In the Midst of Life (17 page)

‘You were going to tell me about the markets.’

‘Ah yes. The souks. Fascinating. You would never see the likes here. Produce, food, animals, carpets, jewellery, ornaments – thousands of things brought in from miles around by donkey, and laid out on the sun-baked earth. Piles of fruit, fish, vegetables, meat, just stacked up on the ground. Great mounds of rice or lentils piled on a sack and weighed out by the bucket full. Meat, offal, lights, liver, brains laid on a sack, and swarming with flies, and the water seller going up and down, ringing his bell. Oh, it was wonderful! Here, for once, the women were in command, because they were the buyers. The men were the sellers, and in any economy the purchaser has the upper hand. I could have watched them for hours – the men wheedling and whining, the women firm and controlled. And the women always won.’

She leaned back on her heels and gazed up at the trees. ‘Oh, I’ve had a great life. I don’t know of any other European woman who dared to go alone into the souks, but I did. The colours, the smell of the spices, and the donkeys, the sun, and always the High Atlas mountains, snow-covered, in the distance.’

It sounded dreamy to me. I wanted to burst out of the constraint of my nurse’s training and take the first boat to Morocco. The very name of the country inspired dreams. But Mrs Cunningham was continuing:

‘The women had their fun, though, in the hammams.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The public bathhouse; hot, wet and steamy. You lie naked on the stone floor, heated from underneath by wood fires, and a bath attendant throws a bucket of water over you and starts rubbing you with soap and a rough cloth – to stimulate the follicles, they say. But, believe me, that’s not all it stimulates, I can tell you! All those women laughing and massaging each other! What happens in the men’s hammams doesn’t bear thinking of. Crowds of men and boys rubbing each other! Boys from the age of seven or eight –
just think. There’s a dandelion there. Look! Try and get it out, will you?’

I had done enough weeding with my grandfather to know how to attack a dandelion.

‘Good girl. You’ve got the root. That’s more than Evelyn could have done.’

She chuckled a throaty laugh.

‘Poor Evelyn. What she needs is a good slide around in a hammam. She’s like a dried up bit of old soap – she needs a good rubbing and lathering in all that steam to soften her up a bit.’

She chuckled again, and I thought of poor Evelyn on the 5.30 from Paddington, returning to her clever and scornful mother and a few hours of guarded conversation and mutual backbiting.

But I liked Mrs Cunningham. It’s funny how you can see real nastiness in some people, especially in their relationships with others, and like them just the same. She was different, and I felt flattered that she seemed to enjoy my company.

She invited me to her house one Saturday afternoon, but when I arrived it was clear that she had forgotten, because she had gone to stay with her son, James, for the weekend, and Evelyn was there alone. I felt embarrassed and said I would go, but Evelyn pressed me to stay.

‘I suppose you’ve been hearing all about the souks and the hammams and the veiled women?’ she said.

‘Yes. Isn’t it fascinating?’

‘It probably is the first time you hear it, but when you get the same old stories over and over again, you can grow tired of them. Has she got to the one about the camel trek across the desert yet?’

‘No.’

‘She will. And the one about the time she wandered into a brothel by mistake?’

‘Wow! A brothel! That’s interesting. What happened?’

‘She’ll tell you. Nothing can be more boring than an old woman who lives constantly in the past.’

‘She’s had an interesting
life.’

‘Yes, but she’s a scorpion when you get to know her. She drove my dear father into the arms of another woman, that’s for sure.’

I began to feel uncomfortable; getting involved in this female feud was something to avoid. I changed the subject.

‘She seems to have a lot of dislike for religion.’

‘Oh yes. She is a very enlightened woman, in that respect. My father was an atheist – or is, perhaps I should say. My brother and I were brought up non-believers. Really, it is the only rational way to think. Religion has had its day. I don’t know that any intelligent person can believe all that nonsense about virgin births and rising from the dead.’

I did not know how to answer. I was very young and impressionable. I had been brought up as a Christian, and had attended Sunday School, which entailed a lot of bible study, but I don’t think I was very committed. To hear this older woman, who was a Cambridge graduate, make such a statement shook me.

‘We are members of the British Humanist Society’ she continued.

‘What’s that?’

‘We believe that men and women are on this earth to do their best for one another, to act with goodness and kindness and justice for the common good. There is no divine intervention – that is just the wishful thinking of weaker minds.’ She glanced at me, and smiled a faintly superior smile. ‘I suppose you were brought up to believe that old business about God the Father, God the Son, etc.?’

‘Well, I suppose I was.’

I hadn’t heard anyone talk like that before, and it disturbed me.

‘Darwin proved conclusively that there is no God who made Man. Mankind has evolved over millions of years from the animal world. It’s all biology, not theology. Man made God from his imagination.’ She laughed derisively. ‘Anyway after the last war, what is there to believe? Nearly two thousand years of Christianity – “love thy neighbour as thyself” – and what did it produce? The German concentration camps.’

She had struck home. Nothing has ever horrified me as much as the newsreel pictures of the Belsen and Auschwitz victims which
were first shown in British cinemas in 1945, and which I saw when I was ten years old.

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘That’s because you were indoctrinated when you were a child. You need to be more of a free thinker.’

I felt ashamed. I didn’t know that I was indoctrinated. It was a horrid word, I thought. I wanted to be a free thinker.

‘You must take some of the newsletters of the Humanist Association. That will open up your mind. Now, let’s have a cup of tea before you go, and some cake. My mother is a good cook, I’ll say that much for her.’

I tucked into cake and biscuits, then cycled back to the hospital with a comfortably full stomach, but uncomfortable thoughts.

