The Dun Cow Rib Page 10
After my birth she remained in hospital for three months, but even after being allowed home she suffered constant breathlessness and lack of energy. By 1950, the year Russell Brock and Paul Wood started working together at the Brompton, her disease had rapidly worsened. My mother was seriously ill. She was closing down. The problem, as yet formally undiagnosed, was the gradual malfunction of her mitral valve. The heart muscle was struggling badly. She was at imminent risk of total cardiac failure. Without urgent surgery she would die.
* * *
It is difficult now to piece together the events of the next few years. Up to the age of five, of course, I remember virtually nothing, but what I can recall very vividly was the sense that something was wrong, or perhaps I should say missing. In truth, of course, my mother was missing – not all the time, but regularly – and even when she was at home and with us, she was often unwell. She got up late and was forced to lie down in the middle of the day; she couldn’t carry her small children or run and play with us. Whispered parental anxieties framed our days, and the coming and going of doctors was an accepted feature of our lives.
She would go away for several days, but we were never told where. ‘Mummy will be home soon,’ became an apologetic mantra wheeled out over and over again. Either silenced by worry or just an Edwardian ineptitude with small children, our father was studiously mute. It was as though the grown-ups had enjoined a conspiracy of non-explanation – that children didn’t need to know. It was all we got, and it hurt without ever knowing why. A hollow emptiness consumed me when she was absent, and when she came home I lived out a fear, like a perpetually nagging ache, that someone would whisk her away again. I had no concept of how very ill she was, but the dark spectre of the Dun Cow rib would not go away. Somewhere deep inside, in some hidden recess of my collective consciousness, a primeval animal instinct was nurturing the seeds of mistrust.
Then came the sudden and unwelcome event that would harpoon itself into the delicate flanges of my memory forever – school, boarding school. I was still only five. Every morning I sneaked into her bed to cuddle up to my mother, the scented sanctum of ultimate warmth and security. The memory vivid. She had hugged me tight, unwittingly increasing the force of its impact. ‘We’ve arranged for you to go to an exciting new school – a boarding school.’ There was a tremor in her voice, an uncharacteristic hesitation despite the forced smile and the hug. I am sure she was clinging to me as much to conceal her own swirling emotions as it was a desperate attempt to shore me up.
I knew well enough what school was. But boarding? ‘What’s a boarding school?’ I asked from the echoing chasm of innocence. She did her best to soften it but the answer came as a shock. ‘You’ll have your own bed with friends of your own age in a dormitory.’ Another new word. ‘It’s just a big bedroom,’ she tried again.
I had never given any thought to sleeping anywhere except at the Manor House or at home, in my own room, with my sister in hers across the landing and my parents at the end of the passage. Even being taken on shopping expeditions to buy uniform and equipment did nothing to help me understand that from now on, aged barely six, for three-quarters of the year I would be living somewhere else with complete strangers. Nor did I have the faintest clue that I was being sent away because she was going to London for someone to slice open her heart with a scalpel and that there was an odds-on chance she might never come back.
‘The boy will be fine,’ my father said.
* * *
It would be years before I knew, far less understood, what my parents had gone through. Now, with the benefit of access to her letters – carefully guarded secrets not discovered until after my father’s death – I have been able to piece things together.
Death from rheumatic heart disease was commonplace in the ’40s and ’50s and it was widely known that the route to surgical correction was studded with the gravestones of those who never made it. Our parents will have been in no doubt how fraught with complications the new and revolutionary procedures were. My mother writes in one of her letters to my father, ‘Dr Wood has told me that the chances of a severe stroke are very high.’ Paul Wood’s reputation for plain speaking preceded him; he had left her in no doubt.
Two letters, written immediately before that first surgery, lay out her fortitude and her fears. The first, written from her Brompton Hospital bed on 5 September 1953, twenty-four days before the operation:
My dearest Christopher,
I slept better last night. I really feel happier knowing that possibly something can be done – what about you? I hope your faith doesn’t allow you to have fears about my making the grade! Nothing will be done until it is all thoroughly chewed over. Mr Brock will see you and put all his cards on the table – I thought it was all going to be so simple, but apparently not so – well, we’ve come so far, we will just have to face this. Paul Wood is coming to speak to me on Tuesday. I shall know much more then.
