the little entourage that gathered round Dad at the club-house. They had names — I forget now, Arthur So-and-so, Harry Somebody — and they all had the confident, weathered looks of men who had had, as they used to say then, ‘good wars’ and become well set-up afterwards. Dad used to make a fuss of me in front of them and they’d tease me in return. Dad was proud of me; he could scarcely credit my new lease of good behaviour, and I don’t believe I ever knew him happier than during that time when I had Sammy. What changes that hamster brought about. But what I remember most about those mornings is the ‘Wwhack! Wwhack!’ of the drivers at the tee; the little jibing, tense remarks that followed, heads tilting to follow the ball; and Dad always getting the best score and no one seeming to mind a bit, as if it were a pleasure to lose to Dad. Dad lifting back his club for the next drive, his body poised, and sweeping it down as if he really meant to punish the little ball, to annihilate it, and the ‘Wwhack!’ as it struck; and you always knew it would never fail (‘Good shot!’ and Dad smiles, shielding his eyes); up, up, with a ‘whirr’ like some flushed game-bird, up, over the gorse and the silver birch and the yellow bunkers, and down again; eighteen times, hounding the ball mercilessly, masterfully, towards the distant flags.