Eye trouble
Jeremy Clarke My boy's mother's husband was plastering a wall last week when a sack of lime fell off the scaffold and landed on his dog, which was lying at the foot of the ladder. The sack burst open and some lime went in the dog's eye. For nearly a week the poor dog's cloudy, pus-encrusted eye introduced a welcome little drama into their united family. Would Duke lose his sight in that eye? (And, if so, would he still be able to retrieve shot birds with only one eye?) Or would the vet's unbelievably expensive eye-drops save it? The matter was still undecided when, working overtime to pay the vet's bill, my boy's mother's husband was again on the scaffold plastering a wall, and a dollop of lime dropped off his trowel and fell into his eye.
My boy's mother's husband is a no-nonsense countryman. I couldn't have wished for a more down-to-earth or more masculine role model for my boy, who lives under the same roof and sees more of him than he does me. Six days a week he works as a builder's labourer. On Sundays he shoots — rabbits, pheasants, pigeons, depending on the season. His most trenchant opinions relate to the rearing, management and shooting of game birds. A shotgun, a half-dozen shooting books and a pair of obedient gundogs are all he owns. When not at work or out with his gun, he sits at the kitchen table making cigarettes with a rolling machine and drinking tea. With the three kids, my boy included, he's been strict but fair. For his sober consistency, I'm grateful to him But when it comes to enduring pain, I've known little girls with a higher threshold than he has. He makes a song and dance about the tiniest cut or graze. If anyone ever had to torture him for information, a smart tap on the top of the head with the back of a teaspoon would be enough to make him sing like a canary. But even knowing this, I was hardly prepared for the whimpering mess my boy's mother led out of the house and helped into my car for the trip to the Royal Eye Infirmary.
His right eyeball was burnt and swol len, according to the casualty nurse who'd examined it earlier. It was closed and weeping. He couldn't open his good eye either, because moving it set off a corresponding painful movement in his burnt one. The bright sunlight was agony for him, even with his eyes shut, and the poor man travelled to the infirmary with his palms pressed against his eyelids, groaning all the way.
The Royal Eye Infirmary at Plymouth is an elaborate, red-brick, late-Victorian affair designed to astonish the eye rather than please it. The waiting-room, like every other NHS waiting-room I've sat in recently, was filled with the obese, the aged, the addicted, the lonely, the crippled, the ignorant and the worn-out. Here, though, it was as though cruel fate had decided to give everybody a good poke in the eye as well for good measure. I steered my boy's mother's husband first in the direction of the helpful nitwit seated behind the reception desk, and afterwards towards a pair of empty seats to wait our turn. We were in for a long wait, it seemed.
Good. I opened my biography of E.M. Forster. At the moment I'm trying to understand the liberal imagination. To this end, I'm reading novels by, and biographies of, E.M. Forster, who, I understand, has been seen as a modest spokesman for it. I'd reached the point in The Cave and the Mountain, a biography by Wilfred Stone, where Forster has at last fully acknowledged his homosexuality and is desperately seeking an opportunity to consummate it sexually. Until he was 30 Forster had no idea about the mechanics of heterosexual, let alone homosexual love, and I was settling down to enjoy the next section, enticingly headed 'The Expanding Ring', when my boy's mother's husband's name was called out, and I had to abandon my inquiry, shut the book and lead the poor suffering man off to the treatment room.
He wasn't the first builder's labourer to appear with a lime-damaged eye by any means. 'Goggles!' exclaimed the nurse as she examined his eye. 'Goggles! Goggles! Goggles! Why weren't you wearing goggles, you silly man!' It was her routine admonishment in such cases, by the sound of it. Her routine treatment — three different kinds of eyedrops — reduced the swelling and restored the eye to something like normal. The drops dispensed by the vet turned out to be equally as effective in the dog's case. And I'm glad to report that E.M. Forster eventually found a sort of happiness in the arms of Constable Bob Buckingham of the Metropolitan Police. A satisfactory result all round, then.
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