Even so I took a break between Book 1 and Book 2 to read The Catcher in the Rye. If my Premium Bond (I had just the one, a present from Granny) had come up and I’d received some fantastic jackpot (say £1,000), I would have hired someone to make the experience of reading less physically taxing. I wouldn’t have minded being read to, though I like to hear a book’s voice in my head without anyone else intervening, but an infinitely adjustable human lectern would have been even better, to hold the book at a suitable distance in front of my eyes for hours on end, so I could rest my arm and didn’t have to stop reading until my brain itself was tired.
I shouldn’t exaggerate. Reading wasn’t that much of a martyrdom. Granted, having palms that can’t turn and face me is an obstacle to cradling a book as other people do (though it would have to be a light book to be manageable — this explains my fondness for pamphlets). On the other hand, my left elbow being fixed immovable has certain compensations. I can lie on my left side with the elbow tirelessly holding the book open, though these days my left eye tends to lacrimate (without any particular reference to the content of the book) when I hold the position for too long. In those days, though, my tear ducts were in fine fettle, and any crying I did for poor Pamela was properly symmetrical.
Pain and the radio
Sometimes while I was reading Pamela ‘Pamela, Pamela’ would come on. ‘Pamela, Pamela’ the song, by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. It’s almost perverse, the convergence between pain and the radio. So many songs have reached me through an intensifying filter of bodily distress.
The two Pamelas worked quite differently, of course. Today I could pick up Richardson’s Pamela and read it afresh, overriding my previous impressions — but ‘Pamela, Pamela’ is hopelessly porous. I can’t hear it except with teenaged ears. It’s a magic hanky in which my tears will never be dry … A song about growth and regret, really.When the rest of your childhood forgets as a dream / And the harshness of life dims those peaches and cream. God-awful grammar, mind you, but still young Wayne had put his finger on something. I was just mature enough to regress emotionally.
Reading is the worst possible mechanism for making time pass. Reading makes time unreal, not by shrinkage but expansion. Look up from your book and be amazed at how little the clock has moved while you entered the stream of mental events. How freely books pour into consciousness. Those books, Salinger and Richardson alike, were doses of atropine instilled into my mind’s eye, dilating it to admit a stream of rich blurred images.
There was some startling stuff in Catcher in the Rye. One passage in particular made me tense up while I read, though my lying posture made it physically impossible for anyone to look over my shoulder and surprise my guilty thoughts (if I was benefiting from a hired bookholder I would have had to work on my poker face). He said it didn’t matter if a guy was married or not. He said half the married guys in the world were flits and didn’t even know it. He said you could turn into one practically overnight, if you had all the traits and all. He used to scare the hell out of us. I kept waiting to turn into a flit or something. The funny thing about old Luce, I used to think he was sort of flitty himself, in a way. He was always saying, ‘Try this for size,’ and then he’d goose the hell out of you while you were going down the corridor …
Perhaps America was uniquely wicked. Otherwise I could reasonably hope to encounter that sort of thing in the corridors of Burnham Grammar School, when the next phase of my mundane education got under way at last. I would have to keep my eyes peeled and my wheelchair oiled for every flitting opportunity.
Surly crackle
During my rehabilitation I had to adjust to an unfamiliar style of physiotherapist. The previous physios I had known, the two German ones at CRX, though as different as night and day, poison and balm, had both been what we would now call holistic. Each in her way addressed the whole person. Miss Krüger wasn’t satisfied simply with making pain, she wanted to snuff out something essential in the patient. That was her game. Perhaps it really was a game, and she wanted to snuff out her charge’s vital spark and then bring it back, as if children were like the Magic Candles in the Ellisdons catalogue which it was so much fun to blow out and watch rekindle after a few smoking moments.
Gisela wanted to make me wholly better, not just the parts of me that lay under her hands. Now I was dealing with physios who took a narrower view than those thorough German ladies. When these ones spoke, it was only to say, ‘Again,’ or ‘One more time.’ Or ‘Same time tomorrow.’ They attended strictly to business and seemed to have been vaccinated against conversation.
My life at CRX had begun on Ward One and continued on Ward Two. Now I had made it all the way to Ward Three, Men’s Surgical. Being on a male surgical ward was the first time I had been an adult among adults. The atmosphere seemed very benign, after what I had known before. Once everyone got acquainted it didn’t matter that there was no privacy. My wardmates would lend me their newspapers — always the Mirror or the Sketch, occasionally the Mail, which was definitely my favourite. The Mirror was physically compact, a tabloid, while the Mail was rather larger but not as big as the papers Dad favoured, a happy medium.
They bought these papers from the WVS trolley in the mornings, along with cigarettes and magazines. I found tabloids much easier to manage from a lying position than the unwieldy quality press could ever have been. There’s nothing to be gained from reading a high-toned editorial if the recalcitrant unwieldy page keeps falling forward onto your face.
Reading a newspaper not meant for Upper People was a real thrill. Sometimes at home, Mum would buy a Mirror out of the housekeeping. ‘Let’s take a peek,’ she said, ‘Just to see how awful it is!’ Then we would devour it, absolutely devour it. We pored over every page, reading against the clock since the paper had to be destroyed before Dad got home, every shred of it burnt.
When Dad caught me reading the tabloids in Ward Three he was shocked that a son of his could sink so low, but he rallied and tried to bribe me into better habits. ‘Tell you what, John,’ he said, ‘What do you say to having the Daily Telegraph delivered every morning? Not just to the hospital, not just to the ward, but right here to your bed? Right into your hand? What do you say?’
My fiscal mind got busy. At 4d a throw, I thought the Telegraph a scandalous waste of money. And six issues a week would come to two shillings! I asked for my pocket money to be increased by that amount instead, to seven shillings a week. I pointed out that this gave me the choice of how to use the extra cash. I might buy the odd newspaper, but would certainly make it last more than a single day.
This attempt at striking a bargain was rejected out of hand. It had to be the Telegraph or nothing, and so it was nothing. Dad couldn’t see that I wouldn’t have accepted his offer even if I’d enjoyed reading the Telegraph. It would have driven a wedge between me and the men on the ward, who were kind enough to turn a blind eye to my reading just so long as I was discreet and didn’t start group discussions about the epistolary novel. They made sure the radio wasn’t so loud it derailed my concentration.
I was back in the limbo of bed rest, but the limbo was different and so was I. There is actually no limit to the range of limbos — they’re like the greys on an infinite paint card. In various ways the new one was lighter, since I had consented to this period of deprivation and I knew what I had to gain from staying still. There was an end in sight, however distant, a horizon over which rays of unknown wave-lengths would eventually send their light. All the same, I wasn’t patient. My body would be seized every now and then with wayward energy, a surly crackle that could only be adolescence.