My Year Off (3 page)

The moment when J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan describes dying as ‘an awfully big adventure’ is a mawkish and embarrassing moment in an often mawkish and embarrassing play. Nevertheless, it’s an observation that contains a kernel of truth. When I analyse it now, I find that my own experience provides some intriguing, and probably misleading, answers to the enduring conundrum of our mortality.

In England, death is shrouded in Victorian euphemism. People do not ‘die’, they ‘pass away’; they are not ‘buried’ but ‘laid to rest’, and not with ‘flowers’ but ‘floral tributes’. For some, the only alternative response to this scary subject is the kind of flippancy, for ever associated in my mind with the works of P. G. Wodehouse, in which so-and-so ‘handed in his dinner pail’ or
‘fell off his perch’ and was now, as John Cleese puts it in that famous
Monty Python
sketch, ‘pushing up the daisies’, in a speech I cannot resist quoting:

Just as grief is the half-sister to rage, so laughter is grief’s twin brother. There can be something strangely uplifting about a funeral, a moment of catharsis in which we can also celebrate our continuing survival.

So I confess that my first reaction, as I came round in University College Hospital, but still drifting in and out of consciousness, was a kind of weird exhilaration.
Yes!
I had survived. I was not yet an ex-parrot. Lying naked under a pink blanket in the intensive care unit, wired up to the monitors, I was aware of being in the antechamber to the grave and even now, months later, I can still recall the eerie fascination of this experience and of having, by the greatest good fortune, returned to tell the tale. A sober assessment of my situation in the grim aftermath of what I was learning to call ‘my stroke’ soon tempered this mad euphoria. If I had known then what I soon came to discover about what the doctors were now referring to as ‘your stroke’, my relief might have been mixed with terror as well as gratitude.

Next to cardiac disease and cancer, stroke is the most common cause of death in the Western world and, oddly, a word that in medical circles is rarely attached to either a definite or an indefinite article. This fell noun
is also a term so commonly misapplied that, for very many people, it lacks a lethal connotation. Of those who survive the initial ‘insult’, about half will be left with permanent severe disability. The physical consequence of stroke is a horrifying catalogue of damage that includes personality changes, impaired sensation, paralysis, incontinence, visual or language problems, deafness, blindness, seizures, and even swallowing difficulties, the distressing manifestations of what the textbooks describe as ‘neurological deficits’. Approximately one third of those who suffer a stroke will die, often from a second or third subsequent assault on the neurological system.

I did not die, of course — and I was never in any pain — but, physically speaking, I’d been poleaxed. My left leg was immobilized and my left arm hung from its socket like a dead rabbit; the left side of my face, which drooped badly for about a week, felt frozen, as if Mr Glynn had just given it a massive Novocaine injection. I could not stand upright; my speech was slurred; to cope with my incontinence, my penis was attached to a Convene, a condom-like device that drained my urine into a plastic bag; every few hours a team of three nurses would turn me over in bed, as if I was a slow-cooking roast. In place of pain, there was an hallucinatory sense of detachment, and I was also oppressed with an overwhelming fatigue. The smallest thing left me wanting to lie down and go to sleep; the muscles on my left side were so weak that to sit in a chair — which I wasn’t able to do, even with three nurses to help me, for some days — was exhausting. I was, besides, terribly confused about what had happened, confused and stunned, though unimpaired, intellectually: my memory seemed to be functioning just fine and I had no difficulty in recognizing people who
came to see me, though I noticed that it sometimes took me a few moments to recall their names. On the other hand, I still have no recollection of where University College Hospital actually is, or how I got there, though I can recall the room and the cramped, sultry high summer atmosphere.