The next time I visited Mrs Cunningham, she was studying a document received from the British Humanist Association entitled
The Right to Die.

Abruptly she said, ‘I have signed an advance directive, instructing that, if I become ill, and the illness is incurable, I request voluntary euthanasia. I have placed a copy of this document with my son, my daughter, my doctor and my lawyer.’ She looked thoroughly pleased with herself.

I had heard of euthanasia, but had not given it much thought. In the course of my work I had seen people die and had thought a good deal about death, but it had never occurred to me that we, in the medical professions, could actually put someone down as you would a dog.

‘It makes absolute sense. I don’t want to suffer needlessly. When my time comes I want my life to end swiftly and painlessly.’

‘That’s what everyone wants,’ I said.

‘Yes, and it’s everyone’s right – or should be. The law needs changing, and we Humanists are trying to bring it up in Parliament. Anyway, I have signed this directive. I consider it the only rational thing to do. I have discussed it with James and with Evelyn, and they both agree.’

‘What does your doctor
say?’

‘He won’t commit himself. He says it would probably cause more trouble than it alleviates. But he respects my wish to die with dignity.’

‘Dignity? Wherever did you get that idea from? Death is not dignified, any more than birth is.’

‘Well, that’s the expression the Euthanasia Society has adopted.’

‘The people who run your society don’t know what they are talking about! No one dies with dignity. That only happens in the cinema when someone says a sad farewell, then his head falls sideways and he dies. It doesn’t happen in real life, I can assure you. Films either make death look romantic, or horrific. It’s neither.’

I giggled as only teenage girls can giggle.

‘I don’t think you are taking this seriously enough,’ Mrs Cunningham said severely. ‘Thoughtless girl. When my time comes, I want an easy death. I want to be able to go to sleep, like having an injection before an operation. You don’t feel a thing. When death begins to overtake me, and bungles the process of dying, I shall want a competent doctor to assist nature and make a good clean job of it.’

‘It all sounds too easy to me.’

‘I have always been in control of my own life, and I intend to be in control of my death.’

That had been almost ten years before, and when Mrs Cunningham was admitted to the Marie Curie Hospital I honestly didn’t recognise her: an old lady, very bent, with sparse straggly hair and a wild look about her. After surgery, she had spent a fortnight in a convalescent home to build her up and improve her strength before the radium treatment, but, nonetheless, she was so thin that every bone in her body stuck out. Her eyes were sunken, and her grey-white skin was drawn tightly over her high cheekbones, making her nose and ears look huge. Her lips were without colour and pinched tightly together above a pointed chin. No, I would not have known her; but she recognised me.

‘You’re the child I used to know in Reading, aren’t you?’

Yes, I am,’ I said with sudden
recognition.

‘A stupid girl, I remember. What are you doing here?’

‘I’m the ward sister.’

I held out my arm to assist her as she walked. She pushed it aside.

‘Leave me alone – there’s nothing wrong with me. Ward sister, you say? That doesn’t sound too good. I dare say you are as ignorant now as you were then.’

She reached the empty bed that had been kept for her.

‘What do you mean by putting me here? I expected a private room. I’m not staying here with a lot of stupid old people!’

She glared angrily around her at the other patients.

I explained that the side rooms were for people who were very sick, and that people like her, who could get about, and were improving, were always nursed in the main ward. She looked at me steadily.

‘You mean I must be improving, or I wouldn’t be here?’

‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘Tell Evelyn that.’

‘Certainly, if you wish me to.’

‘Of course I wish you to! I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it. And tell my son, James, also. I told them both I was getting better, but they wouldn’t believe me. Fools, the pair of them.’

This didn’t look good, by any standards. I had known Mrs Cunningham as an active, strong-minded woman in her early sixties, with a sharp tongue and an independent spirit, but I certainly had not expected this would develop into such venom as she grew old. In our profession we often meet people whose bewilderment and frustration in the face of illness leads to anger, but this was excessive, and I did not like to think of the effect it would have on the other women in the ward.

The Chief came to see her that afternoon, and I accompanied him. She glared at us both.

‘About time, too. I don’t like to be kept waiting. Well? What are you going to do for me?’

He did not say too much, but examined her abdomen, and the scar from the operation, which was healing
well.

‘We are going to take blood for tests.’

‘That’s not going to help me. I want proper treatment.’

‘We cannot start until we have the results.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘A few days.’

‘A few days! That’s preposterous. I want treatment at once.’

‘We will give you tablets to prepare your body for the radium treatment.’

‘That’s something, I suppose. Why am I here at all? That’s what I want to know. I had a hysterectomy. Thousands of women have hysterectomies, then they go home and get on with life. Why do I have to come to the Marie Curie Hospital for radium? It makes no sense.’

This was always the difficult, nay,
impossible,
question to answer. At that time everyone knew that radium was given to reduce a growth, and most people think of a growth as cancer. But this need not always be so. Many growths are benign, many are encapsulated, and even a malignant growth can be reduced to a size of no importance. The Chief explained this to her, and said that surgery had removed the growth, and that the radium, which was the most advanced medical treatment of the day, would minimise the risk of it spreading to other parts of her body. She would probably have six treatments, which might be extended to ten, depending on the response of her body, which would be determined by her physical condition and blood tests. He chose his words carefully.

‘That’s what I wanted to hear.’ Mrs Cunningham’s sunken eyes glared at the Chief. Her thin lips spat out the words, ‘Advanced medical treatment.’

‘Yes. You will get the most up-to-date treatment that is available. This hospital is at the forefront of research, and our success rate is high.’