Low life
My fellow inmates
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwas re-apprehended last week by two storm-troopers claiming to be ambulance men after three weeks of having been Awol from the Middlesex Hospital. They caught me in flagrante in bed with pancreatitis and there was no escaping.
They took me firstly to the casualty department at University College Hospital where, thanks to the awful Virginia Bot- tomley, I had to wait on a stretcher in a corridor for five hours before getting a bed, and another two hours before getting a shot of the mighty painkiller, pethidine. For three days and three nights I retched and would have given another limb to have been able to vomit successfully.
As luck would have it, the miraculous Messrs Cobb and Sweetman of titanium fame walked past my stretcher, and I yelled and they promised to rescue me and move me to their workshop in the Middlesex. Their ward is run by Sister' Sally who looked after me and befriended me two years ago when I broke my hip. My pan- creas stopped screaming after a while and as I was on the mend I got the shock hor- `Of course, if you do become a Catholic I'll want a divorce.' ror of my life when I passed a pint of what looked like claret into a urine bottle. The staff thought nothing of it, but I haven't had such a scare since almost the same thing happened after a lovely Sunday lunch with the Courtaulds once when Philippa Courtauld served a delicious meal that included hot beetroot.
And then a most horribly self-important businessman with a broken leg was put alongside me. He spent all day on a portable telephone talking pompously to his secretary. He reminded me of some of the people that I've listened to in disgust- ing provincial hotels who are nearly always reps selling anything from ladies' bloomers to garden gates and who put on the airs and graces of managing directors.
In contrast there was a very nice old lady on the other side of me who works in the British Library by King's Cross. She has a fascinating theory that the library has been built over an enormous German second world war bomb, a posthumous calling card from the Luftwaffe.
Another saviour on that ward, a male nurse, Roger, saw the pained look on my face although he was giving me pethidine every four hours, and twigged that our businessman was boring the arse off me and he kindly moved me to a bed at the end of the ward situated opposite two old dears suffering from dementia who talked all night in their sleep. I had been warned about them but at lights out I pricked up my ears and spent an age listening to what you could call a better programme than Book at Bedtime. One of them was the unconscious narrator of what I was certain was her autobiography. She started with, `Daddy, Daddy,' in a pleading voice then she went on. 'Oh, Betty, how could you, Daddy will kill you if he fmds out ... Come in out of the rain, George ... you revolting man. Go outside if you want to do that .. . you think you can come round CS1 here and knock on my door any time you want something.' And so on. The woman in the next bed who was, I guess, Viennese and also suffering from a sort of dementia, insisted with old-world charm in trying to pay and tip a nurse for giving her two sleeping pills.
Anyway, by the time you read this, Mr Cobb will have given me a few more weeks' leave before re-arresting me and I shall be at home writing my Good Hospital Guide. The Middlesex gets four stars in spite of the fact that Mr Cobb has failed to return the leg I lent him, but the nurses are amaz- ingly kind. How hospitals have changed since 1965, the first time I ever suffered from pancreatitis. It is now mixed wards, christian names and cups of tea whenever you want them. There seems to be no restriction these days on the amount of vis- itors one is alowed to have. Last night on our smoking landing I counted 22 Jamaicans and it was like a carnival in Kingston. No wonder, the bastards have won the Test Series.
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