There is in fact no better cure for self-pity than Lourdes. Where the sick and the maimed seem to pour together to proclaim their hope and their faith, or even just to share their fears, it is no longer possible to believe that one’s own pain is either unique or unbearable. The discovery holds at least a measure of comfort.
We pushed, pulled and heaved Paul in a wheel-chair up, down and around, missing nothing. We went to the torchlight procession in the evening, and as a matter of course joined the massive crowds in the afternoon for the ritual blessing of the sick. It had not occurred to me to ask if I could join the group of mothers of sick children who were in a special reserved area at the front, near the altar, and generally Frank and I, with Paul, were somewhere in the middle of the heaving throng. One afternoon we had gone there as usual, and, as the priest came by, the sacred monstrance raised in his hands for blessing, the crowd fell silent. And in that pin-dropping silence Paul began to laugh. It was the laugh of a mad creature, a spine-chilling cackle that froze me to the spot with horror and shame. Suddenly an old peasant woman in a black shawl elbowed her way to where we stood and, eyes streaming with tears, lifted Paul out of his wheel-chair and held him up in her arms for the priest to bless. Paul was so astonished that he stopped laughing. It was an agonised moment, the significance of which did not escape me even at the time. It was another woman who had wept for my child, and who had taken compassion on me. Instinctively she had done what the moment demanded.
The woman’s action pulled me up short. From that moment I shook myself out of my stupor, and scraped together some scraps of courage. I can’t claim to have been inspired by anything more noble than common-sense and the urge to self-preservation, but they were enough for a start. The alternatives stared me in the face: either I could go on wallowing, over-protecting myself from hurt, becoming more and more bitter each day as I played the insidious chorus of ‘why-should-this-happen-to-me?’ as the background music to my life. Or – I could face the fact that what had happened was not going to un-happen, and might as well be come to terms with. I had been drowning in self-pity for long enough now to see where it was likely to lead. There was no doubt in my mind that I needed to change course.
Anyway, I was beginning to look forward to the new baby. A number of people had expressed horror – ‘Surely you’re not going on with it?’ Relatives and friends were full of forebodings and fears, but somehow I knew with absolute certainty that their fears would be confounded. The new baby would be a consolation, not a fresh disaster. For once I was right. The birth was easy; the child, John Mark, everything I could have hoped for. With Paul at home, and Anthony a restless, energetic four-year-old, the new baby had to be propped up with a bottle and left to get on with it. He seemed to know from the start that he couldn’t expect anything better, and to the relief of us all, he seemed to thrive on the inevitable neglect.
CHAPTER 2
PAUL
During the first four years of Paul’s life, there was little relief. A local girl, Jean (who became a lifelong and invaluable friend), came in once a week to help with the cleaning; but, except that I went shopping when she was there, I was almost completely housebound and Paulbound. Frank and I had no social life. In those four years, at least, we never went out in the evenings. Dinner-parties, theatres, cinemas, were things once known but long-forgotten.
Once I had thought of myself as a woman with intellectual interests, but now my life was focused entirely on Paul. The other children too, of course, but mainly Paul. There was so much to do for him. Doubly incontinent, he was always having to be changed or cleaned up; he had to be watched constantly because his actions were unpredictable; and he had to be fed, like a baby, by hand, every spoonful shovelled into his mouth, since he could use neither spoon nor cup. And as he would chew everything a hundred times over, with maddening slowness, the time for getting the next meal ready was almost in sight by the time he’d got to the end of the previous one. He was a round-the-clock full-time job.
When I look back now on those early years with Paul, they float in a mist of unreality. Can I really have got up two, three, four times every night to put him back to bed when he was chasing round and round his room like one possessed? I know that I did, and I remember thinking hopelessly that it would never end, that I’d go on doing that for ever and ever, or until the accumulating exhaustion got me down. Paul wouldn’t even have a rest in the middle of the day to make up for the sleep he lost at night. He seemed never to get tired.
At first, I think it was other people from whom we suffered most, because it takes time to learn how not to mind, and you have to work at it. ‘Old fish-face’, the children in the road called after us, when I took him out in his pram. Paul didn’t hear, and if he had heard he would not have understood, so why should I mind so much? I don’t know, but I did. Sometimes the children just ran away when they saw us coming, and I had to steel myself to pretend that I hadn’t noticed that the street was suddenly empty. Once I took Paul on a bus into nearby Altrincham, and I froze when I heard a woman behind me say: ‘Children like that shouldn’t be allowed on public transport. It’s not right.’ At that moment, I remembered, with a sharp stab of anguish, how I had felt about poor spastic M.
I’m sure that it’s fear which deprives well-intentioned people of their normal sensitivity. Or it may be that the shock of horror is so strong as to oust all other, more generous, feelings. Whatever the reason, I seemed to spend my life nerving myself against the barbs of those who certainly meant no harm, but who couldn’t have hurt more if they had put their minds to it. There was a doctor, for example, an old family friend, who passed me by in the street one morning without a word, and with barely a nod of recognition. Next day he came round to the house sweating with outrage. ‘An animal,’ he almost shouted at me, ‘that’s what he is, an animal. Why don’t you have him put away?’ He was working something out of his system, and he didn’t seem to realise what his words were doing to me.
Poor Paul, so gentle he would never consciously have hurt anything or anybody, but so clumsy that he couldn’t help doing so. He infuriated Anthony. The latter was keen on making models of ships and aeroplanes, but there was no way in which the finished models could be kept safe from Paul’s marauding hands. He would trample on the other children’s toys and chew the wheels off their miniature motor-cars. Worse, he swallowed not only the rubber tyres, but every nut, bolt and screw he could lay hands on. We worried constantly, but the strange diet didn’t seem to affect his health.
Sometimes he played in the garden, usually in a small glossy red car, which was his pride and joy. He went on shunting himself around in it, even when he had long since outgrown it. Cars were his great love, and he was always happy when he was in one. Going for a ride in our elderly Ford Consul used to exhilarate him, and he would sit bolt upright on the back seat, with a seraphic grin plastered all over his face. He regarded everything that happened in the car as entertainment laid on specially for his benefit. Once Frank inadvertently backed into a lamp-post and swore colourfully Paul thought it was a marvellous joke, and rocked with an appreciative bellylaugh which didn’t improve his father’s temper.
We both did what we could for him, but sadly there was no question of a loving relationship between us. For love you need some kind of basic communication, a reciprocity. With Paul there was nothing. If he knew us at all, it was only as a vaguely friendly presence; there was no real recognition in his awareness of us.
Try as we would, we could never teach him that some things are just not done. He was incapable of learning from his frequent mistakes. If he pulled out the cutlery