There was the other faintly shaggy person like me, an artistic and witty woman who raised her young grandson herself and had undergone a terribly botched operation, and whose ex-husband was slowly dying in a hospice near the hospital. There was the nice Chelsea widow lady who was afraid to go home and whose signal gallantry took the form of grooming. At all times, Betty’s hair was perfect.
And in the corner there was Ethel. Ethel was very old, and terrified. She whimpered like a dog and moaned horribly and regularly. Her guts made awful noises. She stank of shit unless her nappy was changed, because she had bad diarrhoea. She fiddled all night with her catheter and cried out at the sharp pain. You could tell the type of pain by the outraged hymeneal cry. All night she did it, sleeping sometimes by day. She was lost and wretched and might have been ignored or sighed at by these other sick women.
It was the young ones who took the lead, the opposite of a pack turning on the weak.
Each of these young women had herself a lot to bear. Each was seriously ill, without knowing what that illness might be. The blonde, who put on her extra eyelashes daily and always looked a treat, had a mother in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. On about my fifth night in hospital, the dark young woman received a message from her husband, who worked in a timber yard. A load had fallen on to him. He was in hospital with a cracked skull. She slipped out of our hospital, coat over gown, and went to see him in his hospital. By then our nurses loved her. They made no fuss when she returned.
‘I give ’im a piece of my mind,’ she said. Lucky man. She was a clever girl.
She was what tabloid papers call ‘a fighter’. Things were clear in her head. She was affectionate, brusque, tender, direct.
We were nursed with discipline, which feels good when you are that sick. There was little unkindness, unlike on the first ward. Agency nurses caused real tensions, about pay and about relationships with patients. They may not have intended to do this, but it made the staff belonging to the hospital sore. They were jumped by absence of warning and by different nursing techniques. Agency nurses also earn more. I heard not one mention of this. It was the style of nursing that was the chafe. We patients unionised if there was a sense that Ethel wasn’t being properly cared for. She was, being lost in her mind, demanding. If a nurse couldn’t come to her, one of the beauties held her hand and kissed and soothed her, just as though she were one of their own. Ethel was in hospital, she was demented, and afraid, but she wasn’t alone. It was a delicately managed thing, and took grace on the part of the nurses. They were fussy about hand hygiene and they shooed the girls to their own beds to rest. What kept the whole strained and frightening place from driving us into our lost selves was simply human connection.
I was blind and on a Zimmer, so they directed me as though I was driving a dodgem when I was allowed my first trip to the bathroom to go and wash. The bathroom was shared with men, who were quite as bothered by bumping into women half naked themselves as we were at being seen unwomanned. When first I was washed down with mean soap and an institutional paper towel, I felt remade by pampering luxury. It is hard to find yourself in dirt. You find yourself in water, or in being clean. Cleanliness is next to some exaltation if not godliness.
The nurses would shout across beds while they made them about why their parts of Africa were best. There was tough barracking and teasing. The main hero was Jesus. Very often in the night, a nurse would praise his name, or thank him. I wondered whether the two Muslim nurses seemed left out. It did not feel as though the deities were in battle. They were each so desperately required.
We were there long enough for a shimmer to go around the ward, a shimmer of secret delight when we were allowed to know that the pretty staff nurse was expecting her first baby. We began to mother and boss her.
The blonde beauty had many visitors, pretty girls and elegant men bringing gifts from the shops they worked in.
Ethel turned some corner into serenity. We discovered that she loved sweet things and would smile and babble like a little girl if you gave her soft sweeties. There was consternation that she might be going to have to enter a home, in effect to die. She had a daughter, but she couldn’t remember this. An equal heartbreak. She had a voice as rough as a herring-wife from my childhood. It was lovely to hear her when her shouted news from wherever she was sounded happy.
‘Aw, Vat’s laaavely,’ she would yell while she was washed down after having her nappy changed. ‘Vat’s laavely. Aintcher good ter me?’
I couldn’t go home to Oliver’s house. I was now a person who couldn’t walk, as well as one who could not see. My eyes had shut down again when the blind panic of adrenalin ceased. My blind panic, so it seems, gives me sight.
In hospital, I had received flowers from my agent.
This was both to say, ‘Well, you are in hospital again’ and to mark the broadcast of my most recent short story on Radio 4. The story was a nasty jab at the consultants and junior doctors in the previous ward I had been in, in that very hospital. Of course, it was all transmuted into fiction, but I’d been so sad about the old doctor lying there politely dying next to me, that I made up a story where, although he died, he won honour from the teeth of humiliation.
Two things: the consultant whom I had had in my sights in that story on that day cancelled the appointment that had been made to investigate my fit further, and, thing two, although the radio was on in the ward, and there was my name, and my story, nobody but the author listened, very quietly. Fiction makes a low noise, well below a hum, in the life of a hospital. Books and writing are of interest only to those to whom they are of interest. This is a depressing truth, in itself of interest to fewer and fewer.
I had to go somewhere when the hospital released me, and it had to be where I could live without stairs for a minimum of six weeks. Annabel and Quentin invited me to Hampshire, for as long as it took me to start to walk again. They had dried me out and now they were again taking me in.
In Hampshire, I humped upstairs with my metal frame from the car to the room I was hardly to leave for six weeks, watched as I lurched and wobbled with kind attention by my first husband, with the practised eye of a horseman-yachtsman. He’s used to big animals and metal spars. He was also the encouraging kind of father who allowed the children to tackle stairs but kept a gate there too, a sensible facilitator. I toddlered my way up the familiar wide stair on my bum, hauling the Zimmer after.
I went to what has become my bedroom, that has seen us through many Christmas-stocking openings and two comings of age, washed with real soap for the first time since hospital, and entered a bed I got out of hardly at all for over a month.
Three busy adults, my older children’s father and his wife, and my older son, made time to visit me in the slits of their crammed days and evenings. They brought me stories of the world beyond and set up a routine that gave me a triumph of time and enlightenment, you might call it, an understanding of how they spend their days.
Land defines its rhythms: one lot for farming, its own; quite another for people. They moot the lot, divide the tasks, split them, and do it as it comes, which is naturally. The life of books, or whatever life I thought I led, seems by contrast inward and unevidenced. But it’s what I have to offer.