‘What’s that?’
‘The public bathhouse; hot, wet and steamy. You lie naked on the stone floor, heated from underneath by wood fires, and a bath attendant throws a bucket of water over you and starts rubbing you with soap and a rough cloth – to stimulate the follicles, they say. But, believe me, that’s not all it stimulates, I can tell you! All those women laughing and massaging each other! What happens in the men’s hammams doesn’t bear thinking of. Crowds of men and boys rubbing each other! Boys from the age of seven or eight – just think. There’s a dandelion there. Look! Try and get it out, will you?’
I had done enough weeding with my grandfather to know how to attack a dandelion.
‘Good girl. You’ve got the root. That’s more than Evelyn could have done.’
She chuckled a throaty laugh.
‘Poor Evelyn. What she needs is a good slide around in a hammam. She’s like a dried up bit of old soap – she needs a good rubbing and lathering in all that steam to soften her up a bit.’
She chuckled again, and I thought of poor Evelyn on the 5.30 from Paddington, returning to her clever and scornful mother and a few hours of guarded conversation and mutual backbiting.
But I liked Mrs Cunningham. It’s funny how you can see real nastiness in some people, especially in their relationships with others, and like them just the same. She was different, and I felt flattered that she seemed to enjoy my company.
She invited me to her house one Saturday afternoon, but when I arrived it was clear that she had forgotten, because she had gone to stay with her son, James, for the weekend, and Evelyn was there alone. I felt embarrassed and said I would go, but Evelyn pressed me to stay.
‘I suppose you’ve been hearing all about the souks and the hammams and the veiled women?’ she said.
‘Yes. Isn’t it fascinating?’
‘It probably is the first time you hear it, but when you get the same old stories over and over again, you can grow tired of them. Has she got to the one about the camel trek across the desert yet?’
‘No.’
‘She will. And the one about the time she wandered into a brothel by mistake?’
‘Wow! A brothel! That’s interesting. What happened?’
‘She’ll tell you. Nothing can be more boring than an old woman who lives constantly in the past.’
‘She’s had an interesting life.’
‘Yes, but she’s a scorpion when you get to know her. She drove my dear father into the arms of another woman, that’s for sure.’
I began to feel uncomfortable; getting involved in this female feud was something to avoid. I changed the subject.
‘She seems to have a lot of dislike for religion.’
‘Oh yes. She is a very enlightened woman, in that respect. My father was an atheist – or is, perhaps I should say. My brother and I were brought up non-believers. Really, it is the only rational way to think. Religion has had its day. I don’t know that any intelligent person can believe all that nonsense about virgin births and rising from the dead.’
I did not know how to answer. I was very young and impressionable. I had been brought up as a Christian, and had attended Sunday School, which entailed a lot of bible study, but I don’t think I was very committed. To hear this older woman, who was a Cambridge graduate, make such a statement shook me.
‘We are members of the British Humanist Society’ she continued.
‘What’s that?’
‘We believe that men and women are on this earth to do their best for one another, to act with goodness and kindness and justice for the common good. There is no divine intervention – that is just the wishful thinking of weaker minds.’ She glanced at me, and smiled a faintly superior smile. ‘I suppose you were brought up to believe that old business about God the Father, God the Son, etc.?’
‘Well, I suppose I was.’
I hadn’t heard anyone talk like that before, and it disturbed me.
‘Darwin proved conclusively that there is no God who made Man. Mankind has evolved over millions of years from the animal world. It’s all biology, not theology. Man made God from his imagination.’ She laughed derisively. ‘Anyway after the last war, what is there to believe? Nearly two thousand years of Christianity – “love thy neighbour as thyself” – and what did it produce? The German concentration camps.’
She had struck home. Nothing has ever horrified me as much as the newsreel pictures of the Belsen and Auschwitz victims which were first shown in British cinemas in 1945, and which I saw when I was ten years old.
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
‘That’s because you were indoctrinated when you were a child. You need to be more of a free thinker.’
I felt ashamed. I didn’t know that I was indoctrinated. It was a horrid word, I thought. I wanted to be a free thinker.
‘You must take some of the newsletters of the Humanist Association. That will open up your mind. Now, let’s have a cup of tea before you go, and some cake. My mother is a good cook, I’ll say that much for her.’
I tucked into cake and biscuits, then cycled back to the hospital with a comfortably full stomach, but uncomfortable thoughts.
The next time I visited Mrs Cunningham, she was studying a document received from the British Humanist Association entitled The Right to Die.
Abruptly she said, ‘I have signed an advance directive, instructing that, if I become ill, and the illness is incurable, I request voluntary euthanasia. I have placed a copy of this document with my son, my daughter, my doctor and my lawyer.’ She looked thoroughly pleased with herself.
I had heard of euthanasia, but had not given it much thought. In the course of my work I had seen people die and had thought a good deal about death, but it had never occurred to me that we, in the medical professions, could actually put someone down as you would a dog.
‘It makes absolute sense. I don’t want to suffer needlessly. When my time comes I want my life to end swiftly and painlessly.’
‘That’s what everyone wants,’ I said.
‘Yes, and it’s everyone’s right – or should be. The law needs changing, and we Humanists are trying to bring it up in Parliament. Anyway, I have signed this directive. I consider it the only rational thing to do. I have discussed it with James and with Evelyn, and they both agree.’
‘What does your doctor say?’
‘He won’t commit himself. He says it would probably cause more trouble than it alleviates. But he respects my wish to die with dignity.’
‘Dignity? Wherever did you get that idea from? Death is not dignified, any more than birth is.’
‘Well, that’s the expression the Euthanasia Society has adopted.’
‘The people who run your society don’t know what they are talking about! No one dies with dignity. That only happens in the cinema when someone says a sad farewell, then his head falls sideways and he dies. It doesn’t happen in real life, I can assure you. Films either make death look romantic, or horrific. It’s neither.’
I giggled as only teenage girls can giggle.
‘I don’t think you are taking this seriously enough,’ Mrs Cunningham said severely. ‘Thoughtless girl. When my time comes, I want an easy death. I want to be able to go to sleep, like having an injection before an operation. You don’t feel a thing. When death begins to overtake me, and bungles the process of dying, I shall want a competent doctor to assist nature and make a good clean job of it.’
‘It all sounds too easy to me.’
‘I have always been in control of my own life, and I intend to be in control of my death.’
That had been almost ten years before, and when Mrs Cunningham was admitted to the Marie Curie Hospital I honestly didn’t recognise her: an old lady, very bent, with sparse straggly hair and a wild look about her. After surgery, she had spent a fortnight in a convalescent home to build her up and improve her strength before the radium treatment, but, nonetheless, she was so thin that every bone in her body stuck out. Her eyes were sunken, and her grey-white skin was drawn tightly over her high cheekbones, making her nose and ears look huge. Her lips were without colour and pinched tightly together above a pointed chin. No, I would not have known her; but she recognised me.