Theoretically ill and half-asleep in a twilight world between day and night, safe in my bed, I could let the sounds of the world drift through my head while I sailed away to places where there was no loneliness. Nana used to brings me biscuits and sweets and let Tigger back in.
But the days in bed didn’t come entirely without a price. Doctor Vinter, with his thick German accent, was called. He would take my temperature and hold my thin wrist in his great red hands to feel my pulse. Then I’d have to sit up and lift my pyjama jacket and vest and say ‘ninety-nine’ while he tapped my chest and listened to my breathing. And that was all fine until we got to the bit I dreaded. As soon as the doctor said ‘open wide’, I felt myself beginning to heave, and the tight grip of dizzy fear, like my nightmares, clutched my throat and starved my breath. It was the same every time, I was going to suffocate to death and no one seemed to care.
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ my mother would snap as the doctor pushed a flat stick the size of a cricket bat into my mouth and told me to say ‘aaahhh’.
I was about to choke to death.
I knew I was.
I could feel my whole life tied up in a terrifying knot that was suffocating me while mother kept telling me not to be a baby.
The doctor decided I was a sickly child and left a bottle of chloromycetin tablets.
My mother ushered the old man out of the room with reverent gestures, reserved for doctors and vicars, while I hurried back into my dreams as quickly as I could.
Every four months there were trips to the dentist for ‘a checkup’. This was worse than the doctor. My mother took me to a large Victorian house on Ealing Common, large still rooms with tall ceilings and potted plants, large chairs and a large man with large hands who lifted me into a large chair in a large room where the air stood perfectly still. The drill was like a twisted reject from a Frankenstein movie, a tangle of peeling chrome pulley wheels and cables racing round as the rasping bit bored into my teeth like a tiny road drill. There were no injections to kill the pain in those days.
My mother sat at the back of the room and said, ‘Don’t be such a baby.’
Thank you, Mummy. I feel better now, happy in the knowledge that Baby Jesus is looking down on me and will keep me safe.
First there was the painless bit, a loud noise that went right through me, shaking every part of my body. Then there was the fire, scalding pain that seemed as if it would never end, sharp cutting lines that went right through every nerve.
‘There we are,’ says the dentist. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’
And I always shook my head, too scared to be thought a baby, fighting back the tears and just relieved it was over. This went gone on for years, long into the days when I was old enough to make my own choices and painkilling injections were available because there was always this voice in my head telling me only babies and girls had injections.
I think pain brought my mother closer to her God. For me, it just convinced me more and more that he didn’t exist. There were visits with no fillings and then there were visits where teeth were pulled out. And that was the worst of all, with the man in the black suit holding the gas mask over my face while I fought to stay alive. That is a terror you never forget. There was the pain afterwards too and a mouthful of blood and nothing to make it better because my mother didn’t believe children should take aspirins.
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ she would say. ‘They were only baby teeth.’
I was also six when they took my tonsils out. Once again, I fought the gasmask as the terror of death overtook me. This time my mother wasn’t there with her helpful advice. I’d been wheeled away into the operating theatre but she was sitting by my bed when I was back in a ward full of grown-up men because there were no spare beds in the children’s ward. I couldn’t stop coughing – the stitches in my throat came undone and I coughed blood.
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ she said. ‘It’s only a little bit of blood.’
But I was six, I only had a little bit.
This was the British way, remote and cold with a stiff upper lip that built your character. No good could ever come from showing your feelings or taking pain medication. That was the sort of thing foreigners did.
In 1999 I finally succeeded in building a time machine.
1952 – SEX EDUCATION – PART 1
Forest Hall Boarding School – Yorkshire – I’m third from the left looking at my feet.
There were more than a hundred acres of thick North Yorkshire woods, and in front of them at the top of a hill was the school, a beautiful country mansion like something out of a children’s story.
Sixty boys and ten staff. It looked like paradise, but it was a prison, too far from anywhere to run away from, though one boy did and was found drowned in the river a few days later. It looked like a childhood dream, long days of Latin and cricket, of playing in the trees, cross-country running and training to become a leader of men, uniforms and views of the world from Harrods, privilege for the privileged in yet another isolated cocoon. But there was a darkness about the place like an invisible cloak, a darkness that could stifle innocence, a darkness like a memory of Charles Dickens.
*Forest Hall is now a very smart hotel and spa. I wonder if they’d give me a discount.
There were six of us in the woods behind the school. Past the outbuildings and the copse where the pheasants were fed, across the field where the goats grew fat on damp grass, the woods were thick with old oak trees and rumours of a secret tunnel leading back to the cellars below the school, where big boys took new boys, blindfolded and shaking with fear, and made them eat live worms. The worms were tinned spaghetti, but a terrified child has a terrified imagination and most of us believed that what we were eating was alive and more than one boy threw up down his shirt and was punished by matron.
Bluebells were growing in the lakes of sunshine between the trees. The air was warm with spring softness and on the bank behind us the primroses were coming out. Pigeons were whispering softly in the treetops, unaware that the children below them would be blasting them to death with shotguns in a few weeks’ time.
Badgers, foxes and squirrels were spring-cleaning. The sap was rising everywhere, even in us unsuspecting ten-year-olds.
‘Can you make yours go hard?’ Smith One said.
‘Of course I can,’ I said. ‘Everybody can. Can’t they?’
‘Girls can’t,’ Huntly-Jones said and we all giggled.
‘Girls haven’t got one,’ I said.
‘Do you know why?’ said Porter.
‘Er, no,’ I said. ‘They just haven’t.’
‘It’s to make babies,’ said Porter.
‘What do you mean?’ Huntly-Jones asked.
‘My