Low life
Indisposed
Jeffrey Bernard
Alast, after years of trying, I've finally landed the Spring Double. Pneumonia and pleurisy. I wonder how much Lad- broke's would have laid me against getting the two? Anyway, I'm back in St Stephens Hospital where I was first shown the yellow card in December 1965. But this is the first time I've ever been in a hospital for something that wasn't self-inflicted and that makes it seem somehow a little unfair. They didn't conscript kamikaze pilots.
The ward I'm in is called Ellen Terry and down the corridor there's a ward called Alfred Tennyson. I tried to get moved to Benny Green or Larry Adler but they're completely filled with industrial accidents: people who've fallen into typewriters etc. There are six of us in Ellen Terry. Mr Rice opposite has a dodgy lung and he also has diarrhoea which he reports to me on in graphic detail every 30 minutes or so. I think I hate him. Next to him there lies a sheer hulk, poor Mr Collander, whose blad- der is up the spout. Then there's Mr Handley, a costermonger from Fulham, who is rather delightful really and who has cancer of the lung. He quite rightly got a lit- tle crotchety with a young doctor last week who told him to give up smoking. As he said, 'A little late for that fucking advice, isn't it?' My chest man and registrar is all right though, even if he has developed the habit of draining my right lung via a needle inserted into it under my shoulder blade. Sadly, his students who play games with me preparatory to taking their finals all suffer from halitosis. A couple of them couldn't diagnose a decapitation but I gather they'll qualify.
What has been fascinating though, here in the bowels of Ellen Terry for the past three weeks, is the behaviour of the `domestics'. Nearly all these ladies are West Indian, and by Christ what a mistake peo- ple make in thinking black is black and all the same. Africans are far more benign as a rule. But my bete noire is Granadian and we fell out a fortnight ago when I asked her to include a paper cup in the rubbish she was clearing away from the top of my locker. She erupted more rawly than the psoriasis in the next bed. clean away shit', she told me, 'and I clean away wine. I clear up tissues and wash glasses, but I don't touch paper cups.' Then, grabbing a handful of her own flesh, she went on, 'And this skin is black. Pure black. It's black, West Indian skin and what's more I know who my father is and I know who my mother is.' Never have I known such sudden paranoia. That evening Miss Barbados declared war too. She gave me a bowl of soup but wouldn't give me a spoon. 'I serve soup,'
she said, 'but I never have anything to do with spoons.' Particularly white men's spoons,' she muttered under her breath.
But open warfare has existed since I became addicted to tea 20 days ago. Not a drink or a cigarette for 20 days and something had to give. (Are addicts ad- dicted to addiction?) I must have con- tinuous tea now I chain-drink the stuff but I'm not allowed in the kitchen to boil the water for my tea bags and the West Indians watch me like hawks. I run dangerous gauntlets to boil water. Yes, it's quite a serious place is the Ellen Terry Ward and you don't have to behave that eccentricallY to get into their bad books or get classified as I have by Sister as being a 'difficult pa- tient'. Only the other night as they were do- ing their final round with the drugs trolley 1 asked the staff nurse in charge of the amaz- ing vehicle, `Do you have anything to make love last?' Eine kleine Nacht aside, but that nurse has been off me ever since. This is a very serious place and if my friend Mr Handley doesn't start taking his impending death a little more seriously he could be in for some very cold treatment. Meanwhile, the cockles of my heart have been wonder- fully warmed by the amazingly kind and touching get well cards and letters I've received from readers of this column since I've been in Ellen Terry. What a nice lot you sound. And now for two weeks' con- valescence. My man with the long needles has told me to do absolutely nothing when I get home. That shouldn't be to° difficult.
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