Authors: Robert McCrum
Several months later, when I came to read
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
I encountered, in Jean-Dominique’s Bauby’s description of his appearance after
his
terrible stroke, the actualization of my worst fears at this time:
Reflected in the windowpane I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil before I realized it was only mine.
In fact, many of the people who came to visit remarked on how well, and young, I looked, comments which seemed, to me, cruelly at odds with my inner feelings.
Today I had routine physiotherapy in the morning with John Marsden, then I went across to the Middlesex, and had the camera shoved down my throat. First they sprayed my throat with a kind of cocaine substitute or substance designed to freeze the throat. Then they give you a mild shot of anaesthetic to lull you, and then they stick a camera smeared with jelly down your throat, and then they film you from inside the throat, or rather, they film the back of the heart from inside the throat.
The doctors said I was a good patient, and I certainly did my best to put up with the pain and difficulty of the operation as easily as possible.
It was nice to go to the Middlesex Hospital by ambulance and see something of the outside world, to see the people walking along the street and the life outside, the life I have been missing these last several days.
In the evening Sarah read to me from ‘Narnia’, and then we had a glass of wine, and then we had a visit from Roger Alton, of the
Guardian
, who was very cheery.
Jeremy Paxman sent me some champagne with an amusing letter, which was kind, and I also had a letter from Ish [Kazuo Ishiguro] to say how glad he was to see me much better than he’d expected. This seems to be the general reaction from visitors, who expect the worst.
Sarah took me into the square this morning, where it suddenly occurred to me that the russet brick of the National is the same russet brick as the russet brick of Pont Street and the Cadogan Hotel, a kind of Devonshire red, and of course built at about the same time. I
found myself wondering about the architect involved (and the brickworks) and then my thoughts spun on to Oscar Wilde’s arrest at the Cadogan. When I analysed this to myself I decided that it was because I felt as though I too had been arrested. On the way out we passed a man with his head stitched like a second-hand football the whole way round, but he was actually walking, and seemed to be okay. You do see the most extraordinary sights in the National.
In the afternoon I watched the VJ victory parade on television – Ghurkas and veterans all in their sixties and seventies, like my father. The thing about the veterans of the Second World War is the self-satisfaction they have, the look of real survivors from a world our world has forgotten. They seem curiously proud, though presumably their memories are full of pain and sorrow. You don’t have to be in your seventies, either. How often as schoolboys did we parade in front of war memorials with the ‘Names of the Fallen’. I realize as I watch that this is the world I grew up with at school, as a child or as a boy – a world of Spitfires and Colonel Bogey and American jeeps, Lancaster bombers and khaki, and the many war stories from people who had survived. To see the troops marching down the Mall was to see an empire in full retreat, oddly enough, and to see eccentric items of clothing one hasn’t seen for years, topis and khaki felt hats and strange uniforms with brassy medals, full of memories but meaningless too, to a new generation. As I watched this parade the room was filled with the smell of cigar-smoke from the visiting Arabs in the hallway outside.
In the evening I read the first two chapters of Reg Gadney’s new novel, but I still find I can’t concentrate for more than 30–45 minutes at a stretch.
I can say now that I think he’s going to come through this. I spoke to a friend of Steve and Cynthia’s who told me about his stroke at the age of fifteen – one of dozens of accounts I have heard first and second hand – he was totally paralysed and couldn’t speak or remember words, and now his foot doesn’t flex on its own and his hand won’t co-operate, but that’s all. I can live with that sort of thing, but I feel this is a long slow march through a very humid jungle, full of insects. As Christine [
Robert’s mother
] said: upwards all the way, but with jagged edges. Robert is becoming much stronger and moving his leg, but still not walking. His speech often sounds almost normal, but he is not talking a lot, and not quickly – I imagine because he is tired, but I am really not sure. He has a nagging, persistent fear that the change will be permanent. He is trying hard to be cheerful and succeeding mostly, but I can tell that he often feels quite blue. The most he will say, though, is that he feels fed up. I am slogging along, still exhausted, still waking up feeling worse than I did when I went to sleep. Every day no matter what, I wake up at five to seven. The heat is very wilting, so the windows are wide open. The noises, the cars, the traffic feel as if they are coming from the room. I am wearing swidgy yellow ear plugs and feeling ever weirder. Sara Mosle will be here this weekend, a wonderful help. It will be so nice to see her and it means I don’t have to go home to an empty house at night. My parents-in-law reported yesterday that Dr Lees, the cool neurologist, spoke excitedly at Robert’s progress, and said that at this rate he would be walking again soon. I assumed he wouldn’t have said it unless it was very much the case, because from what I can tell, these guys
are cautious and conservative and go far on the worst case side in making predictions.
At ten o’clock we went into the square, with Sarah pushing me as usual, and read newspapers until driven indoors by a gang of evangelicals singing hymns into a microphone, karaoke-style, on the other side of the square. Then we had lunch at the Queen’s Larder, where there is a sign saying that the ‘queen’ of the Square is Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife. Apparently when mad King George was in hospital here, during his time with Dr Willis in the 1770s, she used to keep delicacies for him in the pub (which became known as the Queen’s Larder) and would visit him here. When I think of George and his wife I think of his delightful ‘Mrs King’. After lunch I sunbathed in the wheelchair, and then fell asleep. Later, we went back to the room and I slept early.
On the whole, I do not remember my dreams at this time, and despite the extraordinary upheaval in my brain I cannot report any particularly vivid dream activity. If there is an exception to this observation it is that I had several sexual dreams, mostly adolescent fantasies. On several pages in my diary I find now that I’ve written, ‘During my sleep I dreamed of sex once more.’
