Though confined to ‘strict bed’ I was soon managing an affair with one of the orderlies, and many of my so-called poems were banal love lyrics written for her, who seemed impressed by them. We met every night after lights out in a store-room at the end of the ward and, luckily enough — but mostly for her — our clandestine love-nest was never discovered.
Frankie Howerd came to shake hands and say encouraging words to every patient in the hospital. Having been out of the country I didn’t realize either his fame or talent, and could think of nothing to say in return. It was unnecessary to do so, of course, but neither was I willing to seem friendly with someone I didn’t know, though it was a generous visit for such a celebrated comedian to make.
My lungs were not responding to treatment, perhaps because the spirit wasn’t yet ready to provide assistance, sulking at the body’s ignominious capitulation to the lowest kind of germ. Squadron-Leader O’Connor, the top medical officer, decided that an artificial pneumothorax might help. This meant a minor operation to cut the lesions that attached the lung to the pleural wall. Once this was done, air pumped by needle into the chest every ten days from then on would be able to flatten the free-floating lung and prevent it doing the usual work. The lung would only be permitted to resume its normal function when, it was hoped, the infection was cured, and in the meantime, which may be for years, I would be able to exist perfectly well with the use of only one lung, provided I didn’t do anything silly like mountain climbing, rowing, cycling or carrying heavy suitcases.
The ingeniously scientific process had improved many people, and the operation itself was little inconvenience. On being put back into bed from the trolley I guzzled a bottle of delicious life-giving stout and puffed at a fragrant shit-smelling cigar, much to the amusement of Sister Monica Jones, to celebrate the first deep cut of my life, before falling asleep.
I borrowed a typewriter so as to see how my poems would look in print, and their appearance, if not their quality, seemed so much improved that I acquired a reconditioned Remington Portable for twenty-six pounds from a salesman travelling the hospital. Touch-typing had been taught at Radio School, and though I hadn’t done any since, the machine was soon rattling away at top speed. My girlfriend brought in ribbons and paper from Swindon, and when my old Nottingham friend John Moult sent a pound note for my twenty-first birthday I asked her to get Auden’s Tennyson Selection, the first English poet I scanned with pleasure and attention.
Half a dozen volumes of modern poetry, none of particular memory, showed the current idiom and themes. I studied the long and detailed appendix on prosody in a Wordsworth selection, then read FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke with Edward Marsh’s memoir, and some of Coleridge — whatever I could get hold of. For prose I read Wilde’s De Profundis, The Living Torch by A. E., and made an attempt on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which my girlfriend’s mother had sent me, with works by Edward Lear.
Quality began to predominate, and in the next few months it became more and more possible to make choices, such as A Room of One’s Own, two plays by George Bernard Shaw, In Hazard by Richard Hughes, Voltaire’s Candide, and Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant. E. V. Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey sent me on a trail, during the next couple of years, through the whole of the Latin and Greek classics. They came from an age that was dead, but I relished the spare language of the histories, the elegant poetry that spoke to and was spoken by the gods, the philosophies which sharpened my mind wonderfully, and plays that re-created legend with such heartbreaking effect.
My Bible — the Jewish Scriptures — appealed to a deeper part, its language entering the bones’ marrow and giving solace during my transition from one life to another. The beauty of the King James’ version, and the sombre rectitude of the Ancient Hebrews, found an enduring response in me.
Mail was important, and I corresponded with Schlachter, Gladstone and others. Coleman wrote from Malaya telling me that the Butterworth Jungle Rescue Team had climbed a mountain from whose summit they had looked down on Kedah Peak, which sent momentary pangs of regret and envy through me.
I woke from my usual afternoon sleep to see my mother and John Moult sitting by my bed. John had won something on a football game, he said, and so paid both their fares. He was still serving with the Royal Corps of Signals as a wireless operator.
The artificial pneumothorax quickly improved my condition and, as the intensity of X-ray shadows decreased, and my blood sediment rate went down, I locked like clockwork on to the progressive stages of time permitted out of bed. Two hours extra were added every few weeks, until one stayed up the whole day except for the afternoon rest. Nothing was more important than this measured return to activity and freedom.
Though not supposed to, I put on my uniform and went out by the store-room window. Patients allowed in the hospital grounds were distinguished by a white instead of a blue shirt and, accordingly dressed, I made my way between the buildings as if by permission, then jinked behind one and went along the fence till finding a place to climb over. Crossing fields, after first using hedges for cover, the smell of herbage was intoxicating, and ‘Greensleeves’ sang at my stolen liberty. Some days I would wander on the nearby Downs, or otherwise during a long summer evening meet my young woman, with her cherubic face and auburn hair, in the village pub.
For want of time the surveying course lapsed, though I was glad of its help and knowledge. Enlightenment gained from reading was rapidly filling the empty spaces, and the ability to write, though still in an uncertain state, provided that sense of purpose without which I had never been able to live.
One book read more than once was The Forest Giant by Adrien le Corbeau, translated by J. H. Ross who was, the publisher’s note explained, T. E. Lawrence. The writer described in 150 pages of stylish and aphoristic prose the birth and death of an enormous sequoia pine — Le Gigantesque. A copy was recently put into my hand by a young woman after a lecture at Nottingham University, and I was caught up again by the beginning:
For years on end it had been rolling, across the plains, through the deep meadow grasses, under the dim echoing archways of the forest. Always, in heat and cold, beneath blue skies, or skies clouded with rain and hail and snow, it had been rolling ceaselessly. One day it would be gilded by the sunlight — but not softened; another day grizzled streaks of rain soaked it — without refreshment. It was buried, to all appearance forever, by drifts of snow — but was not hurt. It had crossed cataracts of light and floods of shadow; it had been rocked by soft winds and hurled dizzily into the air by the shrieking gusts of cyclones; and it had met all these things — the sweetness of the day, the shade of night, the winter, the springs, the summers — with the same submissive, invulnerable apathy. It had waited its hour, ready, if need be, to wait yet much longer.
The content and manner of telling fitted my condition, and had some influence, in that science matched to the mystical was in tune with my own forest experience and the theoretical side of radio. The account of the birth, life and death of the tree included reflections on the turmoil and pain of Man’s existence, which provided me with a kind of perspective when it was necessary that I should have one. I could only agree, for instance, with ‘Memory is activity’s retreating shadow,’ and ‘The play of external events upon our destiny seem as inexplicable as the inherited influences which direct us from within.’ Nor could I deny that ‘In the dark is the beginning of nearly all creative processes,’ or ‘every beginning is an end, and everything ends only to begin again.’ In the back of my engineers’ diary was copied something which seemed even more relevant: ‘If sickness might be called premature age, age might be called a slow sickness.’