Of all the people who were so kind to me in those first hours, there was one nurse I came to think of as my guardian angel, a graduate trainee — I think — from Oxford with beautiful corn-coloured hair, a lovely smile and the most gentle manner of any nurse I’d experienced then or subsequently. ‘What’s your name?’ I mumbled through my frozen jaw, as she bent over my bed. ‘Whicker,’ replied the angel. Curious, I asked how she spelled that, and was told that ‘Wicce’ was a traditional Anglo-Saxon name, a tiny spark of English history which amid the bleeps and wires of twentieth-century medicine I found strangely comforting. After I was moved from University College Hospital I never saw Wicce St Clair Hawkins again, but for her sweetness towards me in those first few dreadful hours of consciousness in hospital, with the dawning recognition of profound physical catastrophe, I shall always feel intensely grateful.

Sarah arrived from San Francisco, white and hollow-faced with worry and loss of sleep. For the first week, she slept on a camp bed in the corner of my room, jumping up in alarm whenever I stirred in sleep, though I do not remember this. She had endured her own terrible drama en route. ‘Robert isn’t feeling very well,’ my mother had said, and her ominous telephone manner had led Sarah to believe, she told me later, that I was likely to die at any moment. In a daze she had got a flight to London, and had spent the eleven-hour trip huddled under a blanket, drinking shots of whisky. She
says she had never felt so alone as she did that night, in the darkened plane surrounded by people. At one point she turned in desperation to her neighbour. ‘Do you mind if I talk to you a moment?’ she said. ‘My husband’s just had a stroke.’ The woman looked at her. ‘I don’t know anything about strokes,’ she said, and went back to
Cosmopolitan
.

Sometimes, it seems that no one knows anything about stroke. The word itself sounds so inoffensive. As a verb, it’s a synonym for brush or sweep or caress. You ‘stroke’ a baby or a lover, and of course it’s also associated with idleness, as in ‘he never does a stroke of work’. And then again it’s linked, more accurately now, with old age, though even here it’s seen as a survivable affliction. History reminds us that both Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill functioned as, respectively, President and Prime Minister, after suffering mild strokes in old age. (Wilson’s, of course, was serious; he never really recovered from it and the United States government was effectively run, during the last years of his presidency, by his fierce wife, Edith.) Such behaviour would be unthinkable today — the media would not permit it — though until one of the world’s leaders suffers a serious stroke in office it’s likely that the public will remain, like the woman on the plane, ill-informed and largely indifferent. In Britain, the fact that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s father, Leo, suffered a severe stroke at the age of forty has helped to raise the public profile of an affliction that is either taken for granted or misunderstood. Perhaps if Sarah had confided to the woman what she most feared — that I would be dead by the time she landed at Heathrow — she might have elicited a more sympathetic response.

In the life of twentieth-century man and woman there
are not many mysteries, but Death remains. In an age when more and more is explained, when even the brain is slowly beginning to yield up its secrets, the Grim Reaper shows no sign of losing his ancient power to fascinate and terrify. And those who contrive, however briefly, to meet him and yet survive also exert a special hold on our imaginations. As my convalescence unfolded, I discovered a substantial and fascinating literature on the subject of death, of which the most notable is the poet John Donne’s
Devotions
.

Donne, a near-contemporary of William Shakespeare, was a friend of Robert Harvey, the pioneer of cardiac ‘circulation’, and had what we would think of as a distinctly twentieth-century appreciation of the body and its limitations as the vessel of our humanity. Like many writers of his time, Donne addressed Death as a familiar, and we know him for his oft-quoted sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’. What his less well-known
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
reveals is a mind acutely tuned, in a rather modern way, to the psycho-drama of sudden illness. ‘A sick bed is a grave;’ Donne writes, ‘and all that the patient says there, is but a varying of his own Epitaph.’

By a strange coincidence, a few days after my stroke a media acquaintance and fellow forty-something, Michael Vermeulen, the London editor of
Esquire
, died of a heart-attack brought on, apparently, by years of hard living. I read his obituaries in hospital with guilty fascination, remembered our last, and quite recent, conversation in the foyer of the Groucho Club, and brooded sadly on the vagaries of chance. As Donne puts it, ‘… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’

Meanwhile, in my immobilized state all I could do was lie in my sickbed, stare obsessively at the cracks in
the ceiling, or out of the window at the ‘little patch of blue that prisoners call the sky’, and think. My brain, which had just let me down so badly, was perhaps never so active. The paramedics’ question — for ever linked in my mind with that headache and the Ivy’s glass of champagne — was a fundamental one. Who are you? Yes indeed. Who am I?

