Going Solo (13 page)

I heard him talking to me and I understood what he was saying, and I also knew all about Mersah Matruh and about the train. Mersah was a small town about 250 miles along the Libyan coast west of Alexandria, and our army had a most carefully preserved little railway running across the desert between the two places. This railway was a vital supply line for our forward troops in the Western Desert and the Italians were bombing it all the time but we somehow managed to keep it going. Everyone knew about the single-track railway-line that ran all the way along the coast beside the sparkling white beaches of the southern Mediterranean from Alex to Mersah.

I heard voices around me as they manoeuvred my stretcher into the ambulance, and when the ambulance started to move forward over the very bumpy track,
someone above me began screaming. Every time we hit a bump the man above me cried out in agony.

When they were putting me on to the train, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a lovely Cockney voice said, ‘Cheer up, matey. You’ll soon be back in Alex.’

The next thing I can remember was being taken off the train into the tremendous bustle of Alexandria Station, and I heard a woman’s voice saying, ‘This one’s an officer. He’ll go to the Anglo-Swiss.’

Then I was inside the hospital itself and I heard the wheels of my stretcher rumbling softly along endless corridors. ‘Put him in here for the moment,’ a different woman’s voice was saying. ‘We want to have a look at him before he goes into the ward.’

Deft fingers began to unroll the bandages around my head. ‘Can you hear me talking to you?’ the owner of the fingers was saying. She took one of my hands in hers and said, ‘If you can hear what I am saying, just give my hand a squeeze.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s fine. Now we know you’re going to be all right.’

Then she said, ‘Here he is, doctor. I’ve taken off the dressings. He is conscious and is responding.’

I felt the close proximity of the doctor’s face as he bent over me, and I heard him saying, ‘Do you have much pain?’

Now that the bandages had been taken off my head, I found myself able to burble an answer to him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No pain. But I can’t see.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ the doctor said. ‘All you’ve got to do is to lie very still. Don’t move. Do you want to empty your bladder?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘We’ll help you,’ he said, ‘but don’t move. Don’t try to do anything for yourself.’

I believe they inserted a catheter because I felt them doing something down there and it hurt a bit, but then the pressure on my bladder went away.

‘Just a dry dressing for the moment, Sister,’ the doctor said. ‘We’ll X-ray him in the morning.’

Then I was in a ward with a lot of other men who talked and joked a good deal among themselves. I lay there dozing and feeling no pain at all, and later on the air-raid sirens started wailing and the ack-ack guns began opening up on all sides and I heard a lot of bombs exploding not very far away. I knew it was night-time now because that was when the Italian bombers came over seven nights a week to raid our navy in Alexandria harbour. I felt very calm and dreamy lying there listening to the terrific commotion of bombs and ack-ack going on outside. It was as though I had ear-phones on and all the noise was coming to me over the wireless from miles and miles away.

I knew when the morning came because the whole ward began to bustle and breakfasts were served all round. Obviously I couldn’t eat because my whole head was sheathed in bandages with only small holes left for breathing. I didn’t want to eat anyway. I was always sleepy. One of my arms was strapped to a board because tubes were going into the arm, but the other, the right arm, was free and once I explored the bandages on my head with my fingers. Then the Sister was saying to me, ‘We are moving your bed into another room where it is quieter and you can be by yourself.’

So they wheeled me out of the ward into a single room, and over the next one or two or three days, I don’t know how many, I submitted in a semi-daze to various procedures such as X-rays and being taken several times to the operating theatre. One of my more vivid recollections is of a conversation that went on in the theatre itself between a doctor and me. I knew I was in the theatre because they always told me where they were taking me, and this time the doctor said to me, ‘Well, young man, we are going to use a super brand-new anaesthetic on you today. It’s just come out from England and it is given by injection.’ I had had short talks with this particular doctor several times. He was an anaesthetist and had visited me in my room before each operation to put his stethoscope on my chest and back. All my life I have taken an intense and inquisitive interest in every form of medicine, and even in those young days I had begun to ask the doctors a lot of questions. This man, perhaps because I was blind, always took the trouble to treat me as an intelligent listener.

