ANN LESLIE
If you've never been seriously ill in your life, you indulge in little fantasies like 'If only I were stuck in a hospital bed for a few weeks I might actually get past chapter two of Midnight's Children', or 'I'll brush up my tourist Russian and read Akhmatova in the original'. But of course you never do. During my four months in hospital, the Daily Mail generously sent round a pantechnicon of books to while away the hours: I gazed day after day, week after week, upon a new biography of Hirohito and thought . . . well, perhaps tomorrow. Ever prone to free-floating guilt, I felt guilty about never opening it. You're too exhausted for visitors. Indeed, turning away kind friends is another guiltinducing activity. I was brought up as a Catholic, and my very Catholic friend Mary Kenny firmly believes that my 'lapsing' for over 40 years is a mere blip, and that I'll end up like Lord Marchmain in Brides/wad, performing a shaky sign of the cross on my deathbed. She rings to tell me that Visiting the Sick will earn her 100 (or was it 1,000?) days off Purgatory — a sort
of Green Stamp deal with the Almighty so I'll be doing her a favour by letting her come. She reluctantly agrees to settle on a few novenas instead. In times of trial Mary always puts her faith in God and hats (I put my faith in make-up and willpower): she suggests, unsuccessfully, that the nurse should unhook me from my drips and let me out on furlough to buy large and jolly hats to wear in my hospital bed.
Marjorie Wallace, the indomitable chief executive of the charity Sane, has been seriously ill herself and puts her faith, not in God or hats, but in champagne. She threatens to arrive with a Moet or three. But I'm on a drip, Marjorie, I'm not even allowed a sip of water!' She is deeply shocked. 'I couldn't have survived without champagne! Couldn't they put Moet into one of your drips?' Richard Littlejohn says he's going to come round and recreate in hospital what I think of as our Lads' Lunches Out with fellow lunchers Jeremy Clarkson and A.A. Gill. The Lads trio are achingly funny when forking up platefuls of Marco Pierre White's vinaigrette of rabbit en gelee, but in my condition I find laughter impossibly painful — besides, it does say Nil by Mouth on my door — so have to turn down that kindly offer as well. I console myself by remembering that, at the end of our lunches, Littlejohn is prone to stand on tables and sing 'Tony Blair Walks on Water!' in a raucously mocking tenor. and I'm not sure how well that will go down in the London Clinic. To tell the truth, it was never a great hit at the Mirabelle either. Even when you're well again, you tend to obsess on your innards. Last week I found myself perched on a velveteen sofa in an old Politburo flat in Moscow talking to Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former head of the KGB. He was the mastermind behind the failed coup against Gorbachev ten years ago which signalled the end of the Soviet Union. Comrade (he's still a dedicated Communist) Kryuchkov is a bit rocky on his legs since he had a spinal operation. I found myself indulging in a bizarre bout of medical one-upmanship with him about our assorted ailments — 'You see, my operation lasted.. . ., 'Well, I've had three operations, and. . . '. I suddenly thought how grotesque it was to be actually sympathising with this aged monster. When I remembered all the innocent lives this cold, cruel old Soviet had destroyed, guilt about my highly inappropriate sympathy seemed for once to be justified.
My daughter, backpacking around the Balkans, rings me on a crackly phone to tell me she's in Sarajevo. I know it's safe there now, but I'm worried that she might want to light off on her own, without telling her nail-biting parents, to some Macedonian trouble spot. Katharine likes 'interesting' places. I don't want her going there (actually, I don't want our troops going there either — when meddling in the Balkans we always fall prey to the law of unintended consequences and usually make matters worse). Her call brings back haunting memories of the Balkan wars and, bizarrely, a recurring nightmare I have about a corgi dog I inadvertently killed on the road outside Gorazde, the so-called 'safe haven' in Bosnia, which was under siege by the Serbs when I reached it. If you have to report on the aftermath of a massacre, you assume a forensic state of mind, mentally preparing yourself for the horrors you're about to see. But I wasn't mentally prepared for an extremely minor tragedy involving a pedigree dog. I'd been up at the front line but was now being driven fast through yet another burned-out village back to safety — a sniper, Muslim as it happens, seemed determined to 'slot' us on our way out. Out of an abandoned, bullet-ridden house a corgi dashed joyously into the road to greet us, wagging its tail. What on earth was a dog like this doing here? A corgi isn't the usual peasant dog and so was probably a highly prized pet. My car hit him and left him yelping and writhing in the road. But this was a war zone: there was no way I could stop to save him or to kill him cleanly. Another small, innocent life pointlessly, and agonisingly, brought to an end in this appalling war, How could I possibly mourn the death of some abandoned family pet when so many human beings were dying in the town I had just left behind? Nevertheless tears came into my eyes at the thought of my part in his slow death.
Istill wonder about the dog's owners. If they'd survived, did they — despite what they'd suffered — mourn his passing? I suspect that they would have. It's fashionable to sneer at people's love for their pets as mere sentimentality. But I can't sneer: this week we had to put down Posy, our adored 22-year-old cat. Unlike the Gorazde corgi she was not pretty, but her feisty little spirit was strong to the end, and she died, as she had lived, surrounded by love. As Simon the vet did the deed for us in the sittingroom. I thought again of the war-zone corgi whose life I had also ended; and wept again, not only for our beloved cat, who died in such peace, but also for that Bosnian pet dog, who did not.
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