After my friends, with commiserating handshakes, had gone jauntily through the gate with their neat brown cardboard box of demob gear, I was told to go on ten days’ leave, and then return to the camp for more tests. Crossing the middle of Manchester with my kit, outwardly the spick-and-span airman back from overseas hoping for a good time, I could not feel less fit than anyone around me. Even so, homecoming after two years necessarily lost some of its glamour and, as if to muffle my despair — though the habit of discipline absorbed from the age of fourteen was useful to me now — I began to doubt the medical officer’s assumption that I had started to rot inside. The pride-saving possibility occurred to me that X-ray plates had got mixed up, and that all would later be put right.
I told my parents I wasn’t quite fit after my time in Malaya, and that it might be necessary for me to go into hospital for a while to convalesce. This explanation was found reasonable, and no questions were asked. My old girlfriends were married, or gone from home, or otherwise occupied, and I have no memory as to how my leave passed. A habit of noting novels read for that year in a wireless log book listed none for those ten days.
I was not unhappy to get back to Warton, anxious to know whether or not tuberculosis had really struck, and if so to what extent. For three weeks I was isolated in a small ward at the station sick quarters because of possible contagion, much like a leper on Pulau Jerejak. The experience of being cut off from the world was new: a piece of obsolescent equipment for which no one could have any use.
A silent male orderly brought in my meals, and left me to make my bed, and I saw a doctor once on going for more X-rays. Apart from the settled despair, I was glad above all to be on my own, not wanting anyone else to be sequestered in the ward in case I was obliged to talk about my reason for being there. I remember reading Many Cargoes by W. W. Jacobs, The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells, and a novel by J. B. Priestley, as well as some chapters of my Bible.
In my kit were notebooks and maps from Kedah and, at the onset of evening, the worst part of the day, I drew the bedtable forward and began to write a coherent account of the expedition. For some days I was blessedly unaware of the anguish that had settled on me, reliving the trip into the jungle proving that mental pain ceased to be felt if something could be done that was entirely absorbing. Turned into two people, I chose to be the one which knew no hurt, never in any doubt as to which was more compatible. This first indication that writing could expunge the pain of living was not lost on me.
Further interior photographs at the X-ray machine revealed cavities in my left lung, and the right also as marked with the disease, a map of the moon never imagined in all the wanderings of my fevered topographical dreams. I was more than mystified as to how the affliction had been acquired, because you certainly did not catch it in the jungle, though the effluvia could have been breathed on a bus in George Town. Speculation turned into a circular worrying nag that got nowhere, unless as an anodyne to ease the baffled spirit. At times I thought my head would burst from sheer misery, though an invisible person looking on would have seen no outward evidence of distress, something made sure of by carefully observing myself, but hoping I wasn’t going mad in the attempt.
Told to pack my gear, I was given a train warrant for RAF Wroughton in Wiltshire. The journey, with changes at Crewe (of not too distant memory) and Bristol, was a hiatus of blessed normality. Getting out of the station at Swindon, a coffin containing the body of an airman, who had died of tuberculosis in the hospital I was bound for, was put on the train just stepped from.
At Wroughton, sixteen miles north-east of the radio school, it was found beyond all doubt that I was ‘TB Positive’, which put me into a ward with thirty other men in a similar condition. What had to be accepted, and took much doing, was not being recognized any longer as in first-class health. People who had TB, if they hadn’t died of it, were regarded as finished off, or at best as unemployable pariahs. From wanting to be first-class everything I was suddenly defeated in an area where no trouble had been expected at all. The fact that 25,000 people a year died from what I had got did not worry me, as much as having reached a solid gate on the road forward which had always seemed ready to open on to the infinitely promising beyond.
Now that the evidence of X-rays and sputum tests was indisputable, another kind of normality had to begin, that of two rows of bedridden men facing each other for an unknown length of time, with lovely Queen Alexandra’s nursing sisters and delectable WAAF orderlies gliding along the polished floor to look after us. None of us would have seemed ill had we been walking in the outside world, or so I even now liked to think. Most of the men were younger than myself, their tuberculous condition having been diagnosed during training or before despatch overseas.
The treatment consisted mostly of simple bed-rest, and we were superbly cared for, the excellent diet including a bottle of rich stout set on every locker each morning. Smoking was not forbidden and, lacking my favourite Malayan cheroots, I sent out for 100 small cigars, the little wooden box reaching me in time for Christmas.
On first entering the ward I noticed a man reading History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, while two others were discussing Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, to be broadcast on the wireless that evening, which seemed to set the intellectual tone peculiar to the RAF. A set of earphones by each bed was attached to a radio system, and my switch stayed on the Third Programme, so that I was soon becoming familiar with the music of the great composers.
The Times and Daily Telegraph came in every morning, carrying advertisements for surveyors and wireless operators needed by the Colonial Service, each reading like a poetic epitaph on the tombstone of my previous ambition. After mulling on them wryly I turned for compensation to the crossword puzzle, my skill much improved on borrowing a thesaurus from a man several beds along. As for world news, the Russians were no longer brave and with us as during the war, and the Americans and the RAF were trying to break their blockade of West Berlin.
A correspondence course in surveying gave me what was needed to keep my brain sharp. Opening the textbook, and spreading a sheet of graph paper on my bed-table, I drew plans of imaginary streets and country estates, familiar from those given me by Burton as a child. My sister Peggy, thinking me about to embark on a new career, sent an engineers’ diary for 1949, containing interesting mathematical data.
I posted my account of climbing Kedah Peak to Hales, of my old ATC squadron in Nottingham, and it came back typed, with a letter advising me to try and get it published. Some poems and short prose sketches were already written in my wireless log book, so his suggestion did not seem too outlandish, and in January I despatched ‘Kedah Peak’ to the Geographical Magazine and, when it was rejected, to Wide World Magazine, which also turned it down. At the same time I tried getting a poem into a periodical called Everybody’s.
During 1948 the list in my notebook showed thirty-eight novels read, mostly of the escapist sort plucked off the trolley pushed around the ward every few days by women of the WVS. Books of travel and adventure were as much enjoyed as by any bedjacketed explorer, but there was also From Bapaume to Paschendaele by Philip Gibbs (which started my interest in all to do with the Great War), Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, The Guide to Music by P. A. Scholes, and a biography of Chopin.