‘What is it called?’ I asked him.

‘Sodium pentathol,’ he answered.

‘And you have never used it before?’

‘I have never used it myself,’ he said, ‘but it has been a great success back home as a pre-anaesthetic. It is very quick and comfortable.’

I could sense that there were quite a few other people, men and women, padding silently around the operating theatre in their rubber boots and I could hear the tinkling of instruments lifted and put down, and the talk of soft voices. Both my senses of smell and of hearing had become very acute since my blindness, and I had developed an
instinctive habit of translating sounds and scents into a coloured mental picture. I was picturing the operating theatre now, so white and sterile with the masked and green-gowned inmates going priestlike about their separate tasks, and I wondered where the surgeon was, the great man who was going to do all the cutting and the stitching.

I was about to have a major operation performed on my face, and the man who was doing it had been a famous Harley Street plastic surgeon before the war, but now he was a Surgeon-Commander in the navy. One of the nurses had told me about his Harley Street days that morning. ‘You’ll be all right with him,’ she had said. ‘He’s a wonder-worker. And it’s all free. A job like you’re having would be costing you five hundred guineas in civvy street.’

‘You mean this is the very first time you’ve ever used this anaesthetic?’ I said to the anaesthetist.

This time he didn’t answer me directly. ‘You’ll love it,’ he said. ‘You go out like a light. You don’t even have any sensation of losing consciousness as you do with all the others. So here we go. You’ll just feel a little prick on the back of your hand.’

I felt the needle going into a vein on the top of my left hand and I lay there waiting for the moment when I would ‘go out like a light’.

I was quite unafraid. I have never been frightened by surgeons or of being given an anaesthetic, and to this day, after some sixteen major operations on numerous parts of my body, I still have complete faith in all, or let me say
nearly
all, those men of medicine.

I lay there waiting and waiting and absolutely nothing happened. My bandages had been taken off for the operation,
but my eyes were still permanently closed by the swellings on my face. One doctor had told me it was quite possible that my eyes had not been damaged at all. I doubted that myself. It seemed to me that I had been permanently blinded, and as I lay there in my quiet black room where all sounds, however tiny, had suddenly become twice as loud, I had plenty of time to think about what total blindness would mean in the future. Curiously enough, it did not frighten me. It did not even depress me. In a world where war was all around me and where I had ridden in dangerous little aeroplanes that roared and zoomed and crashed and caught fire, blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important. Survival was not something one struggled for any more. I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.

The doctor had tried to comfort me by saying that when you have contusions and swellings as massive as mine, you have to wait at least until the swellings go down and the incrustations of blood around the eyelids have come away. ‘Give yourself a chance,’ he had said. ‘Wait until those eyelids are able to open again.’

Having at this moment no eyelids to open and shut, I hoped the anaesthetist wouldn’t start thinking that his famous new wonder anaesthetic had put me to sleep when it hadn’t. I didn’t want them to start before I was ready. ‘I’m still awake,’ I said.

‘I know you are,’ he said.

‘What’s going on?’ I heard another man’s voice asking.
‘Isn’t it working?’ This, I knew, was the surgeon, the great man from Harley Street.

‘It doesn’t seem to be having any effect at all,’ the anaesthetist said.

‘Give him some more.’

‘I have, I have,’ the anaesthetist answered, and I thought I detected a slightly ruffled edge to the man’s voice.

‘London said it was the greatest discovery since chloroform,’ the surgeon was saying. ‘I saw the report myself. Matthews wrote it. Ten seconds, it said, and the patient’s out. Simply tell him to count to ten and he’s out before he gets to eight, that’s what the report said.’

‘This patient could have counted to a hundred,’ the anaesthetist was saying.

It occurred to me that they were talking to one another as though I wasn’t there. I would have been happier if they had kept quiet.