R. is beginning to clamour for big, fat non-fiction books, biographies and the like. ‘Narnia’ isn’t doing it for him any more. He enjoyed the nostalgia of
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
, but reacted with highbrow
indignation to
The Magician’s Nephew.
These are good signs, I think. Everyone keeps asking me if he is going through personality changes. Quite a scary question, because the truth is I’m not sure: is he impatient and peremptory because of the combination of his normal self (before I came along) and the frustration of his condition, or because of a neurological problem?
Several visitors wanted to know if I had ‘changed’, a question that often came with enquiries about religion, and even now, two years later, it’s a question I find hard to answer honestly. At one obvious level I have changed significantly; at another I feel myself to be just that: my self. For a while I had a strong fantasy of renewal and regeneration, and for a while it seemed as if I could begin my life again. Now, I know that this is just that, a fantasy, though a powerful one none the less. In one respect, however, I did change. I became less intolerant of difficulty.
I have been nearly a month ‘inside’ today. Time has dragged very slowly, but I’m getting used to this slow passage of time, as I am to my situation.
My thoughts are still of the past, and of the ‘truth’ of the past. In some ways, I realize, this sequestration is parallel to the time I spent alone at school after my operation in nineteen-sixty-whatever it was. One thing that strikes me is that the Faber staff are being incredibly kind to Sarah, and that she and they have become friends, which is really rather nice. One of the great things about Sarah’s having to look after herself in the outside world while I am here is that she meets my friends on her own terms rather than meeting them
through me, which is probably a good way of doing things, and a good way for her to establish her own identity in London.
Last night I watched a programme about punks on the television. This brought back so many memories of first coming to London in the seventies, of living in the North End Road, near the Nashville Rooms, during the best/worst of Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. It’s very odd how so much of the past seems to be coming back at the moment, at a time when I have so much time to think about the past and reflect on it all.
Then, a visit from Adam Phillips [
friend and psychoanalyst; author of
On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored], who has a quite brilliant bedside manner, as I suppose he should. We talked about what it means to lose independence, especially for those of us who cultivate the idea of it; what it means to be a patient, and what it means to lie still in a bed for weeks, with no means of walking off our anxieties. Apparently, Adam says, Coleridge writes in his notebooks somewhere that convalescence is the time when we see the world the sharpest. He asked what I was reading, and if I was depressed. We talked about Africa … [
illegible
] … punishment, and the idea that one deserves bad luck. We left it that I would call him if I wanted to see him, and I made a note to do this. He asked if I felt that I would be forgotten, and I said that I did, occasionally. He asked about my dreams, and I explained that they were often very vivid, but couldn’t at that moment recall any dreams of special interest. Adam recommended reading Oliver Sacks’
An Anthropologist on Mars.
Eventually he left, having calmed me down considerably.
Now it’s lunchtime, and blazing hot outside. The drought continues. I still find myself longing for a nice
small war on television. I explained to Adam my obsession with food programmes and the news. Also nature television. I can watch cookery programmes like
Ready Steady Cook
for hours, and take much pleasure in imagining the taste of the food, a taste that is now denied. I also like watching nature and travel programmes, and luxuriate in the view of the countryside one gets from television. This is another reason for watching Channel Four, which seems to me to be vastly superior to the BBC.
I’ve come to realize what it means to be an ill person, to be stuck in one place and unable to enjoy the world outside. Adam and I also discussed the way in which most doctors don’t have a clue. He says that if you pay for health care and go on the private side, as I have, they are much more likely to discuss your chances, the prognosis and so forth, than if you go on the NHS, where they won’t tell you a thing. Doctors have their professional pride: because they often don’t know the causes of stroke, and its potential outcome, they refuse to be drawn into a discussion of what’s happened. Doctors have their fantasies of omnipotence, too.
Being a patient means having time to think, time to brood. It’s a bit like being a baby again. All you can do while you are lying there is to organize your thoughts and make the most of your time, and of course, being alone in hospital (like prison) is not the same as solitude. There are constant interruptions from nurses and so forth, and there is nothing willed about it at all. You have to submit to the experience.
Now that I’m scheduled to go to the Devonshire [
Hospital
] for rehab, I am starting to feel very fond of,
1. the ward, and 2. the nurses. Julia came to say goodbye today, and said that I would soon be walking back in to see her. I’ll certainly miss her, and Hanifa, and Mamie, to whom I have become very attached.
The press today is obsessed by the drought, which seems to be raging up and down the country. One of the worst things about this illness is that I shall have missed the best summer of my lifetime.
I have now been here almost a month. The most important thing is to explain the mood from day to day. Today my mood is much better. I saw Emma [
my assistant
] and Belinda [
the managing editor
] from Faber’s this morning, and we chatted happily. This morning I had a new physiotherapy session, and the nurse said I would be going to the Devonshire on Friday. I am looking forward to this greatly.
In the afternoon I had a succession of visits from friends … [
illegible
] … ending with my dear brother Mark. I felt very cheered up by all these visits. [
My friend
] A. brought some soup, and cracked jokes, and stayed for ages, and was delightful. There’s no doubt that visitors make a huge difference, and make the time pass more easily, though too many at once can be a strain and not enjoyable. People say you should visit the sick. That’s true, but you should not drive them demented. I can be lonely here, but I also enjoy my solitude.
There’s also the question of visitors’ etiquette. When do they leave, and how soon? It is up to them to say when they are going to go, but I have developed a way of saying ‘Thank you and goodbye’, as a way of preserving my energy.