Who am I? is, of course, the ultimate question, a question that every one of us would be wise to face up to at some moment in our lives. In fact, I had begun to approach the issue in an oblique way some years before, in 1987, when I wrote and presented a BBC documentary film about my McCrum forebears, an exploration of the Scots-Irish settlement of Northern Ireland entitled
In the Blood
, a phrase that eerily foreshadowed, as it turned out, my stroke. During those helpless moments in the hallway of my Islington house, I had looked up at the portrait of my great-great-grandfather, Robert McCrum, an Ulster linen millionaire whose hard-earned fortune was squandered by his only
son, on the wall above me and wondered what on earth he, for whom adversity was as natural as the remorseless northern weather, would have made of my bizarre predicament. Later, as I lay in the hospital, I began to wonder what, if anything, my family history could say to me in these new, and dramatically changed, circumstances.

Whatever way you look at it, McCrum is a peculiar name. That’s what I discovered when I was five years old, at Newnham Croft primary school in Cambridge. McCrum-Crumbo-Crumble-Crummy was the usual declension. At least my classmates did not know that the authentic Scots derivation means ‘son of the bent one’ (which begins to make some sense when you inspect the bizarre fantasies of my namesake, the great American cartoonist R. Crumb).

When my family looked for a past, they found it in the romantic Highlands. As children, my sister Elizabeth and I were often told that McCrum was a corruption of McCrimmon and that we were descended from ‘the pipers to the lords of Skye’. But on the one occasion I actually went to Skye I found the appealing McCrimmon connection to be utterly fanciful. If my unusual name was a corruption of anything, it was MacIlchrum (alternative spellings: MacGilliechrum, Cromb, Crum, McCrumb, MacCrum) and belonged to lowly peons of the Clan MacDonald, scattered through the Western Isles and across the rough green pastures of Northern Ireland. These McCrums were the ‘sons of the bent one’, with clear implications of bastardy. The Ulster Scots’ ancestry is full of blood, mystery and confusion. In short, I’m from a people who do not know exactly who they are or where they come from, a scarecrow lineage, patched together from the flotsam and jetsam of
planter history. I confess I have come to identify with this ragamuffin ancestral collage.

I was born at home on 7 July 1953, in Cambridge, at 8 King’s Parade, opposite the King’s College Chapel, in a little white room that now sits above an antique shop. The world I came into was quite severely academic, professional, meritocratic and, on the face of it, as fortunate and privileged as you could wish for. It was also a world recovering from the traumas of the Second World War — hunger, separation and loss — a world in which the frank acknowledgement and discussion of emotion was seen as needlessly self-indulgent. My mother, Christine, is the daughter of the headmaster of Rugby School, an institution immortalized in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
; my father, Michael, was the senior tutor of Corpus Christi College; as newlyweds, they were living in college lodgings. Later, we would move nearer the fens and the River Cam to Ashton House, a fine old eighteenth-century turnpike lodging house with a bumpy flagstone vestibule, overlooking Newnham Road.

For a child, Cambridge is a kind of airy green paradise, and my memories of those early years before I went to prep school at the age of nine are filled with play, sunshine and laughter, and the high wide skies of the fens. After primary school, I went briefly to the celebrated King’s Choir School, known throughout the world for its choral tradition and the Christmas Eve service of Nine Lessons and Carols, though I was not a chorister and cannot sing. Now my own life began to follow a pattern set down by my father, literally at birth. I was entered for the English upper-middle-class handicap, a well-worn human steeplechase that involved negotiating a series of academic jumps. So, after a year of King’s, I was sent to Horris Hill, a remote boys’ prep
school housed in a mock-Tudor monstrosity in the Berkshire countryside not far from the Greenham Common air base that would dominate British newspaper headlines in the mid-eighties during the row over the deployment of Cruise missiles.