There followed an unexpected insight into both my mother’s endlessly caring personality and a gentle sideswipe at my father’s inadequacy with his children:
Felt rather worried after Saturday. I thought dear Jay sounded so tired and sad. Give him lots of love, darling, he seems such a tough little guy, but he needs lots of love – an occasional cuddle from Daddy won’t do him any harm.
The second letter, written in fountain pen in her elegantly fluid hand on the day of the operation, is much more revealing:
My own darling Christopher,
I can’t thank you enough for your wonderful words of encouragement. I feel wonderfully calm and am quite prepared for the pain I shall have to endure . . . I have everything on my side and so much to get well for – the best husband ever and our wonderful children. Thanks to God’s help and your great love, I have been able to face up to this thing. Alone I couldn’t face it. Never forget that I love you now – and always will. Helen.
8
Hampton House
We were twenty-two boys aged about six to eight, and a few dayboys – Daybugs – whom we boarders viewed as a wholly inferior caste. At eight years old we would be expected to ascend to the Junior School, a full-blown boarding prep school a quarter of a mile away down an avenue of ragged Scots pines. But at six, eight was still light years away, an unimaginable seniority I could only view with that hollowing-out dread of the deep unknown. By day and night the spectre of fear loomed unbidden in my heart. It surrounded me in every direction and was contagious. I could sense it in the other new boys’ faces: fear of older boys, fear of teachers, fear of being late or being in the wrong place or wearing the wrong clothes, fear of being laughed at, but the greatest fear of all was yet to come. It would be many weeks before it finally dawned that home would never be the same again.
His name was Bettesen, David Bettesen, if after all these years of neither remembering nor trying to I can scrape together such crumbling flakes of detail. We were required to use surnames only, but nicknames stuck best. I recall a timid and sensitive boy with a round button mouth and a hesitant smile that was always there, hovering around his lips, but which never quite made it to his cheeks. If I close my eyes I can see him clearly – a thatch of wheat-sheaf hair and pale blue questioning eyes behind wire-framed glasses, a troubled face where diffidence ruled over any hope of conviction. The sort of child you look at twice to make sure he’s all right. A boy without vice who wore his vulnerability like a delicate flower. We called him ‘Betty’.
We were new boys and immediate friends in an amity of torment, born of an unspoken but equally shared homesickness, a sickness that clamped down upon us like gathering storm clouds at nightfall and was still firmly parked on our chests when we awoke in the morning, an inner desolation that held us permanently teetering on the precipice of tears. Every night I fell asleep aware that in the next bed Betty was silently sobbing into his pillow, a choking intimacy of despair. It was a misery I felt keenly but was unable to evince by day with anything more than a perpetually repeating sigh and a long
ing I couldn’t revoke.
In my sponge bag my mother had lovingly placed a tiny white handkerchief with a lace border, dabbed with her one and only perfume, sandalwood with a note of hyacinth. She must have known I would be unhappy, but events had closed in on us all and given her no choice. Years later she told me that she’d felt a terrible traitor agreeing to send me away, an enforced betrayal wholly counter to her loving instincts. In bed I put that handkerchief under my cheek so that I could wallow in its fragrance. She and the scent permanently fused. It intensified the emotion, bringing it close to anguish. It was an unshielded, unadrenalined pain, fiercely resolute, which raged unchecked like a fever through every pore of my being. If I bit hard on my bottom lip I found that I could focus it, bringing myself to the very edge of crying out, and then, letting go, spinning briefly and blissfully into the surging wave of relief. I did it over and over again until exhaustion dragged me into unconsciousness. Sometimes it drew blood and I would awake to find the pillow spotted and smeared like a medieval bride’s nuptial sheet.
