It must have taken quite some organising. She must have persuaded or bribed a rag-and-bone man, or someone from a fair. A fair is more likely, I suppose, since the animal wore ribbons. There were rags tied round its hoofs so that the surprise wouldn’t be given away by clops.
What I saw first was its master walking backwards into the room holding a parsnip and backing slowly towards me. He made clacking sounds of encouragement with his tongue against his teeth. He wore a hat, also with ribbons, which he swept off with an awkwardly dramatic gesture as the animal advanced into the room. I think his showmanship must have been cramped by the lack of space, the difficulty of steering a sizeable quadruped with a mind of its own. Under the hat he had bright red hair, worn rather long for the period.
The donkey was comfortably lower than the lintel, but almost too wide to fit through the door. There was a strong bodily smell which fascinated me. As they came nearer I realised that it came from the man and not the beast. The man manœuvred himself towards the bed and crouched down so that the donkey would be almost beside my head when it got its reward. I could smell the donkey now — it had an intense burnt smell, harsher than the whiff of bonfires. It reached down and took the parsnip with a series of astounding crunches. The man said, ‘Want to pat him, sonny? He likes that ever so,’ but my tensely smiling mother was already calling out, ‘Better not, John.’ As if the surrealist tableau she had laid on would be pushed over the edge by actual contact with the wonderful animal, into something that would squeeze my heart to bursting.
The man made slow shunting gestures with his hands. Again his tongue clacked against his teeth, and eventually the donkey backed out of the room. It left no trace of its visit except a little patch of drool on the worn carpet by my bed, which soon dried up. I would almost rather it had left one of its droppings, a shocking log or a scatter of pellets which my mother would have rushed to clean up, though I don’t suppose it would have smelled any worse than horse-shit does, which is wholesome enough. At least that would have made the episode less like an apparition or a dream about a magic animal, about a clacking noise and a series of deafening crunches, about a man whose red hair I would have liked to touch at least as much as I would have liked to stroke his donkey.
I had few other visitors. I remember a troop of local children coming to sing their carols one Christmas — though not perhaps the first, the indelible Christmas of candy and gramophone, of hairy hands and suspect clarinet.
The carol singers would traipse round knocking on doors, singing their two carols alternately. ‘Away in a Manger’. ‘Hark the Herald’. They came into my bedroom and sang their whole repertoire to me, first one and then the other. They brought the cold in with them. There were six or eight of them, mostly girls. A great crowd in my room. They clustered round the bed, but they didn’t look at me while they sang. Only a couple of the little ones, the ones closest to my age, couldn’t resist lowering their eyes and sneaking a peek.
What had Mum said to them? Here’s a few coppers for you, if you sing to my poorly boy, only be sure not to stare. It was a treat. It was certainly meant to be a treat.
They stood very near the bed. They breathed over me. Perhaps Mum was getting extra value out of her handful of coppers by asking them to expose my system to every bug that was going. She’d been a nurse, it was her way of thinking. Otherwise I would be a sitting duck for every cough and sneeze, if I ever managed to find my way back to the lively world of germs.
After so much under-stimulation, such a rationing of sensation, having this multitude burst into my room and sing at me was like an assault. It was a shock seeing runny noses and bright scarves, open mouths and chapped lips, all in a bunch and from close to, after so little variation of solitude. My heart raced and didn’t slow down for a long time after they had gone.
It seems obvious in retrospect that I must have been bored, but boredom doesn’t really describe my experience. Small events resounded with more significance than I knew what to do with, and attempts to vary my surroundings didn’t always have the intended effect. When Mum brought some buds in from the garden and put them in a vase I found their presence on my bedside table disturbing. Some of the inflorescences fell off in a day or two, the little catkins, and they looked like slugs dusted with yellow powder. It wasn’t the resemblance to slugs that bothered me (I’d always liked slugs) but the invasion of known space by an alien element. I was happier, perversely, with the unchanging roses on the wallpaper.
Only lightly agonised
Treats and surprises were one thing, but what my morale needed was some regular occasion to look forward to. Mum had enough nursing expertise to know how to forestall bedsores by changing my position, but my mind was always lying in the same dull trench of thought. It was agreed with Dr Duckett that one expedition per week, properly supervised, was compatible with the sentence of bed rest.
It wasn’t much of an expedition. I only went as far as the hall. Our local grocer offered a delivery service, for which orders could be taken by telephone. It became my weekly treat to play a part in the chain of retail command. Mum would write out her list in diagram form, in the days before my reading became fluent. A sketch of two oblongs meant Two pounds of potatoes please. A red stick was A pound of carrots. Wiggly strips meant A half of streaky bacon. I even learned to understand the hieroglyph that meant a quarter of field mushrooms if they’re not too dear — ask how much. Then Mum and ‘the girl’ would set me up on a chair, well supplied with cushions, only lightly agonised, within reach of the phone in the hall. Mum would hold the receiver while I relayed the family order into the cold black curve of the mouthpiece. I loved doing that, feeling that I was at the nerve centre of the household. I manifested a character trait for which there was little scope at the time, obscured by pathos on this first appearance. The desire to be useful.
How did Mum cope? How did she save her sanity? One of the things she did was to get a dog, a golden retriever, our lovely Gipsy. If Gipsy was company for Mum then she was a sort of nurse for me, just as Nana in Peter Pan is more nanny than dog. Golden retrievers are frisky, lolloping creatures, but Mum trained her to stay put on a chair next to my bed. I would only have to say, ‘Hup!’ and Gipsy would jump up onto her chair and curl up to watch over me. I couldn’t really pet her. There’s a picture of the two of us taken the year after I became ill. I’m terribly skinny — it’s not surprising that Mum devoted so much energy to making me eat. I look like a monk on hunger strike. My face is like a worn-out mask, at the far end of life. Gipsy wears an expression of the most soulful worry. You would think she has just taken my temperature and is wondering when my fever will break. She slept in my room, adding her night voice to Mum’s and Dad’s. Every now and then she gave out a distinctive grunting sigh.
I remember one day when a neighbour came to call, bringing her own dog, a low-slung terrier. Gipsy jumped down from her chair and the two dogs went around in circles, sniffing each other’s bottoms. They were of such different heights that they had to get into the strangest positions. I thought that was the funniest thing ever — I really laughed, but being careful not to let my head go back or my shoulders shake.
Afterwards I asked Mum what Gipsy was doing with that other dog. She explained that long ago all the dogs in the world went to a special party, and they hung up their bottoms on pegs as they arrived. But then there was a fire at the party and everyone left in a rush, taking any old bottom down from the pegs. And ever since then, dogs have sniffed each other’s bottoms, trying to join up again with the lower half that had once been theirs. This fable says almost nothing about dogs, but it explains a great deal about Mum. During that fire alarm she might not even have looked for her bottom half. She would have managed without, and never looked back. Perfectly happy to wipe other people’s bottoms as long as she wasn’t expected to have one of her own.