Released from hospital

It takes effort to wrestle the facts from memory. I thought that it was summer when I came out of hospital, and that it had been a six-month stay. But I was discharged in time to see a long queue outside a tobacconist / candy store in Harold Place, Hastings. The public record confirms that war-time sweet rationing ended on 24th April 1949. So I could not have been incarcerated more than four months, a span which must have included my seventh birthday. Alice in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows, which I recalled in my last post, may have been my presents. Memory is selective. To remember everything is to be fatally afflicted, like Funes the Memorious, in which Luis Borges tells the story of Funes, a man who, after a horse accident, gains a perfect, total, and unflagging memory, recalling every detail of his past simultaneously.

It’s the peaks of triumph, the pits of woe which remain specially etched on memory. Ordinary days are eroded flat by the ensuing decades. Here in these memoirs, my effort is to peel off layers of forgetful vanity, reaching flesh still raw and smarting from ancient wounds.

My greatest triumph in those months was the first time I hobbled on crutches and plastered leg to the ward toilet. I give heartfelt thanks for not needing to call “I need the Bottle” or “Bedpan please Nurse” in the last 58 years. Hardly an achievement to boast of in the wider world, but such details are big in the reduced horizons of the disabled and dying.

The greatest triumph of a long stay in hospital should be the day of discharge, especially when you walk out on your own two feet, intact after two operations, hundreds of injections in the fleshy parts, successive hospital epidemics and the double-restraint of quarantine. Yet what befell on that day was a great humiliation which I would pass over in silence had I not rashly brought up the topic myself.

After physiotherapy to relearn walking without crutches, and to build up my strength, I’d been pronounced free to leave. Farewells had been exchanged with my former jailers revealing a sort of mutual respect. Yet I could not go till my parents showed up to collect me. Scrubbed, dressed and combed with a little bag of belongings, I waited, my bed already given up to a new arrival on the ward. No parent showed up. Nurses who had once been cross with me could barely conceal how cross they were with my mother and stepfather. Finally arriving several hours late, they were flustered and quarrelsome as on the occasion of my accident.

My childish deal with the angels, to be a “burnt offering” to reunite my parents, had failed. I had a little sister by now, six months old when I came out of hospital. I remember one image only: a baby in a pram. If anyone would have brought my parents back together it would have been her, their shared child, but destiny had other plans.