Betty’s bed was next to mine in the corner of a dormitory of ten uniformly black iron hospital beds with squeaky springs, bars and knobs like knuckles at the joints, head and foot, mattresses of bristly black horsehair unlike the hair on any horse I’d ever seen. On dark-stained floorboards they stood in two perfectly spaced rows of five beds, feet to feet like a ward, separated by a highly polished brown Lino aisle down the middle, at the far end a big cream-painted cast-iron radiator with sharp vertical ridges. In our leather soled house shoes we could sprint halfway down the aisle and then skid as if on skates, slamming right into the radiator. One afternoon Betty forgot that gym shoes wouldn’t slide. He was fast. His dash catapulted him head first into the radiator and smashed his glasses. Blood spurted out of the top of his head in a six-inch fountain. It wasn’t serious and he quickly recovered, but the image was permanently fixed. I’d never seen anything like that before.
Each bed was robed in a blanket of pillar-box red. These were topped with a travelling rug of our own. Some boys’ rugs were bright tartan, others of more sombre hue, mine a country weave of black and white hounds’ tooth, yet others of plain camel or grey herringbone. Every morning before breakfast we had to fold our rugs into a measured rectangular bolt across the foot of the bed, slippers placed with military precision beneath.
The school was run by a well-rounded lady in her forties called Mrs Warmley, who, all these years later, I still view among the angels with a disposition as sweet as a peach. I can see her now, a gently spoken soul with lines tickling the corners of her kind eyes, sympathy inscribed in runes, and a fizzing goldfish tank in her large study bedroom. Her overshot lower jaw seemed somehow to be detachable, to swivel sideways like a camel’s, clicking as she spoke. A man in RAF pilot’s uniform smiled from a photograph on her sideboard, but never any mention of Mr Warmley. We guessed he might have been killed in the war.
She had meticulously flowing handwriting, always with a Waterman’s green-and-gold-marbled fountain pen with royal blue ink; the pen vertically clipped to the front of her dress, nestling between her large baggy bosoms so completely that when she sat down it vanished altogether. It fascinated us. We giggled about it, waiting for it to pop out again. She taught us English and French. ‘Ou est ma plume?’ she would ask the whole class and we giggled again.
Before bed she read us the Chronicles of Narnia with her spectacles on the end of her nose, knitting as she read from a big winged armchair, needles and jaw gyrating and clicking in unison, fountain pen nowhere to be seen. Teeth cleaned, hair brushed, and in our dressing gowns and slippers, we sat cross-legged in a semi-circle on her carpet. Trenchard Minor was allowed to sit on a cushion. Later we learned he had just been circumcised. We called him ‘Snipit’. I imagined Mrs Warmley had written the chronicles herself with that fountain pen and I loved her for that. She made boarding slightly more tolerable. If it hadn’t been for Betty and Mrs Warmley, I would have run away.
We were nearest the dormitory door, Betty and I, beside the rows of pegs where our camel dressing gowns hung in more perfect spacing on either side of the door. A floorboard in the passage creaked as Miss Beech, tall and skinny, hollow cheeked and flat chested, hair in a mean knot at the back of her head, crept up to listen for talking after lights out. We dubbed her ‘Twig’. She was in charge of us juniors. She ruled our days and nights with malevolent and despotic zeal.
At the time we just accepted Twig as a hovering dread in our lives, an ever-present foreboding of trouble. It preceded her like a bad smell, there whether we deserved her ire or not. Looking back, I now feel a twilit glimmer of sympathy for her. In childhood or as a young woman I realise that life had dealt Muriel Beech a bum hand; she was plain and had learned it painfully when some acid circumstance had soured her against the world. We were her only outlet for that bitterness and she couldn’t conceal it. It seeped from every pore.
Beside the door, we were sentries. I could detect her shadow eclipsing the crack of light under the door. ‘Cave! Twig!’ flew round the dorm, whispered from bed to bed. If she heard us she burst in like a tidal wave, snapping the lights into dazzling glare and brandishing a gym shoe. ‘Out of bed!’ she’d bark. ‘You, you and you. Bend down and touch your toes.’ She spat out the words, seeming to pick her victims at random. Then she walloped them.
