Since I spent so much of the day in a half-state of under-stimulation, it was inevitable that I should be much awake while others slept. It was always frustrating when Mum and Dad went to bed and left me to the watches of the night. To the night and Jim’s watch, whose glow never failed me, and the vigilant dozing of Gipsy. However much she was brushed, she brought a welcome whiff of the outdoors with her. I would pray to God very hard at night, and was sometimes saddened when I didn’t seem to get an answer. In the morning Mum would say, ‘I expect he’s very busy — but he’ll see to it sooner or later, that’s for sure!’ Then she said perhaps I should try praying to Jesus specifically, since he had more free time and was generally easier to approach.
I tried to interest Jesus in my questions about the ‘I’, but they weren’t really his cup of tea. He was more involved in relieving pain and suffering, which was all very well, but just relieving the pain didn’t solve the problem, did it? If we could find out how the pain had got there in the first place, we could stop it from even starting. But I suppose that wouldn’t leave much for Jesus to do, it would virtually be handing Him his cards, so then I’d have lost a useful friend of last resort, and it would be back to me and God, Who was far too busy and didn’t seem terribly hot on the milk of human kindness side of things, which was why Jesus got the job in the first place. It was all very confusing. I couldn’t seem to get the hang of the Trinity.
I could hear trains but not see them. Trains started early in the morning and ran till very late at night. There was a different rhythm every seventh night, which I later learned to call ‘Sunday service’. Perhaps inactivity was sharpening my hearing. I could certainly tell Dad’s night noises from Mum’s. His snoring was dry and enquiring, hers sounded like a throatful of bees.
The night splints on my hands were supposed to keep my fingers reasonably straight despite the skewing heat of the fever. You’d think I’d be sick of rigour and restriction, what with willed immobility by day and splints by night, but perversely I wanted more. I wanted to go to sleep with my left arm straight — not only straight in the sense of unbent, but straight up in the air. Straight up, like a flagpole waiting for a flag to fly. If my arm was going to stick in one position I wanted to decide which position it would be. It looked as if I was going to have to live with a useless arm, and I wanted to exercise my power of choice as much as possible. There was something obscurely satisfying about that particular posture. Naturally Mum and Dr Duckett said, ‘Bring it down or you’ll stay like that,’ which of course was the whole point. ‘You have to bend it,’ they said, but I didn’t want to. I wanted there to be at least one part of me that wasn’t out of true.
Die-hard little Nazi
It can’t have helped that my chosen position had overtones, however innocent, of a lying-down Hitler salute. I must have looked like a die-hard little Nazi, waiting for my Führer to bring me a bunch of grapes and read me a story. Of course they were right to discourage me, even if it sounded like being told that if the wind changes and you’re pulling a face, it’ll set there rigid for ever. But still I wanted to sleep with my arm straight, even if it meant I’d wake up unable to move it. And this turns out to be an old and rather austere yoga posture. There are ascetic mystics who have kept their arm straight in that posture for years, without any help from stiffening joints. It’s a recognised practice, and there’s even a special stick some yogis use, called a dhandam, to help them with the task of fixing their limbs.
When I could get to sleep I dreamed vividly, and it’s not surprising that my night-pictures should have been of movement. Running, soaring. Dreams take up the slack of the day, and in my case there was much to play with, basic fantasies to fulfil. There was a lot of grey existence to balance with floods of colour, a lot of powerlessness to redress. Mum had told me once about the Indian Rope Trick, and I had seen it in my mind and loved it. Now I dreamed of doing it myself, shinning up a hawser that writhed like a snake and vanishing while Mum looked on goggle-eyed.
I dreamed of lying in bed, obeying doctors’ orders to keep still, but at the same time using magic power from my hands to make a massive steel ball move around the room, landing anywhere in the room, until I became famous for my abilities and people queued up behind a rope to watch and wonder.
I had other, stranger dreams, seemingly quite wrong for my situation. They were nightmares of health. I dreamed of running in the garden, without pain, of pushing Peter over and making him cry, and being fiercely told off for that, in a way that made me cry too. I dreamed of refusing to go to bed, for fear that if I did I’d never get out of it again. I dreamed of actually hiding under the bed so that Mum couldn’t get me, despite which she hauled me up and plonked me roughly down on it. I dreamed that she locked me in my room then, and that I lay on the floor rather than the bed and woke up shivering. All this seems curious night-time traffic in a mind that didn’t have to worry about those particular things.
One day Granny came to stay, bringing honey from her own hive. I liked bees. I liked wasps too. In summer, when the window was open, bees or wasps would sometimes fly into the room, and I didn’t mind. I let them walk on my face if that was what they wanted. I even opened my mouth so that they could walk around inside. I really quite wanted them to sting me, but they never did. My appetite wasn’t for pain but for drama, and I didn’t raise the stakes by closing my mouth while they were walking around inside it.
There was some comb in the honey, which she showed me was made up of little regular rooms. Late at night she sat on the chair opposite my bed and told me her cure for sleeplessness. She was wearing a dressing gown which made a luxurious rustle quite unlike the anxious swish of Mum’s. I assume she was sleepless herself, wandering the house, and found me in the same state.
Polyhedral infinity
What she did when she couldn’t sleep, she said, and what I should do also, was to imagine herself being inside one of the cells with a little brush, a brush as soft as a whisper. Only when my brush had done its work and the little chamber was perfectly clean and shining should I move onto the next cell with my whispering brush. In this way the mind might be calmed and sleep invited. I liked the idea of polyhedral infinity, my mind as an empire of cells, needing proper maintenance. It was entirely in character that Granny’s cure for sleeplessness should be vicarious housework. It was still hard, though, to associate Granny with either sleep or the lack of it. I already felt that she would resist being mastered by unconsciousness. Why would she give in? Capitulate to that soft siege. Equally unthinkable, though, that sleep wouldn’t come running the moment she snapped her fingers.
Granny let her guard down a little that night we pooled our insomnias. ‘I remember when your mother was starting to grow up, John,’ she said, ‘she would go out to dances and such things. I would tell her very strictly to be back by nine, ten at the absolute latest. Sometimes she would not return until gone eleven. On one occasion it was after one.’ Children love these revelations that Mummy and Daddy weren’t always good little girls and boys themselves, and in that respect I was no different. I was utterly normal.