Home life
Off balance
Alice Thomas Ellis
Why don't I shut up? I should never have moaned that August was boring. As soon as I said that, Janet's cat, Eric, lost his tail. We don't know how. He can't say, and speculation is fruitless. He lives near the railway lines, but his tail was not initially utterly severed, only almost. The vet had to amputate it. Eric has made a good recovery but lost his balance. He went out to sit on the wall in the sun and when he saw Janet he made to leap off and greet her in his accustomed, graceful feline fashion, but that didn't work. He fell off. Janet had to stifle a laugh and now her guilt is insupportable. Then the daughter got glandular fever. Most of our sons have had this unpleasant and debilitating illness, but only as 0 or A Levels approached. The daughter is not yet threatened by these events and I don't know why she should be struck down in the middle of the summer hols.
Her throat swelled prodigiously as we sat alone in remote seclusion at the end of the valley. When she couldn't even swallow saliva I telephoned for medical assistance and now we're in the children's ward of the local hospital with cut-out teddy bears on the doors and a rabbit on the window- pane. I kept telling her she'd be better soon and putting off the telephone call, so when I sent for the doctor night had fallen and we sailed through the lanes in an ambulance in the dark. I had an interesting talk with the ambulance man, and the `It's just post-natal depression.' doctor was a great fan of Jeffrey's; the nurses here are delightful and I have a friend in another mummy with whom I go to the canteen for lunch (chips and shepherd's pie, or quiche and chips, or chips), so I can't claim to be lonely but I am amazingly cut off. One telephone is full of money so cannot be used, and when I tried another one to call London I could hear Janet but she couldn't hear me. I reversed the charges then, because I was sick of giving British Telecom ten pences for nothing, like throwing buns to a bear who refuses to perform.
I feel as though I am living in a grounded space-ship, and very soon I shall have nothing to read but women's magazines because I've read nearly all the old paper- backs I slung hastily into an overnight bag as we left. Speaking of overnight, I spent my first night here sleeping in a mechanical armchair which extended to permit one to recline but also sprang back to position at a fingertip's touch, nearly catapulting the occupant across the room. Last night I got to sleep in the camp-bed because the mummy who had slept in it the night before had been moved into a room. It's all a bit complicated.
It's the nurses I feel sorry for. At the moment the place isn't too crowded, but they have the wary look of people who are used to being overwhelmed and have got in the way of expecting it. One day there were only two of them on duty with nine ailing children to mind. Sister was juggling a baby in one hand and bed-making with the other while calling out reassurance to the rest of the patients. In the room of one child the television was on, and there was Edwina Currie making a remark to the effect that there wasn't a shortage of nurses. Sister says she found herself addressing the screen in no uncertain terms. I keep remembering that before we left the valley for the hospital the air force was daily whizzing through the sound barrier, skimming the bracken at a couple of million quid a throw. Being ill always seems to me a terrible waste of time unless you want a rest, but flying through the air in all that hardware practising for the next lot of hostilities — which would, in any event, see us all out, rendering even nurses redundant — seems a dreadful waste of money; especially when the planes crash in the bracken. I think I'm getting an idee fixe about aeroplanes and conifers.
They've just taken the drip out of the daughter's arm since she's managing to drink, and I feel faint. I'd make a hopeless nurse. We've both had to regress a few years. She needs some encouragement to swallow, so I grip her hand tightly, hold the cup to her mouth and say to the person who steals my tights and whose shoes are too big for me: 'One for Mummy, one for Daddy, one for Janet. . .' She takes it very well considering.
PS: Two fire engines have just drawn up outside the window.
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