The rest of us lay and watched her swinging into the task. Thwaap! went the gym shoe, thwaap! thwaap! thwaap! onto small, tight, thinly pyjama’d buttocks. The boy’s sharp intake of breath at each blow, the leap back into bed and the struggle to hold back tears. Behind her glasses her eyes were cold and grey; the left one was a few degrees off kilter and wandered aimlessly so that you never quite knew where she was looking or whether it was you she was addressing. When she was angry it gyrated like an aspen leaf in a breeze, her whole unhappy presence shedding fear as a flower sheds scent.
If one of those eyes spotted someone’s slippers not placed correctly beside the bed leg she’d wallop him too. She picked on boys she didn’t like; Sutton got thrashed over and over again. When he contracted poliomyelitis and left, she switched her ire to Hobson. But she also had favourites, a goody-goody called Holdsworth whom we branded a sneak, and Shawcross, a small boy with blond curls and cinnamon freckles dusting the bridge of his nose. They never got beaten, wherever their slippers were.
We feared Twig. I was convinced she was Narnia’s White Witch in disguise. At night I imagined her riding in the sleigh, shrieking orders at the slavering wolves running alongside. She aroused in us dark and troubling emotions we had never encountered before. Hatred sprung sweet and shocking in such tender human breasts. We were too innocent to understand that her nocturnal assaults had little to do with discipline – her spinsterly frustrations made manifest and visited upon us in violent raids of spite.
Every night before lights-out we were made to kneel at our bedside and say our prayers while Twig stalked up and down the aisle peering to see if our eyes were closed. I prayed silently for deliverance, for Aslan to invoke the Deep Magic so that he could spring out from behind a rock with an ear-splitting roar clawing Twig to the ground, fangs plunging into her neck, blood squirting out of the top of her head like Betty’s.
Aslan, it seemed, might have been listening. Once, in the dead of night, a boy named Hewitt jumped out of bed, downed his pyjama bottoms and fired an uncontrollable explosion of diarrhoea into the middle of the Lino aisle. Wailing, tears flooding down his cheeks, he stood barefooted with his dung-drenched pyjamas around his ankles, surrounded by an expanding morass of evil-smelling excrement. Someone flicked on the lights. We sat up blinking and recoiling at the overpowering stench that quickly filled the dorm. ‘Better get Twig,’ they said.
She appeared in her flannel night attire with a woollen shawl thrown round her shoulders. The harsh light shone back from a greasy white cream applied liberally to her cheeks and brow, making her ashen and ghostly. We’d never seen her hair untied before, hanging in rag
ged cats’ tails onto the shawl. She looked older than usual and, for the first time, powerless. She gasped at the sight in front of her. ‘Stay where you are,’ she snapped at Hewitt. Then she turned and disappeared. He began to wail all over again.
Twig returned with Mrs Warmley in a long blue candlewick dressing gown, white curlers in her hair like breaking surf. ‘Get a bucket and a mop,’ she told Twig. ‘And you’ll need Jeyes Fluid.’ Then she took Hewitt by the hand, helped him step clear of his pyjamas, wrapped him in a towel and whisked him away. We could hear the bath running. Some minutes passed before Twig came back, now incongruously dressed in tracksuit bottoms, gumboots, rubber gloves and an apron, carrying two buckets of hot water and a mop.
By now we had woken up properly and the first glimmer of entertainment was rising within us like a winter dawn. We lay doggo and silent, our noses clenched into the top sheet like a row of Bedouin in a sandstorm. Were we really going to witness our nemesis reduced to cleaning up shit? The suspense was unbearable, gripped by agonies of delighted reckoning. Twig set to, clanking the bucket handles in ill-concealed disgust, down on her knees, hauling in the faecal mess with a towel and wringing it out in the hot water. Betty and I threw each other glances. Our faces creased and we sniggered. The acrid reek of Jeyes Fluid caught in our throats and slowly overcame the stench.
For twenty minutes, retching and recoiling, the subject of our direst loathing was utterly humiliated before our eyes. The force of the eruption had splashed Hewitt’s tartan rug and the end of his bed. She had to strip it back to the mattress, carrying the offending bedclothes away with her. We felt triumphantly bewildered, trapped between the urge to laugh out loud and jeer, and the fear of terrible retribution if we had. She avoided our eyes, only snarling ‘Go back to sleep’ as she swept out.