‘Well, we can’t wait all day,’ the surgeon was saying. It was
his
turn to get irritable now. But I did not want my surgeon to be irritable when he was about to perform a delicate operation on my face. He had come into my room the day before and after examining me carefully, he had said, ‘We can’t have you going about like that for the rest of your life, can we?’

That worried me. It would have worried anyone. ‘Like what?’ I had asked him.

‘I am going to give you a lovely new nose,’ he had said, patting me on the shoulder. ‘You want to have something nice to look at when you open your eyes again, don’t you. Did you ever see Rudolph Valentino in the cinema?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I shall model your nose on his,’ the surgeon said. ‘What do you think of Rudolph Valentino, Sister?’

‘He’s smashing,’ the Sister said.

And now, in the operating theatre, that same surgeon was saying to the anaesthetist, ‘I’d forget that pentathol stuff if I were you. We really can’t wait any longer. I’ve got four more on my list this morning.’

‘Right!’ snapped the anaesthetist. ‘Bring me the nitrous oxide.’

I felt the rubber mask being put over my nose and mouth, and soon the blood-red circles began going round and round faster and faster like a series of gigantic scarlet flywheels and then there was an explosion and I knew nothing more.

When I regained consciousness I was back in my room. I lay there for an uncounted number of weeks but you must not think that I was totally without company during that time. Every morning throughout those black and sightless days a nurse, always the same one, would come into my room and bathe my eyes with something soft and wet. She was very gentle and very careful and she never hurt me. For at least an hour she would sit on my bed working skilfully on my swollen sealed-up eyes, and she would talk to me while she worked. She told me that the Anglo-Swiss used to be a large civilian hospital and that when war broke out the navy took over the whole place. All the doctors and all the nurses in the hospital were navy people, she said.

‘Are you in the navy?’ I asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am a naval officer.’

‘Why am
I
here if it’s all navy?’

‘We’re taking in the RAF and the army as well now,’ she said. ‘That’s where most of the casualties are coming from.’

Her name, she told me, was Mary Welland, and her home was in Plymouth. Her father was a Commander on a cruiser operating somewhere in the north Atlantic, and her mother worked with the Red Cross in Plymouth. She said with a smile in her voice that it was very bad form for a nurse to sit on a patient’s bed, but what she was doing to my eyes was very delicate work that could only be done if she were sitting close to me. She had a lovely soft voice, and I began to picture to myself the face that went with the voice, the delicate features, the green-blue eyes, the golden-brown hair and the pale skin. Sometimes, as she worked very close to my eyes, I would feel her warm and faintly marmalade breath on my cheek and in no time at all I began to fall very quickly and quite dizzily in love with Mary Welland’s invisible image. Every morning, I waited impatiently for the door to open and for the tinkling sound of the trolley as she wheeled it into my room.

Her features, I decided, were very much like those of Myrna Loy. Myrna Loy was a Hollywood cinema actress I had seen many times on the silver screen, and up until then she had been my idea of the perfect beauty. But now I took Miss Loy’s face and made it even more beautiful and gave it to Mary Welland. The only concrete thing I had to go by was the voice, and so far as I was concerned, Mary Welland’s dulcet tones were infinitely preferable to Myrna Loy’s harsh American twang.

For about an hour every day I experienced ecstasy as Miss Myrna Mary Loy Welland sat on my bed and did things to my face and eyes with her delicate fingers. And
then suddenly, I don’t know how many days later, came the moment that I can never forget.

Mary Welland was working away on my right eye with one of her soft moist pads when all at once the eyelid began to open. At first it opened only an infinitesimal crack, but even so, a shaft of brilliant light pierced the darkness in my head and I saw before me very close … I saw three separate things … and all of them were glistening with scarlet and gold!

‘I can see!’ I cried. ‘I can see something!’

‘You can?’ she said excitedly. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes! I can see something very close to me! I can see three separate things right in front of me! And nurse … they are all shining with red and gold! What are they, nurse? What am I seeing?’