The Day Gone By (19 page)

My first memory of the hospital goes back to when I was very small - I think, three. I had a nasty earache and my father (ever mindful of Robert, no doubt) decided to take me down to the hospital, where I was put to bed. All the time, I seemed to be hearing a continual, disturbing whispering and susurration, as of leaves, which gave me no peace. Someone came up to me and asked ‘Can you tell me in what way it hurts, dear - how you feel?' I replied ‘There's a garden in my ear.' I had not experienced the last of that ear, as will be told.

The two senior sisters at the hospital were powers in their own right. Their names were Sister Tomlinson and Sister Dickinson - Sister Tommy and Sister Dickie. They were generally credited with a lot of medical wisdom, and the doctors used to remark humorously that they wouldn't dream of prescribing or doing anything for a patient without either Sister's approval. They were kindly dragons - my goodness, how they worked, too! - and to me, as I grew to know them, they seemed more and more like aunts. (‘Hullo, young Richard; out of my way, now!')

But the nicest person in the hospital, and one of the fondest memories of my life - like Miss Langdon - was Matron Miss Adamson. She was, perhaps, rather an unexpected person to be a matron. She was then in her forties, I would now guess, with fine features and swept-back, white hair. She was quietly spoken and very gentle. Indeed, I never heard her raise her voice. To me she was, quite simply, a second mother. She was someone to whom I could tell everything (such as the Ruth Hubbard problem), and find her invariably understanding and kind. To me, of course, she, as Matron, assured, cool, slim and nice-looking in her dark blue uniform and flowing white head-dress, was a figure to be looked up to and trusted implicitly. The respect with which everyone treated her was plain to be seen. But they weren't free to come into her private room, as I was. She evidently liked me, and this meant a great deal, because a lot of grown-up people decidedly did not. I was spoilt, wayward and inconsiderate: but I was much less so with Matron, because there was something about her which made you behave as you should. The general atmosphere - even the characteristic smell - of the hospital, too, inclined a small boy towards a certain restraint. I knew well enough that this was a place where people came because they were ill - many gravely ill - and that my father's livelihood and working life were centred on it. It was a place to which to come and talk seriously to Matron: it wasn't a place to kick up your heels.

The hospital possessed great numbers of toys and games, and Matron used to let me play with these, and sometimes let me borrow them. I recall in particular a toy theatre, the like of which I had never seen. The cast were two-dimensional, on stout cardboard and properly jointed. At their backs were horizontal strips of sticking-plaster. In these you inserted one arm of a stiff, T-shaped wire, the long arm of which extended out through a horizontal slit which ran the length of the stage half-way up the back-drop. With this they were manipulated from back-stage. I can't remember any toy ever giving me more pleasure.

Sometimes Matron would take me with her when she went round the children's ward. I would follow discreetly behind her as she went from bed to bed, speaking to each child in her low, gentle voice. My goodness, weren't those children just about glad to be ill in hospital? This was luxury. A lot of them had never known anything like it in their lives. They were poor, most of them, from homes in the courts and alleys of Newbury sixty years ago. They were in no hurry to get better - especially at Christmas-time. Shy and inarticulate, they mostly answered Matron in monosyllables, calling her ‘Miss'. I remember her stopping by one bed and asking a little boy of about my own age to try to see whether he could keep his hands still. He couldn't, but she told him he was much better and going on well.

‘What's the matter with him?' I asked Matron, when we were well past the bed.

‘It's St Vitus's dance, dear,' she said. ‘People who have that can't keep themselves still'

‘Will he get better?'

‘Oh yes. He's better than he was to begin with.' There was a singular quality about Matron of which I was intuitively aware, though I never thought about it much. It was simply a part of her self, as I came to know her; a kind of distance, of melancholy - the pensive gravity of a saint, one might almost think. It was as though there were some preoccupation - something untold which she never quite dismissed from mind. I believe I was possibly more sensitive to this than many grown-up people (I have never talked to anyone about it), simply because they generally spoke to her on some urgent matter or question of their own, while I, alight with affection, was nearly always waiting for what
she
would say to me. Would she have liked to have children of her own? Did the sort of things she often had to deal with upset her, I wonder? I can't tell - I never saw her after childhood. I'm glad I knew her: I've never known anyone who seemed at all like her; a lady out of Walter de la Mare, always more or less inwardly aware of some world beyond.

Many years later, I learned that Matron had died in a mental hospital.

It was during these last years of childhood - before I went to boarding school - that I became a film fan. These were the days of silent pictures - a new and important part of life in the nineteen-twenties to millions of people who had never known anything at all like the cinema before. Of course, those films are watched now with hindsight, in the light of the social tidal wave of the talkies of the ‘thirties, the big luxury cinemas - the dream palaces - the great stars like Clark Gable and Greta Garbo. It must be remembered that people in the ‘twenties had no idea that all this was coming, and found silent films wonderful enough. I can remember an old market woman, sitting next to me, utterly engrossed in
The Adventures of the Flag Lieutenant.
I can't recall who played the Flag Lieutenant, dashing and handsome - his name in the story was Dicky Lascelles - but they were all in China, and the English heroine was isolated, alone in her house and threatened by an uprising of evil Chinese. However, the Flag Lieutenant, of course, was on his way. As the film kept cutting from an Evil Face at the window to the heroine holding a phial of poison between her slim fingers and wondering whether the time had come to swallow it or not, my kindly old neighbour kept repeating ‘Oh, Dicky, come quick!' and became quite ecstatic when, of course, he did. Not that I was any the less absorbed. I hadn't grasped, myself, that it was poison; and of course I knew nothing of the Fate Worse than Death, but when you're seven or eight you can easily become enthralled by things that are enthralling surrounding grown-ups; and anyway I knew at least that the Flag Lieutenant was coming to rescue her.