Low life
Home, sweet home
Jeffrey Bernard
Icame home last Sunday to discover that my wheelchair will not go into the bath- room and will just go into the kitchen with an inch to spare and so I sat on my sofa and seethed for a couple of hours. My brothers had kindly brought me home with an amazing amount of property I seemed to have collected in hospital. I somehow knew that it might be a mistake to have left that hospital when the nurses said goodbye. And what a nice bunch of girls they were. Legend has it that all nurses are angels and, of course, they are not. But one of them even wheeled me one day into the CATTO GALLERY, HAMPSTEAD, 15 MARCH 1994 local pub for a drink. We bumped into three registrars and a consultant. Momen- tarily I feared for her job but surprisingly they were very jolly and delighted to see her. So would you be if you could.
But nurses and the good surgeon and his registrar apart, I shan't miss many people from that ward and the smoking landing where we converged from all the wards every day. I might miss Joy, a nice old bird who I told one day that they should have kept her hip and replaced the rest of her. There was also a pleasant man who had the misfortune, because of mistaken identity, to be shot outside a pub in Camden Town not long-ago. The bullet, a 45, lodged in his spine, not severing the spinal cord itself, but robbing him of the use of his legs. Nei- ther the police nor he have a clue as to the trigger-man. What appalling bad luck. Even so, I think he might have been a bit of a rascal himself.
To cap it all, I was given a bath on my last morning and, forgetting that the foot of my good leg is numb, I tested the water with it and gave the nurse the go-ahead to lower me into it. The water must have been nearly boiling and when my bum touched it, I nearly went through the ceiling — the first time I had moved for weeks. They are very keen that patients should be clean and almost spruce, but it is awful to be washed by someone else and not in the least bit romantic as a poet, would have it. An oth- erwise kind nurse from Sri Lanka became obsessed with the fact that I couldn't and can't be bothered to shave every day, but she was well-meaning, whatever that means, and I was on the verge of proposing to her when it occurred to me that she talks too much. A nurse would indeed be a wel- come addition to this household. Vera returns tomorrow and life might continue for a while yet. I was encouraged to plod on by the letters I have received from Spec- tator readers. They came from all over the place and were very kind but there is no chance of my answering them all. And now I am practising walking with my artificial leg and that can make for some soreness. When I tried it the other day in the ward after a few large vodkas, it was nearly disas- trous and a nurse, observing me stagger a little more than usual, observed that I might be getting the 'flu. But I am deter- mined to get out of this flat one day soon.
Six weeks of hospital mincemeat and mash deserves an outing to a restaurant. There were some good reminders of the past. Christine, who owns the Ming, sent me up a marvellous meal one evening although I fell asleep in the middle of it thanks to pain-killing drugs. A lot of visi- tors brought some tasty grub with them and not one of them helped themselves to my cigarettes, although one lady nearly drank my locker dry and another one dropped and smashed a bottle of excellent claret. Never mind, it kept me in touch with the familiar Soho sound of breaking glass. I might give a party soon just to keep in touch now that the visitors have stopped flowing. I shall need to hire a bouncer for some of my more boisterous friends since I couldn't really throw anyone out from this chair. The other thing about being held prisoner in a chair is that I shall have to stop being rude to people from such a dis- advantageous position. I could start giving bad imitations of Lionel Barrymore, but that would be boring, wouldn't it?
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