So much for food. Mum’s training as a nurse helped her to deal resourcefully with a number of other difficulties. I couldn’t use the lavatory, but the bedpan was a non-starter. I had to lift my bum from the horizontal to use it, and this was agony, so Mum devised a different method. She taught me to ‘go’ on my side, sissing into a bottle, tuppennying onto a kidney dish. Our teamwork improved, until every drop went into the bottle. The bladder-hooliganism of my earlier days had been properly tamed.
For a short time it was actually thrilling to be a baby again, praised and rewarded for a level of dependence that would have brought stern looks and impatient words only weeks before. But regression is an unstable pleasure, all the more so when no choice is involved.
The head of the bed was by the window, so I couldn’t see outside, though I could hear things. Nature filtered in, but not in any form I could interpret. I could hear birds scuffling on my window-sill in the mornings. I thought of them as wrens, because of the farthing ashtray which I was sometimes allowed to hold and explore with my eyes. In ornithological fact they were almost certainly tits. Sometimes I would hear a big galumphing noise which could only be a stork depositing a baby under the gooseberry bush at the bottom of our garden, the little girl Mum had always wanted to make the family complete.
From a distance in time it’s easy to say that Mum and Dad could have turned the bed round, the moment an indefinite sentence was passed on me, so that I could at least see out of the window, though my view from that angle would have been only sky. It wasn’t even the bed that needed turning round, just the bedclothes. It wasn’t a major engineering project. It could have been done in five minutes. Even so, I understand quite well why they didn’t. Every adjustment to my new state was a step backwards for them. Turning the bed round would have made it harder to pretend that I was going to get up any time soon. I only had my situation. They had something much worse — knowledge of my situation. I was not their son in the way I had been, and there was nothing they could do to re-connect me with what they had lost.
If Dad was at home then of course the radio was his preserve. No one questioned his need to hear the news whenever it was on. If he was away, Mum would sometimes lug it in and set it up in my room. I liked listening to the Billy Cotton Band Show, though Mum thought Billy himself was very vulgar, and his opening cry of ‘WAKEY WAKEY!’ really got on her nerves. It was the pronunciation that got her goat particularly. What Billy Cotton shouted was actually ‘WHYky— WHY— KEE!!’ and he stretched out the second ‘WHY’ so that it seemed to last for ever. I wonder if Mum guessed how much I loved it.
I was told not to move, and I was a good boy. I had to move something, and if it wasn’t my body then it would have to be my mind. I learned my numbers. I got Mum to teach me to count to a hundred. Then I’d reel off the tally, time and time again. Counting up, counting down. Mum was very patient. She didn’t baulk even when I upped the stakes and went as far as a thousand, not even sighing when I asked, ‘What comes after a hundred, Mummy?’ If I had known about times tables I would have made short work of them. I loved every little number. I didn’t let her read the paper or do her sewing while I did my counting. I made her say, ‘Very good, John,’ or ‘Correct!’ after every single number. I made her concentrate on me absolutely. She was never allowed to be off duty.
Mum would soothe me by brushing my hair. As a special treat she would use Dad’s brush, a Mason Pearson with no actual handle, a military oval of manly grooming, the bristles set in a bed of dark pink rubber. My own brush was softer but conveyed no electrical tingle to the scalp. Sometimes she would leave Dad’s brush with me when she left the room. On some primitive level it seemed wrong that my hairbrush had a handle and his didn’t.
When she was out of the room, counting lost its interest, and I explored the few movements I was allowed, things that didn’t count as moving. There were various activities that could be managed while lying perfectly still, as the doctor had ordered. It counted as keeping perfectly still as long as you didn’t move any bones. There were no bones in eyes, for instance. I rolled my eyes until I felt a sort of dizziness, although I was flat on my back and there was no danger of falling. I could fool myself I was falling while remaining perfectly still. I learned to cross my eyes. I practised breathing in different ways, concentrating on one nostril, for instance, at the expense of the other.
A Great Big Figgieman
Some of the rules of the house were suspended in my interest. If I retrieved a crumb of snot and rolled it between my fingers, Mum would pretend not to notice. Talk about making your own entertainment! The privilege of my situation, in which boredom lay so close to over-excitement that there was hardly any space between, was that snot qualified as a toy. The home word for such a crumb was Figgieman. In the days before I was bed-bound, Mum would say, ‘I can see a Great Big Figgieman!’ in a tone of ominous triumph. When my life thinned out, she just looked the other way and let me get on with it. She took pity on my dirty little ways, even when I accumulated a whole gallery of waxy snowballs. When they dried out I would flick them at the wall when nobody was looking, or else amalgamate them into one revolting whopper with a little supplementary spit.
My tongue was a rich source of games. I would tickle the roof of my mouth with its tip. It didn’t quite make me burst out laughing, but it brought laughter to mind. Anybody who says that tickling yourself is impossible, and that the sensation depends on someone else doing it, hasn’t tried tickling of this type. It’s not perfect but it works, and that made it a precious game for me then.
Then I stuck my tongue out and started rotating it very slowly at full extension, feeling the wet trail I left on my chin or my cheeks or the groove above my lips as it slowly evaporated. I learned to touch my nose with my tongue, gradually improving its flexibility. I discovered for myself that the tongue is a muscle, by straining it. Then it was back to eye work for a while. When the speaking muscle had recovered, I would combine the eye-rollings and the tongue sweep, sometimes synchronising the movements, sometimes making them contrary, even contrapuntal. When Mum came into the room and surprised me while I was engrossed in my little theatre of grimaces, she was shocked. She thought I was having a seizure. A fit, on top of all her troubles. Even then I understood that they were her troubles.
Mum was my jailer, but she was also the Entertainments Officer, even the Escapes Officer. It was her responsibility to see that I didn’t break the rules of my confinement, but also to fill my time with any amusement small enough to be smuggled between its bars. On top of which she was necessarily my fellow prisoner, though there was no one to organise entertainments for her.
Once she brought the local bobby to pay me a visit. He was wonderful in his uniform. She left us alone, after warning him not to sit on the bed. He said I’d been in the wars, hadn’t I? I said that I had — in fact I was still in the wars.
He said to keep my chin up and called me ‘sonny’. He let me hold his whistle. I blew down it for all I was worth, without asking permission in case he said no. Mum came running — her heart was in her mouth, she said. But then her mouth was where her heart mostly lived.
Metaphysical teeth
In my spare time I invented a game I called Teeth. All my time was spare. This was the opposite of the eye and tongue games, and more sophisticated. Teeth was metaphysical. It involved keeping still a body part that wasn’t actually under the ban on movement. I suppose I was asserting a sort of freedom by adding a voluntary freezing to the one that was imposed from outside. I put my teeth together lightly, not grinding them but just letting the tips rest on each other, and let them grow together in my mind and become huge. My teeth turned into a sort of cave, and I could disappear inside it, clenched inside myself. Escaping to the interior, knowing that nobody in the family home would ever know what had happened to me. Once again Mum was worried by my frozen state, and even called the doctor in. There seemed to be nothing, in the narrow range of activities that was left to me, that couldn’t be interpreted as a symptom. Any behaviour on my part might be the prelude to a crisis.