Low life
Toytown
Jeffrey Bernard
T got home last week from the Middlesex 1.Hospital to find that one of my best friends, my Swiss cheese plant, was dying. I put her on a drip — it is definitely a she — but her leaves are turning yellow and she looks as jaundiced as the gall bladder that was in the next bed to me for three weeks. I really am sick of ill health and death. My desk is like a graveyard and its monuments are ashtrays overflowing with dog ends, dried up old tea bags — I got through 80 in my first three days back here in bed — and old tissues that have wiped my steamed-up glasses and sharper and thinner nose. I left 14Ibs behind in the Middlesex and there's not a lot left for the Government to issue health warnings to. But as far as hospital sojourns go this recent one wasn't too bad excepting the first delirious week when I was playing brinkmanship. When I got through that, came to and realised that I wasn't going to snuff it the feeling of relief was marvellous. The nursing was the best I've ever known and it made up for the fact that the houseman was not a good vein prospector and so made my arms look like well-used double tops on a pub dartboard.
An added bonus, apart from the nursing, was the company in my little four-bed ward on a balcony. The dawn chorus of belch- ing, farting and snoring was minimal and I was given the freedom of the kitchen where I could stagger back and forth to make and drink tea. And when I was too weak to do that the nurses did it for me. The fact that I made a fool of myself on BBC2 appearing on Forty Minutes some- how helped but it should have had the reverse effect. Only one nurse told me I was a male chauvinist pig. Quite wrong. But Mr Flaherty. in the opposite bed and minus his prostate gland loved it and became very friendly without being boring. He was the only fellow prisoner I've come across who didn't revolt me by waxing lyrical about the creativity of his bowels. He was an extraordinary man if he was real, but I think he was made of wood and came from Toytown. He had a very shiny face with two red circles painted on his cheeks and I think he was either Percy the Postman or Mister Policeman. Whenever he had an agonising slash he smiled bravely and his wife who visited him faithfully and regularly was aptly the Schoolmistress. She wore steel-rimmed glasses, had curly greying hair, the sing-song voice of some- one used to talking to idiots, she smiled a lot and even pressed an apple on me one day: Talk about Happy Families. I nearly sent out to Hamleys for a pack of those old cards. The Flahertys had been blessed rather late in life with God's gift of boy twins and now, aged about seven, they
bounced around our little ward making all sorts of noise during visiting hours. One day when Percy Postman and his wife were holding hands and had their backs to me I summoned up all my strength, leaned out of bed and clipped one of the twins over the ear. It disconnected my drip which hurt a little and made a bloody mess. Make no mistake, God is watching these people.
But there were compensations. I felt so wretchedly ill I couldn't read. Whenever I get pneumonia, pleurisy, pancreatitis or other self-abuse-related illnesses I always set myself the target of reading a monster, bumper book like The Mill on the Floss or Barnaby Budge. Luckily, on this occasion, I could only just manage the Times and Percy Postman's Mail. Then I would col- lapse exhausted and nurture my bed sores. I did read just one other thing though and it annoyed me considerably. I read a 'High life' column in which my Greek colleague wrote that Pentonville wasn't as boring as the Coach and Horses, which he said was full of criminals. This may have been a joke but we haven't been told. In fact several people from the Coach visited me, among them a retired shipping clerk, a commercial artist, an actress, a waiter and a market stall holder. Taki, as usual, has got it wrong. All the criminals like Lord Lucan and his other friends are to be found in places like Annabel's or Gstaad or Pentonville. Apart from large doses of potassium that column was the only bad taste I suffered. And we like our friends in the Coach. My biggest worry now is that Alice Thomas Ellis should fall ill or be caught shoplifting in the home appliance department of John Lewis. Home life is a wonderful thing as I have discovered in the two weeks I have been home and living in my dressing gown. The casserole bubbles away in the kitchen, the full vodka bottle sulks on the mantelshelf, the gas fire hisses away and I lie in bed thumbing through holiday brochures dreaming of convales- cent sunshine. The beloved Jan Leeming interrupts from time to time to tell me that you are all getting wet and snarled up on the Ml. Just occasionally I cough, which serves to remind me that starting tomorrow it's all going to be different. Anyway, no man holding an ante-post voucher on the Derby, Gold Crest this year, can possibly snuff it before that first Wednesday in June.
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